You get injected with an unknown toxin and now your loyal teammates are determined to help ease your suffering.
— pairing: Task Force 141 × fem!141!Reader
— cw: 18+ | sex pollen; dubcon/fuck or die; dd:dne; medical & military inaccuracies; pining; hurt/comfort; angst; fluff; cum and orgasms as the antidote; wc: 12k+
author's note: This has been in my drafts for two years 💀 And she would've said yes to all of them.
"We need some answers, Kate. Now." Captain Price's voice booms inside the spacious briefing room.
He's practically pacing in front of the desk like some anxious K-9, arms folded over his plate carrier as he keeps his sharp eyes trained on Laswell and the two scientists sitting behind their laptops, staring at their respective screens.
Meanwhile, the rest of his team is still as geared up as their Captain—all waiting for orders or further instructions, scattered around the room and listening with bated breath while Price grows more agitated with each shaky exhale he can hear coming from you.
You're currently sitting on one of the tables, boot-clad feet dangling off the edge as you stare at the ceiling, right into the fluorescent lights above, ignoring the way your eyes begin to sting from their brightness.
You've been putting on a brave face since getting stabbed with the needle a few hours ago and you've kept the façade up since hopping off the helo back on base, but it's getting harder to mask the panic rising inside you as your body starts to feel funny.
You swipe the back of your gloved hand over your sweaty forehead, catching the cold perspiration on your feverish skin with the rough fabric, and out of your peripherals, you notice the way your teammates' heads snap in your direction—different-coloured pairs of eyes assessing you with worry, concern, and a hint of curiosity.
Soap and Gaz are standing to your left and right respectively, sneaking glances at you whenever you shift on your spot, while the Lieutenant is still as a marble statue a little offside, arms crossed over his bulky tac vest.
Laswell begins to explain calmly, clutching a thick folder to her chest.
"We're still waiting on anything concrete, John, but the research papers your team managed to extract have offered a great insight on that—whatever that bioweapon is."
Bioweapon.
Your eyes widen as you sit up straight, the word making your heart race and your skin crawl with fear. Both Soap and Gaz take a step closer—two strong pairs of arms outstretched and ready to catch you if you faint.
"Easy there, John—" Laswell says firmly, unbothered by his tone as she takes a step towards the captain and gestures at the two scientists watching the scene unfold with wide eyes from behind their laptops.
"They said she won't die. The amount of injection was too low… apparently."
Apparently?!
You inhale sharply and open your mouth to announce your imminent panic, but you're interrupted when one of the scientists speaks up first.
"That is correct, sir. She won't die."
Professor Doctor Boswel, as the name badge on his white lab coat states, chimes in. Price stops pacing at once, though his sharp eyes scream you better start explaining now, or one of you will be made responsible for this.
"Bringing the syringe back to base was the decisive factor. Our team at the lab is still working to decipher and translate the medical reports and research papers your team recovered, but we can confirm that this bioweapon is most likely a toxin."
A low murmur of various curses goes through the briefing room as you try to ignore the odd tingles in your limbs—like they're going numb from sitting in a bad position for too long—and process the doctor's words instead.
"You're saying I've been poisoned, doc?" You butt in crudely, letting out a humourless laugh as you begin fidgeting with your hands, clenching and unclenching them to get rid of those tingles while a cold drop of sweat trickles down your left temple and is swiftly wiped away by Soap's gloved thumb.
"Fuckin’ hell, lass. Ye dinnae look too good," Soap mutters under his breath, exchanging a concerned glance with Gaz, who then looks to the captain for guidance with a serious frown.
When Gaz turns around abruptly, you get a whiff of his scent, and you're ashamed to admit to yourself that you inhale it deeply—musk and sweat and gunpowder smoke, a hint of his fancy body wash lingering underneath all the grime. A perfect concoction of what is entirely Gaz.
It's intoxicating. Mouth-watering.
And absolutely inappropriate, because he's one of your best friends and a comrade.
What the hell is happening?
Of all the injuries and wounds you've already acquired during missions and deployments, this must be the fucking worst. You'd rather get shot or stabbed than sit here, feel strange as hell and be ogled like a failed science experiment.
Price's eyes flicker to Ghost, who hasn't said a word since sitting you down on the table with a gruff order to stay seated, and then to his three sergeants, lingering on you heavily before he turns back.
"What kind of bloody toxin?"
"It seems to be some sort of aphrodisiac, but… uh, well—about fifty times worse than that."
The other scientist, Professor Doctor Adebayo, answers tentatively, as if explaining it out loud makes him uncomfortable.
"The reports say it turns men—"
Dr. Adebayo hesitates, clearing his throat and looking between Laswell and Captain Price, until the latter lets out an exasperated sigh.
"Turns them what, doc?"
It's Laswell who says it eventually, "Turns them aggressive, John. Feral with lust, as ridiculous as that might sound."
The CIA agent finally looks in your direction before approaching you slowly while Dr. Adebayo seems to heave a sigh of relief as soon as she takes over.
"A high dose of it can be used to lower one's inhibition levels to a point where even the most honourable man would resort to sexual assault to ease his urges."
Her factual yet grim explanation makes the tension inside the briefing room spike tenfold. Every man present tenses up, visibly uncomfortable—Ghost especially, who's practically vibrating with strain.
Using a toxin like that—a bioweapon—on soldiers in the field could lead to even more and worse war crimes, and everyone here is aware of that.
"Wait—what? What the fuck?" Gaz utters, bristling next to you while you grip the edge of the table, gritting your teeth as the tingles intensify and wreck through your body in waves that leave you shuddering with each one.
"'Scuse me, what now?" You scoff. "Does that mean I'm gonna turn into a fuckin' nympho any second?"
Multiple pairs of eyes snap towards you at your choice of words. Some look intense and laced with worry. Price scolds you with one glance. Others look mildly amused—the latter being Soap, who lets out a snort but tries to cover it up with a fake cough into his fist.
Laswell surveys you intently, though her voice softens when she addresses you directly.
"How are you feeling, Sergeant? Are you in pain? Nauseous?"
A beat of silence follows. Your eyes flutter briefly as you meet Kate's blue gaze, and you exhale a long breath through your nostrils before you answer curtly.
"I feel weird."
You feel like you're about to get your period, but you keep that information to yourself for now and try not to wrap your arms around yourself self-soothingly.
Your lower abdomen is starting to tighten and cramp. Your gut twists like you just chugged a steaming bowl of soup and your limbs keep tingling—from your toes to your fingertips, and up to the tip of your nose. Tiny vibrations along with hot and cold flushes that make you quake and squirm in your seat on the table.
Kate squints at you, though she doesn't press further.
"What kind of effect will this stuff have on her?" Price enquires gruffly, more level-headed this time, his gaze shifting from the two scientists over to you and then back.
Meanwhile, as you crank your sore neck from left to right to get a good crack in, your eyes catch sight of Soap's muscular forearms and—to your horror—they linger.
The sleeves of his combat fatigues are rolled up to his elbows, exposing dark coarse hair and thick veins and that damn SAS insignia tattoo.
You want to trace the black lines with your tongue and imagine the salt of his skin on your parched taste buds.
And your eyes widen when a sudden rush of mind-numbing, pulsating heat makes you squeeze your thighs together as you clench your jaw to keep the lewd sound bubbling up in your throat from escaping.
Soap shoots you a quizzical look, one eyebrow raising as you avert your eyes from him swiftly, heat crawling up your neck and prickling beneath your skin.
"Fuck," you breathe, doubling over with a groan as the muscles in your thighs and lower abdomen begin to cramp up painfully while you can practically feel your pussy start convulsing around nothing, leaking with arousal and soaking into your underwear.
In a matter of seconds, your team—Ghost included, like a solid wall of quiet reassurance—are by your side, keeping you upright, asking questions, though their deep, accented voices are muffled as your quickening heartbeat begins to thud in your ears.
Their every touch seems to burn through the thick layers of your kit.
"Kate—Kate," Price is by her side in a few long strides, ducking his head to get on eye-level with her as he points at the two scientists accusingly, though Kate is already on her smartphone, contacting the lab again.
Price huffs like an angry bull trying to protect his herd as he turns his attention back to Dr. Boswel and Dr. Adebayo, who seem to be in a frenzied discussion, watching the way you're cramping and writhing.
"What the fuck is happening to her?" He barks at them, demanding an answer yesterday.
"It's—it's the toxin," Dr. Boswel stammers obviously, blinking up at Captain Price from behind his glasses. "She didn't get the full dose, but it's still—" He pauses, eyes flickering nervously under the captain's glare. "—bad."
Another gut-wrenching moan from you echoes through the briefing room as you squirm in Gaz's embrace, and Price must restrain himself from directing his wrath towards the two men in front of him—it's not their fault, after all.
It's his.
"Oxytocin might help… neutralize the toxin in her body," Dr. Adebayo remarks, clicking his pen nervously as he stares at his laptop screen before meeting Dr. Boswel's eyes, who is waiting for an elucidation.
"The hormone," Dr. Adebayo clears his throat again, clearly uncomfortable, "—not the drug." He clarifies, clicking his pen a few more times.
Laswell lowers her phone and shares a look with Price, holding an entire conversation with one long, meaningful glance, the one learned and perfected over more than a decade of working together, when Gaz's voice breaks through the chaos, calling for attention.
"Cap'n! What do we do?!"
You're not brought back to the barracks but Captain Price's private quarters.
Your squad makes sure to keep you out of sight in your condition; away from prying eyes while Ghost sneaks through the shadows with your quivering form cradled against his chest, carrying you bridal style like you're something fragile, something vulnerable he must protect.
Once safely inside the captain's flat, the curtains are drawn before your heavy gear is stripped from you, all while you don't even bother paying attention to who is grabbing or holding you at this point.
All that matters is someone touching you.
Your brain is mush, reduced to your most simple and carnal desires. No shame nor worry about the needy noises you're making whenever one of their big, strong hands strips another layer of clothing.
"Shit, I think she has a fever," Gaz mutters, cupping your face with both hands as he investigates your hazy, unfocused eyes while you let out another pathetic whimper. "She's completely out of it."
"Get her into the guest bedroom. Down the hall, first door on the left," Price orders gruffly, trying to keep his eyes from wandering up and down the length of your trembling, half-naked body.
"I'll call the senior consultant."
Ghost grumbles a low curse under his breath when your hand brushes over the front of his crotch—by accident or voluntarily this time, he doesn't dare imagine—and leaves the guest bedroom while Gaz and Soap manoeuvre you onto the king-sized bed.
Meanwhile, you don't care about the effect your uncharacteristic behaviour has on your teammates and superiors.
Whenever they try to make you drink or take an easy bite of food—whether it's a chewy protein bar or an overripe banana, because Price has no proper groceries at his place—you twist in whoever's embrace you're in, turning your scrunched-up face away like a petulant toddler.
"I don't wanna," you whine and hiccup, protesting each time Gaz tries to lift the rim of the water bottle to your lips, your speech now slightly slurred, glossy eyes averting their gaze as you breathe shallowly, squirming while Soap keeps you propped up with your back resting against his chest on the bed.
Gaz, who has been trying again to make you drink a sip of water for the past twenty minutes, looks back at his Lieutenant and Captain helplessly.
"Doc said we need to keep her hydrated," Price announces, rubbing his bare hand over his tired face. "Keep flushing that bloody poison outta her system and—"
Suddenly, Ghost's deep, gravelly voice interrupts the captain's speech with a harsh bite to it. "Johnny."
Soap, who has been trying his best to ignore the way you keep grinding your arse against his crotch in this position, ducks his head at the sharp and sudden warning.
"What? 'M not doin' anythin'," he grunts before sucking in a sharp breath as his cock keeps stirring and twitching in his combat trousers, "Fuck, lass, please—"
Soap tries to keep you from moving; his ungloved hands get a firm hold of your hips, but you're practically panting and mewling in his lap, making it harder for him not to crumble under the pressure building up in his dick.
Then Gaz is swift to pluck you out of the Scot's embrace with a disdainful frown, like you're some toy that was stolen from him.
"Don't be a fuckin' perv, Soap," Gaz snaps, cradling you into his arms, where you immediately begin pawing at his black compression shirt, determined to get your palms under it and on his bare skin.
"She can't consent!"
It's Price who approaches the bed then, while Ghost stays leaning against the doorframe, keeping a keen eye on the situation.
"Enough! Both of you," Price barks, eyes flashing before his shoulders drop with a rough sigh. He pinches the bridge of his nose. "Doc said it might help if—"
John stops mid-sentence, clenching his strong jaw. He can't believe what he is about to say, and he crosses his arms over his chest again, feigning control while he internally braces himself for his next words.
"Those doctors said it might help if she… climaxes."
His words hang in the air like a thick fog that no one can quite see through nor think in, and everyone seems to be holding their breath while you finally manage to tug Gaz's shirt out of his waistband, making him cuss under his breath when you go on to lick a long, wet stripe over his exposed abs like some feral lioness, utterly hungry for a taste.
"Shit—Babygirl, no, d-don't—" Gaz stammers helplessly while a rush of heat goes straight to his neck and cock simultaneously, overwhelmingly so.
He pushes you away by your shoulders—and hates himself for how reluctant he is at it—and he winces when your blunt nails claw into his bulging biceps, digging into his skin even through his shirt with another whimper.
"Please, Kyle… Let me—" you mewl, batting your eyelashes up at him. "It—It fuckin’ hurts."
Soap pushes his fists into his eye sockets, heaving a deep breath that turns into a frustrated groan. "Steamin' Jesus, lass, ye’re fuckin’ killin' us here."
"Take a bloody walk, MacTavish," Price orders, pointing his thumb at the door over his shoulder, and while Soap climbs off the mattress, grumbling to himself with an obvious erection pressing against the seam of his zipper, Price addresses Gaz.
"And you, Garrick, take—" He hesitates again, balling his hands into fists at his sides, trying to keep his own body in check at the sight and sounds of you, before he nudges his chin towards the door of the bathroom.
"Take her to the shower to get the fever down and… help her."
The captain's last words are nothing more than a strained grumble.
Gaz gapes at his superior. Soap freezes in his steps at the end of the bed, openly gawking and blinking like he didn't just hear right. Ghost visibly stiffens and shifts his stance, still leaning against the doorframe of the guest bedroom. No one can see the way he grits his teeth so hard he might chip a tooth behind his balaclava.
"But sir—"
Price shakes his head; brows set in a stern frown as he holds Gaz's widened gaze.
"She'd want you to take care of her if she could actually consent to it. And that's an order, Sergeant."
Ghost wants to disagree, but keeps his mouth shut and exhales a sharp huff of contempt instead.
The rest of the men try to distract themselves around Captain Price's flat while Gaz takes you to the en-suite bathroom like he was ordered to.
Not asked, ordered to.
He keeps repeating that in his head as he walks you towards the bathroom door with his arm around your waist, your body listing into his side like you've forgotten how to hold yourself upright. His jaw is set so tight his molars ache.
He's been ordered to do a lot of things in his career. Clear rooms. Hold positions under fire. Drag wounded men through mud while rounds cracked overhead. He's followed every order without hesitation, because that's what good soldiers do—they trust the chain of command and they execute.
This doesn't feel like any of those things.
He keeps the bathroom door unlocked—just in case you faint and he needs help—and lets out a huff when you fling yourself into his body suddenly and the air is knocked from his lungs.
"Easy," he pleads with you while his head dips down, and he inhales your familiar scent before he can stop himself. Sweat and the remnants of whatever lotion you put on this morning underneath your gear before the mission, something warm and sweet that he's caught whiffs of a hundred times before in passing and never let himself think about for longer than a second.
"Easy there, love," he tries again, his trembling hands wrapping around your midriff tentatively.
Gaz hates these circumstances. Hates how the mission ended in such a bloody mess. Hates how excited he is to undress you to your underwear, and he despises that this is how he'll get to have you for the first time.
This is not how he'd imagined it.
He never imagined it. Not in any concrete, detailed way. Not like he'd planned it in his head, step by step—the restaurant he'd take you to first, somewhere nice but not so nice you'd take the piss out of him for it. The way he'd tell you after the second drink, maybe the third, that he'd been thinking about you. Casually. Like it hadn't been eating him alive for months.
He hadn't planned any of that.
Fucking liar.
You make a sound against his chest, somewhere between a sob and a moan, and your fingers twist into the wet fabric of his compression shirt, tugging weakly.
"Kyle… Kyle, I need—"
"I know," he murmurs, and his voice comes out rougher than he intends. "I know, love. C'mon."
He manoeuvres you towards the shower, reaching past you to turn the dial to lukewarm. The water sputters, then hisses to life against the tile, and steam begins to curl at the edges of the glass.
You're still in your underwear—plain, standard issue, nothing designed to be sexy—and it doesn't matter, because the sight of you trembling and desperate in front of him with water beginning to mist across your skin is doing things to his head that no amount of mental discipline can counter.
He starts to dismantle his assault rifle in his head.
You stumble into the shower cabin and he follows, still fully clothed. The water hits his chest and soaks through his compression shirt in seconds, plastering the fabric to his skin, and the cold shock of it helps. Briefly.
Bolt. Firing pin. Cam pin.
"C'mon, Babygirl," he coos at you as he turns your quivering body in his embrace until your back is flush against his chest. One arm wraps tightly below your breasts, forearm pushing up against the swell of them through the soaked fabric of your bra, and he tries, and fails miserably, not to take a long look over your shoulder.
Buffer tube. Buffer spring. Buffer.
You melt against his body and his cock throbs in his combat trousers, straining against his briefs uncomfortably. The water is doing nothing for the heat radiating off your skin. If anything, you're burning hotter, pressing back into him with small, involuntary rolls of your hips that make his breath stutter.
Lower receiver. Trigger assembly. Trigger—
"Please," you whimper, and his entire train of thought derails.
Your head lolls back against his shoulder, exposing the column of your throat, and he can see the way your pulse hammers beneath the surface, rapid and frantic. Your hips buck against his hand when he finally—finally—lets it trail down over your lower belly, his calloused fingers dragging across the wet skin, feeling the muscles jump and twitch beneath his touch.
"Yes—yes—yes—" you chant breathlessly, and your hips cant forward, chasing his hand with a desperation that makes something crack open in his chest.
Fuck—fuck—fuck—fuck.
He cups your pussy through your knickers and the heat of you against his palm nearly makes his knees buckle. He can feel you through the thin, soaked fabric and he's not sure if the wetness is from the shower stream or if it's all you.
His chest is heaving when he finally gathers enough courage to dip his long fingers beneath the waistband of your underwear. His jaw clenches and his mind grasps desperately for the drills again—clear left, clear right, move to the next room, check your corners—anything to stay anchored while you let out a moan that echoes off the tile walls and punches straight through him.
You're so wet, so swollen, it's obscene. His fingers slide through your folds with zero resistance and the groan that rips from deep within his chest is involuntary, guttural, ashamed. He can feel your arousal ooze from your entrance, slick and hot, and he can already tell how tight you'd feel clenching around his fingers, how you'd—
No. He's not going there.
"Fuck," he curses under his breath, more to himself than to you. "I'm only doin' this for you, Babygirl. This is only about you."
He says it like a prayer. Like if he repeats it enough, it'll be true.
His fingers press on your clit, pulsing and twitching already, and he starts rubbing small, firm circles over it, adjusting the pressure when your breath hitches or your thighs clamp around his wrist. He reads your body like he reads a room. Methodically, attentive, and cataloguing every reaction.
You writhe and squirm in his tight grip, your nails digging into the arm he has banded around your ribs, and every sound you make, every whimper, and stuttered gasp of his name, chips away at the wall he's trying to keep standing between following an order and wanting this.
"M-more, Kyle, please!"
Gaz curses himself, but he gives you more.
Two fingers pressing into you, slow and careful despite every instinct screaming at him to give you what you're begging for. You clench around him immediately, hot and tight and silky, and his cock kicks in his trousers so hard he must bite the inside of his cheek to keep from groaning.
He curls his fingers, searching for the spot that makes your thighs shake, and when he finds it, you keen so loudly the sound bounces off every hard surface in the small bathroom.
"That's it," he murmurs against your temple, his lips brushing your skin without quite kissing. "That's it, love. Let go for me."
He's not sure when he started talking to you like this. Somewhere between the first touch and the second, the clinical detachment he'd been clinging to crumbled and something else took its place—something tender and fierce and terrifyingly honest.
Your first orgasm hits you hard enough to make your entire body seize in his arms, your back arching away from his chest as a strangled cry tears from your throat. He holds you through it, fingers still working, still pressing and giving, because even as the tremors wrack through you and your legs give out, he can feel your body already winding up again, the toxin refusing to let you rest.
"Shh, shh, I've got you," he breathes, adjusting his grip to take your full weight when your knees buckle entirely. "I've got you."
You cum again two minutes later, and then again after that, and again, and Gaz loses count somewhere around the fifth or sixth time, when his fingers are cramping and his arm is trembling from holding you upright and the water has long since turned cold.
Each time, he thinks it'll be enough, and each time, your body coils tight again within minutes, the toxin driving you right back to the edge with a cruelty that makes him want to put his fist through the tile.
He doesn’t want to imagine what a full dose would have done to you. To anyone.
When you tell him that you're hurting—repeatedly, begging him to make you cum in that desperate, broken tone of yours—the young Sergeant is sure something dies inside him on the spot.
"Kyle—Kyle, I need more, I need you to—please—Fuck, please!"
He knows what you're asking for. You're grinding back against his cock, which has been rock-hard and aching for what feels like hours, and every roll of your hips sends a jolt of white-hot arousal through him that he must physically brace against.
"I can't," he grits out, and it takes everything in him. "Christ. I can't do that to you. Not like this."
"Please—"
"No, Babygirl." His voice cracks on the word, and he presses his forehead against the back of your head, squeezing his eyes shut. "Not like this."
He drops to his knees instead.
The tile is hard and unforgiving under his kneecaps and the now cold water from the shower hits the back of his neck, but he barely registers any of it as he turns you to face him and hooks one of your legs over his shoulder.
He looks up at you once—your hazy, unfocused eyes, the way your chest heaves, the water running in rivulets down your body—and then he leans forward and drags his tongue through your folds in one long, broad stroke.
The sound you make is devastating.
Your hands fly to his head, fingers scrabbling for purchase on his wet hair, and your hips jerk forward so violently he must grip your thigh to keep you steady. He groans against you, he can't help it, and the vibration makes you cry out again, blunt nails raking over his scalp.
Gaz eats you like he's starving for it, because the truth he can't say out loud is that he is.
He's thought about this. Dreamed about it. Wanked to the idea of it in the dark of his bunk with his fist shoved against his mouth to keep quiet. And now he's here, on his knees in his Captain's shower with cold water running down his back and your taste flooding his mouth, and it's everything and nothing like what he imagined because you're not choosing this—you're not choosing him—and that knowledge sits in his chest like a brick.
But he doesn't stop.
Gaz licks and sucks and fucks you with his tongue until his jaw aches and your thighs are shaking so badly you can barely stand, even with his hands gripping your hips. He makes you cum on his mouth twice, then thrice, pressing his face into you each time your body locks up, working you through it with relentless, single-minded focus because if he stops to think about what this means, about what happens after, he'll fall apart.
When he finally pulls back, his lips are swollen, his chin is slick and his cock is so hard it genuinely hurts. You're still whimpering, still reaching for him, still not done, and the toxin is still pumping through your veins with no sign of stopping.
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and exhales a shaky breath, pressing his forehead against your hip.
"I need—" His voice is wrecked. He swallows hard, then tries again. "I need a minute."
Not because he's tired, or his fingers are cramped and his jaw is sore and his knees are bruised from the tile. No.
But if he stays on his knees in front of you for one more second, he's going to give you what you're begging for, and he will never forgive himself for it.
He stands on unsteady legs, turns the shower off, and reaches for the towel hanging on the rack outside the cabin. His hands are shaking as he wraps it around, and you cling to it loosely, swaying on your feet.
"C'mon," he says, guiding you towards the door with one hand on the small of your back. His voice has steadied, but his eyes haven't. "Let's get you dried off."
You're protesting. He's cursing under his breath. There's shuffling, a stumble, and then he grabs the door handle and swings it open—
And Soap nearly falls backwards into the bathroom.
"Soap!"
The Scotsman catches himself on the doorway, one hand gripping the frame as he glances over his shoulder with a look that's not even remotely sheepish enough for a man who was clearly pressing his ear to the door thirty seconds ago.
Gaz is still wearing his clothes, though they're completely drenched—his compression shirt is a second skin, his combat trousers heavy with water, boots squelching on the tile. He's holding you by the forearm as you stand next to him, loose towel wrapped around your body, still trembling, still making those small, desperate sounds in the back of your throat.
"The fuck, mate? Did you eavesdrop on us?"
Soap shrugs as he straightens up, adjusting his stance in a way that's clearly meant to disguise the state of his trousers. "Was jus' checkin' on ye."
"Checking on—" Gaz's jaw works, nostrils flaring. He wants to snap, wants to shove Soap back into the hallway and slam the door, but he's running on fumes and you're leaning into him again, your face pressed against his soaked chest, mumbling incoherently.
"She needs—" Gaz starts, then stops. Looks down at you, back up at Soap. Something heavy passes between the two men, unspoken but understood.
"She needs more than I can give her right now," he finishes quietly, and the admission costs him more than any of them will ever know.
Soap's expression shifts. The boyish smirk drops, replaced by something sobered, and he gives Gaz a short nod—the kind they exchange in the field when one of them is spent and the other takes point.
"A'right," Soap answers, surprisingly steady, rolling his broad shoulders. "Ah’ve got 'er."
Gaz transfers you into Soap's waiting arms with a gentleness that borders on reverent—one hand on the back of your head, the other guiding your shoulders—and he doesn't let go until he's sure Soap has you secure.
Then he walks past them both, water dripping from every inch of him, and doesn't look back.
He makes it to the kitchen before his hands start shaking badly enough that he has to brace them flat on the counter. He stands there, head bowed, water pooling on the linoleum beneath him, and breathes.
Ghost is leaning against the opposite wall with his arms crossed, and he doesn't say a word.
There is no need to.
Soap carries you back to the bed like you weigh nothing to him; one arm under your knees, the other around your back, the towel slipping loose and neither of you caring, and he lays you down with a surprising gentleness that contradicts every tightly coiled muscle in his body.
He's been hard since the briefing room, balls throbbing uncomfortably. Over two hours of it. The kind of persistent, throbbing ache that sits low in his gut and pulses in time with his heartbeat, and he's been dealing with it the way he deals with most discomfort.
By ignoring it aggressively and hoping it fucks off on its own.
It has not fucked off unfortunately. Truth be told, he’d be worried about himself if it did.
"Right then," he mutters, kneeling on the mattress beside you as he cracks his neck and rolls his shoulders again like he's about to breach a door. "Let's sort ye out, hen."
And that's the thing about Johnny MacTavish—he doesn't agonise. Not the way Gaz does, all quiet guilt and moral calculus. Soap's moral framework is simpler, blunter, built from different materials. You're his teammate, you're hurting, and he can help. Everything else is noise.
That doesn't mean he's unaffected; doesn't mean his hands aren't shaking when he settles between your legs and pushes the towel fully away from your body, or that his breath doesn't hitch hard enough to hear when he gets his first proper look at you fully naked, spread out on the white sheets with your chest heaving and your thighs trembling and your eyes half-lidded, glassy, barely tracking him.
Christ, you're beautiful.
He's thought about this. Fuck. Of course he has. He's not a bloody monk, and you're you.
He's thought about it in the gym when you spot him on the bench press and your face hovers above his, upside down and grinning. He's thought about it on long transports when you fall asleep against his shoulder and he stays perfectly still for hours so you won't wake up. Or when you laugh at his shite jokes that no one else finds funny, when you steal chips off his plate in the mess, when you call him Johnny instead of Soap and don't even notice you've done it.
He's thought about it a lot.
But not like this.
"You with me?" he asks, tapping your cheek lightly with two fingers. Your eyes roll towards him, struggling to focus, and you make a sound that's part whimper, part plea.
Close enough.
"A'right, sweetheart. I've got ye."
He doesn't ease into it the way Gaz did. Where Gaz was methodical, with careful touches, measured pressure, and constant checking, Soap is instinct. He reads you through vibration and sound, adjusts on the fly, follows the frequency of your moans like he's tuning into a signal.
He dips his head between your thighs and licks into you without preamble, broad and hot and greedy, and the noise that tears out of you rattles something loose in his chest.
"Fuck—tha's it," he groans against you, the vibration making your hips jolt, and his big hands grip the backs of your thighs to keep you spread open and steady. "Tha's my bonnie girl."
He's not quiet about it, either. Soap eats pussy the way he does most things. With enthusiasm, commitment, and absolutely zero self-consciousness. Wet, filthy sounds fill the bedroom, punctuated by his own groans and your increasingly incoherent cries, and he doesn't give a single shit that the door is open, and his team can hear every obscene noise he's wringing out of you.
Let them hear.
His tongue works over your clit in fast, tight circles, then broad, flat strokes, alternating rhythm and pressure every time he feels your thighs start to shake. When you try to close your legs, he pins them open with his forearms. When you try to squirm away—overstimulated, oversensitive, too much and not enough at the same time—he follows relentlessly, dragging you back by the hips with a growl that rumbles against your soaked flesh.
"Nuh-uh. Stay still f'me."
He makes you cum with his mouth in under five minutes and then doesn't stop.
Your fingers twist into the sheets, into his mohawk, clawing at his scalp as your back arches off the mattress and a wrecked sob punches out of your lungs. Soap groans in response, the sound reverential, like your pleasure is a hymn and he's on his knees in church.
He keeps going. Lapping at you through the aftershocks, sucking your clit between his lips until you're keening, pressing his tongue inside you just to feel you clench around it, and when you cum again with his name breaking apart on your lips—Johnny, Johnny, fuck yes, Johnny—he nearly blacks out from how hard his cock throbs in response.
His hips have started moving on their own. Small, involuntary rolls against the mattress, his aching cock grinding against the sheets through his combat trousers, and he knows he should fucking stop, should pull his hips back, should focus on you and not the desperate friction building between his body and the bed.
But he doesn't stop.
He is physically incapable.
You taste like honey and salt and something almost medicinal underneath—the toxin, probably, working its way out of your system through your sweat and your slick—and he's drunk on it. Drunk on the way you say his name, how your thighs tremble against the sides of his head, drunk on the wet sounds of his tongue on your cunt and the way you keep pulling his face closer, harder, more.
"God—fuck—lass, ye taste so fuckin' good—"
He's rutting against the mattress in earnest now, his hips snapping in sharp, desperate little thrusts, and the friction is nowhere near enough and exactly too much at the same time.
The sheets are going to be ruined. He doesn't care. Can't. He’s a weak man, and his entire world has narrowed to the taste of you on his tongue and the ache in his junk and the way your body keeps arching into him like he's the only thing keeping you alive.
"Please—please, Johnny, I need—I can't—"
"I know, hen, I know—" he pants against your inner thigh, pressing a biting kiss there that makes you yelp, "—jus' one more, c'mon, give me one more, aye?"
He flickers his tongue, seals his mouth over your clit and sucks, hard, and you shatter. Your thighs clamp around his head, your hands fist in his hair so tightly it stings, and the scream that rips from your throat is ragged and raw and so fucking beautiful that he comes.
Inside his combat pants.
His hips stutter against the mattress and a guttural, muffled groan vibrates against your pussy as his cock pulses and spills, hot and wet, soaking through his briefs and into his trousers. His arms shake, his vision whites out for a second, and he has to press his forehead against your inner thigh and just breathe through it, chest heaving, while you whimper above him, still trembling from your own orgasm.
He pulls back slowly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and the reality of what just happened settles over him like a cloth soaked in ice water. He stares down at himself, at the damp patch darkening the front of his trousers, and lets out a long, defeated exhale.
"MacTavish."
Ghost's voice comes from the doorway; flat and sharp, dripping with contempt.
Soap closes his eyes, disappointed in himself, exhaling through his nose. "Aye. I know."
"You know?" Price's voice joins Ghost's, closer, much heavier. The captain is standing just inside the bedroom now, arms folded, jaw set. He looks at Soap the way a father looks at a teenage son caught doing something monumentally stupid.
"Get yourself sorted. Now."
Soap doesn't argue. He climbs off the bed on unsteady legs, not meeting anyone's eyes, and adjusts his trousers with a grimace as he shuffles past Ghost in the doorway.
Ghost doesn't move to let him pass. Makes him squeeze by, shoulder to shoulder, just to make it uncomfortable.
"Disgusting," Ghost mutters, low enough that only Soap hears it.
"Fuck off, LT," Soap mutters back, and there's no heat in it. Just shame.
You don't notice the shift at first.
One moment there are hands and mouths on you, voices and pressure and friction. The next, everything is quieter. Stiller. The mattress dips on one side and stays dipped, a solid weight settling beside you but not on you, not against you, not close enough to touch.
You whine at the loss of contact, of heat, of anything, and reach blindly for whoever is there.
A large hand catches your wrist. Gentle and firm, holding it in place.
"Don't."
One word. Low and gravelly, scraped raw like it was dragged over broken glass and wire mesh on its way out of his throat.
Ghost.
He's sitting on the edge of the bed with his back straight and his boots still on, because taking his boots off would mean he's staying, and staying would mean—he doesn't finish the thought.
Price asked him to sit with you while Gaz and Soap pulled themselves together. Asked this time, not ordered, because Price knows that ordering Ghost to do something he doesn't want to do is about as effective as ordering the tide to turn. Ghost agreed with a single nod, and now here he is, and every muscle in his body is locked so tight he might snap a tendon.
You're lying on your side, curled in on yourself, wearing nothing but your sodden underwear again and the ghost of everyone else's touch on your skin. The towel is long gone. Your body is still trembling, still feverish, still caught in the grip of the toxin, and the soft, pained sounds you keep making are doing things to him that he absolutely cannot allow.
He's hard. Has been since you doubled over and moaned and he had to watch your body betray you in front of everyone. His cock is straining against his trousers, thick and heavy and insistent.
Ghost pretends it isn’t. He's very good at pretending things don't exist.
"Simon…"
His jaw clenches beneath the balaclava. You rarely use his first name—none of them do—and hearing it now, in that voice, breathy and desperate and small, is a kind of cruelty he wasn't prepared for.
"You need to drink something," he murmurs, and reaches for the water bottle on the nightstand without looking at you.
"Don't want—"
"Wasn't bloody askin’."
He unscrews the cap and turns to you, and the mistake—the critical, tactical, unforgivable mistake—is that he looks at your face next.
Your eyes are glassy and wet, your lips parted around shallow little breaths, and you're looking up at him like he's the only solid thing in a world that's been spinning for hours.
Not with lust—not the way you looked at Gaz and Soap—but with something quieter. Something that reaches past the toxin and grabs hold of something deeper.
Trust.
You trust him. Even now, reduced to your basest instincts, your intoxicated, unhinged brain still recognises him as safe.
Something fractures behind his ribs, and he shuts it down immediately, brutally, the way he shuts down everything that threatens to breach the walls.
"Sit up," he orders, and his voice is soft yet steady even if the rest of him isn't. He slides one hand behind your head—just his palm, just enough to support your neck—and lifts the bottle to your lips.
You drink. Slowly, reluctantly, with small sips that dribble down your chin, but you drink. He holds the bottle still and watches the column of your throat move with each swallow, and when a drop of water runs from the corner of your mouth and trails down your neck, dark eyes track it all the way to your collarbone before catching himself and looking away.
"More," he says curtly, bringing the bottle back.
You manage a few more sips before turning your head away with a pitiful sound, and he lets you, setting the bottle aside. His hand lingers on the back of your head a moment too long—his thumb brushing once against the nape of your neck—before he pulls it back like he's been burned.
You reach for him again. Fingers closing around the fabric of his sleeve, tugging weakly.
"Stay. Please. Don't—Don't go."
"'M not goin’ anywhere." The words come out before he can vet them, gruff and low, and he immediately resents himself for saying them so quickly, so easily, like a confession slipped out under duress.
He lets you hold onto his sleeve. That much he can allow. That much won't cross a line he cannot uncross.
You shift closer, seeking warmth, and your body curls towards him until your forehead is pressed against his thigh. He goes completely rigid, every muscle locking and nerve firing, and his hands hover in the air on either side of you, not touching, not pulling away, suspended in the unbearable middle ground of a man who wants desperately but won't take.
Another small whimper from you. Not desire this time but pain. The cramps rolling through your body in waves, the toxin still doing its vicious work even after everything Gaz and Soap wrung from you. You're shaking, and not just from arousal. You're exhausted. Dehydrated. Your body is at war with itself.
Ghost is not a gentle man. He knows this about himself the way he knows his blood type and his boot size. It's a fact, unalterable, built into the architecture. He doesn't comfort. He doesn't soothe. He handles.
But.
His hand comes down on the back of your head, and it stays.
Heavy and warm through the leather of his glove. Not stroking just resting, a solid weight against your skull, and you let out a breath that sounds like it's been trapped in your lungs for hours.
You stop shaking. Not entirely. The tremors are still there, running through you in small aftershocks, but the worst of it eases under the steady pressure of his palm, like he's an anchor and you've been drifting.
"Ghost?" Your voice is small, barely a whisper.
"Yeah."
"It hurts."
He closes his eyes behind the mask. His hand presses down just slightly—a fraction more weight, a fraction more warmth—and his throat works around words that don't come.
He knows it hurts. He knows Gaz and Soap's efforts weren't enough. He knows what the doctors said—what Price said—and he knows what would fix it, and he can't.
Not because he doesn't want to. Because he wants it too fucking much.
Simon Riley is not a man who trusts himself with things he wants.
Wanting, in his experience, is the first step towards destroying, and he has destroyed enough for one lifetime. Touching you now the way his body is screaming at him to would not be careful or measured or controlled or gentle.
It would be all consuming, and he would take too much, and he would never be able to look you in the eyes again.
So he sits on the edge of the bed with his boots on and his cock aching and his hand on the back of your head, and he holds himself perfectly, agonisingly still. Just a solid shadow in a bedroom.
You press your face harder against his thigh and he lets you. Your fingers tighten on his sleeve and he lets you. Your breath evens out incrementally but still too fast, still too shallow, though calmer now, and he lets that happen too, guarding it like a perimeter, daring anything to disturb it.
He doesn't know how long you stay like that. Long enough for the light under the curtains to shift and for his leg to go numb beneath the pressure of your head. Long enough for Gaz to appear in the doorway, freshly changed into borrowed civvies, and stop dead at the sight of them.
Ghost meets his eyes over the top of your head. His expression is unreadable behind the mask, but his hand doesn't move from your hair, and that says more than his face ever could.
Gaz nods once and backs out without a word.
In the kitchen, Price is pouring two fingers of whisky into a tumbler and staring at the far wall like it owes him money. Soap is sitting at the table in a pair of Price's joggers, his soiled trousers balled up in a plastic bag at his feet, looking like a scolded dog.
"She's calmer," Gaz says quietly as he enters, and both men look up. "Ghost's with her."
Price takes a long drink. Sets the glass down. Rubs a hand over his beard.
"It's not enough, is it."
It's not a question and Gaz doesn't answer it.
"She's still in pain. She keeps—" He stops and swallows thickly. "She keeps asking. Saying she’s in pain."
The captain stares at the whisky in his glass. The silence stretches, tense and heavy, pressing in on the walls of the small kitchen.
"She needs more than fingers and a mouth," Soap says bluntly, because someone fucking has to, and delicacy has never been his strong suit. Gaz shoots him a look, but Soap holds it, unapologetic.
"He's right," Price agrees suddenly, and the words taste like bile. He pushes away from the counter and stands to his full height, shoulders squared, and for a moment he looks every inch the officer. Burdened, resolute, carrying a decision he'll second-guess for the rest of his life.
"Gentlemen's agreement," he says. His voice is low, steady, absolute. "What happens tonight stays in this flat. No one treats her differently when this is over. No one brings it up unless she does. No one holds it over anyone, including himself."
He looks at each of them in turn—Gaz, then Soap—and holds until he gets a nod from both.
"And we tell Ghost."
Ghost doesn't agree.
He listens to the terms of the gentlemen's agreement from the doorway of the kitchen, arms crossed, stance wide, radiating the kind of stillness that makes lesser men instinctively check their exits. When Price finishes, Ghost holds the silence for a long, loaded beat.
And then: "No."
Price doesn't flinch. "No to which part?"
"All of it. My part." Ghost's voice is flat and final, stripped of everything except the decision itself. "I'll stay with her. I won't fuck her."
Soap opens his mouth—probably to say something spectacularly unhelpful—and Gaz kicks him under the table without looking.
Price studies his Lieutenant for a moment. Then he nods once, heavy with an understanding that doesn't need to be spoken.
"Fair enough." He rolls his sleeves up to his forearms. The mechanical motion of a man preparing for something he cannot delegate. "I'll go first."
No one dares to argue.
Unlike Soap, Price closes the guest bedroom door behind him and stands there for a moment with his hand still on the knob, just breathing. It smells of sex and pheromones, but wrong.
The room is dim. Someone turned off the overhead and left only the bedside lamp, casting everything in low amber light that softens the edges of the furniture and the shape of you on the bed. You're curled on your side, knees drawn up, one hand clutching the pillow beneath your head. The sheets are wrecked; damp and twisted, pulled loose from two corners, and your skin glistens with a thin sheen of sweat.
You look small.
That's the thing that hits him first and hits him hardest.
You're one of his soldiers. He's seen you clear buildings, haul wounded men twice your size to extraction, take a round to the vest and get back up swearing. You are not small. You have never been small or fragile.
But you look it now, trembling and fever-damp and reduced to a version of yourself that he never should have had to witness, and the weight of that sits on his shoulders like a ruck full of stones.
He crosses the room in a few strides and sits on the edge of the mattress. The frame groans under his weight.
"Sergeant."
You stir, your head lifting, and your eyes find his face. They're glassy and unfocused, but there's a flicker of recognition—Captain—before it's swallowed by the next wave rolling through your body. You let out a sound that's half sob, half moan, your thighs pressing together, and your hand reaches out blindly until your fingers catch the fabric of his shirt.
"It hurts," you whisper. "Still hurts. Why does it still—"
"I know." He catches your wrist, holds it. His thumb presses against your pulse point to check, and it’s rapid, thready, way too fast for simply lying on a bed. "I'm going to help you."
He says it the way he says we're moving on that compound at 0300 or I need eyes on that ridgeline. Leaving no room for ambiguity, because if he allows ambiguity into this room, he'll start thinking about what he's doing, and if he starts thinking, he'll stop, and if he stops.
You'll keep hurting. Under his command.
He stands long enough to strip his shirt over his head and remove his belt, and then he's back on the bed, propped against the headboard with you between his legs, your back against his bare chest; coarse salt and pepper hair rasping against your tacky skin. One arm wraps around your midsection, heavy and secure, anchoring you.
"Easy," he murmurs against the top of your head. "I've got you, love."
His free hand trails down your stomach, and your muscles jump and twitch beneath his rough palm. He catalogues every reaction. The hitch in your breathing, the way your hips tilt up to meet him, the small, desperate noise you make when his fingers dip below your navel. The same way he catalogues threat patterns and exit routes.
This is a mission. He is completing the objective. He is taking care of his wounded soldier.
He keeps telling himself that as he peels your underwear down your thighs and off, tossing them aside. As he runs his hand up the inside of your thigh and feels you shake. As he finally cups you and discovers just how wet and swollen you are, dripping on his fingers, he has to close his eyes and clench his jaw against the visceral punch of arousal that knocks through him.
This is the job. You gave the order. See it through.
He works you with his fingers first, because he needs to know what you can take. Two thick fingers pressing into you slowly, carefully, and the sounds you make guts him.
"That's it." His voice is lower now, rougher. "There you go, sweetheart."
He doesn't call his soldiers sweetheart. He has never, in twenty-odd years of service, called anyone under his command sweetheart. The word falls out of him like a loose round, and he can't take it back.
Your sopping hole clenches around his fingers and his cock, already hard and straining against the front of his trousers, jerks so violently he must bite back a groan. He curls his fingers inside you, finds the swollen spot that makes your spine arch and your breath stutter, and works it with a patient, devastating precision.
You cum and gush on his fingers with a broken cry, your body locking up in his arms, and the aftershocks roll through you in long, shuddering waves that he holds you through without a word.
It's still not enough. He knows it won't be for a while longer.
Price reaches for the condom on the nightstand—Gaz found them in Price's bathroom cabinet, a half-empty box, almost expired, shoved behind the toiletries like an afterthought—and tears the foil with his teeth while you keen and squirm against him, already spiralling back up.
He undoes his trousers and pushes them down just enough to free himself, because keeping them on feels like maintaining some essential boundary, some last scrap of separation between Captain Price doing what needs to be done and John wanting what he shouldn't want.
Rolling the condom on is a particular exercise in self-control. His cock is thick, flushed dark when his foreskin slides back, weeping pre at the tip, and every brush of his own fingers against the oversensitive skin makes his abs clench.
He lifts you with ease, one hand on your hip, the other gripping himself, and positions you above his lap.
"Sergeant," he grunts through gritted teeth, "look at me."
Your head lolls back against his shoulder, eyes half-open, and you meet his gaze as best you can. He searches for something in your expression—recognition, maybe awareness, you—and finds enough of it to quiet the loudest of the voices screaming in his head.
"If it's too much, y’tell me. That's a bloody order."
You nod hazily. He doesn't know if you actually processed the words, but he needed to say them. Needed that on the record, if only between himself and God.
He lowers you onto him slowly.
The sound that comes out of him is not one he's ever made before.
You're scorching hot and soaked. Your body takes him inch by inch, clenching and fluttering around him as gravity and his guiding hand ease you down, and by the time you're fully seated in his lap, he's seeing stars and his fingers have left dents in the flesh of your hip.
"Fuck," he breathes, and the word is ragged at the edges, torn from somewhere deeper than his chest.
You moan shamelessly, and the relief in the sound nearly undoes him. Like something that's been wound unbearably tight has finally been given slack. Your body relaxes against his, tension draining from your muscles for the first time in hours, and the change is so visible, so immediate, that it almost justifies this.
Almost.
He starts to move. Rolling his hips up into you, slow and deep, both hands gripping your waist to control the pace. He keeps it measured; long and deliberate strokes that drag against your inner walls and make you whimper with each one, because if he lets himself go, if he fucks you the way his body is begging him to, he'll lose himself entirely.
And he hates—Christ, he hates—how fucking good you feel.
He hates the way you fit around him like you were made for it, and the way your head falls back against his shoulder, how your lips part and you breathe his name—not his rank, not Captain, but John—and the sound of it rushes through him hot and electric and wrong. Hates the wet, obscene sound of your body taking him repeatedly; that his hips are moving faster now, snapping up into you with a force that makes the headboard knock against the wall.
Hates that he doesn't want to stop.
Your eyes squeeze shut, your head tips back as you cry out. "John—John—oh god—"
His arm tightens around your ribs, crushing you back against his chest, and his mouth finds the curve of your shoulder—not kissing, just pressing there, teeth grazing skin, breathing you in. His other hand slides down between your thighs and rubs tight circles on your clit in counterpoint to each thrust, and you come apart so violently in his arms that he has to hold you through it with every ounce of strength he has.
You clench around him like a vice and he follows you over the edge with a bitten-off groan, his hips stuttering, his cock pulsing deep inside you as the orgasm tears through him with a ferocity that whites out his vision.
For a few suspended seconds, there's nothing left. No rank, no mission, no guilt. Just the pounding of his heart and the aftershocks rippling through both your bodies and the impossible, terrible warmth of you around him.
Then reality seeps back in, cold and unforgiving, and Captain John Price opens his eyes and begins the long process of hating himself for every second of the last twenty minutes.
He pulls out carefully, disposes of the condom, and fixes his trousers. When he leans you back against the pillows, your eyes are already glazing over again, your body winding up for more, and the sight of it makes something weary and furious crack behind his chest cavity
He cups your jaw, tilting your face up. "Stay with me, Sergeant. Stay with me."
You whimper, and your hips shift restlessly against the sheets.
Price stands and walks to the door on legs that feel like they belong to someone else.
"Garrick. You're up."
Gaz and Soap take you in turns after that, and it's different this time.
Where the first round was clinical in its own way—Gaz with his careful guilt, Soap with his missionary zeal, Price bearing the weight of command—this his round is rawer.
The boundaries have been breached, and the gentlemen's agreement hangs over the room like a ceasefire that everyone knows is temporary.
Gaz is gentler than Price was. He lays you on your back and settles between your thighs with a tenderness that borders on devotion, pressing his forehead against yours as he pushes inside you.
He goes slow and gentle, and whispers things against your temple that no one else can hear, private things meant only for the space between your mouth and his.
"I've got you," he murmurs repeatedly. "I've got you, Babygirl, I'm right here. I will be here."
He comes inside the condom with a shudder and your name bitten into the skin of your shoulder, and when he pulls out and rolls onto his back beside you, he stares at the ceiling for a long time without blinking, tears prickling at the corners of his eyes.
Soap goes after. He's not gentle—can't be, doesn't know how to be, not with the way you claw at his back and wrap your legs around his waist and beg him harder, please, harder—but he's present.
He hooks your knee over his broad shoulders and fucks you deep, watching your face with a focused intensity that's almost clinical in its own right, cataloguing every reaction, every gasp, adjusting angle and depth and rhythm like he's zeroing a scope.
"Tha's it, sweetheart, take it—fuck, yer so—fuck—"
The condoms run out after Soap's first round.
Gaz discovers this when he reaches for the box on the nightstand and finds it empty, and the look on his face—the quiet oh, shit—would be funny in any other context.
"Cap'n," he calls, voice strained. "We've got a problem."
Price, who has been standing in the hallway staring at nothing, appears in the doorway. Gaz holds up the empty box. Price closes his eyes.
"Then pull out," the captain says flatly. "That's an order."
It should be simple, and it’s anything but.
Gaz tries. He genuinely, sincerely tries, but you're clenching around him so tightly and making those sounds, those desperate and wrecked, grateful sounds, and when your orgasm hits and your walls contract around his cock in rhythmic, milking pulses, his hips stutter and he buries himself to the hilt and spills inside you with a choked groan before his brain even registers what his body has done.
"Shit—shit, I'm sorry, I—fuck—"
He pulls out too late, watches his cum leak from you onto the sheets, and drops his head against your sternum with a devastated exhale.
Soap doesn't even pretend he's going to manage it.
"'M not gonna be able to pull out," he announces with a frankness that makes Gaz want to strangle him. "Jus' bein' honest, Cap."
"You'll pull out or I'll pull you out myself, MacTavish."
And yet Soap does not, in fact, pull out in time.
Price has to physically haul him back by the shoulder, and even then, Soap's cock jerks and pulses as it slips free, painting your inner thighs and lower belly with hot, thick ropes of cum while the Scotsman lets out a string of Gaelic curses that would make his mother disown him.
The room smells like multiple people fucking and sweating and something medicinal—the toxin, working its way out of your pores at last—and you're finally, finally, starting to slow down.
The desperate edge has dulled. Your whimpers are quieter now, tired rather than urgent, and your body has stopped arching off the bed every few minutes.
You're still reaching, though. Still searching for contact, for warmth, for a body against yours.
Ghost enters the room without being asked.
He's stripped down to his black t-shirt and trousers. The balaclava is still on, but his gloves are off, and the sight of his bare, scarred hands is somehow more intimate than anything else that's happened in this room tonight.
He doesn't look at the other men or acknowledge the state of the sheets or the smell or the heavy, post-coital guilt saturating the air.
He simply moves to the bed, sits down, and gathers you against his chest with a practised efficiency that suggests he's been rehearsing this moment in his head for the last two hours.
You go willingly. Boneless, exhausted, trembling with the last dregs of the toxin and the cumulative aftermath of more orgasms than your body was designed to handle in one night. Your face presses into the crook of his neck, your fingers curl loosely in the front of his shirt, and you let out a breath that sounds like surrender.
Ghost pulls the duvet up over both of you. One arm settles around your back securely. His other hand comes up to cradle the back of your head, fingers curling into your hair, and he holds you against him like he's shielding you from blast radius.
"Go to sleep," he says quietly. An order and a request and a plea all compressed into three words.
You make a small, incoherent sound against his throat.
"I know." His hand moves over your hair, slowly and gentle. "Sleep."
Price watches from the doorway for a moment. Then he pulls the door halfway closed and leaves the Lieutenant to his vigil.
In the kitchen, the captain pours himself another whisky—three fingers this time—and drinks it standing up, staring at the drawn curtains. Gaz is in the shower. Soap is sprawled on the sofa in the living room, one arm over his eyes, dead to the world.
Price's phone buzzes. Laswell.
How is she?
He stares at the screen for a long time. Types and deletes three different responses before finally settling on one.
Handled. Debrief in the morning.
He sets the phone face-down on the counter and finishes his drink.
Hours later, you wake up slowly, like surfacing from deep water.
The first thing you register is warmth. A wall of it, solid and breathing, pressed against your back. An arm draped over your waist, heavy with sleep. Fingers loosely tangled in yours against your sternum.
The second thing you register is that you are naked, sore in places you don't want to think about, and your mouth tastes like the inside of a boot.
The third thing is the balaclava.
You can feel it, the knitted fabric against the back of your neck, and the slow, even exhale of breath warming your skin through the cloth. The chest behind you rises and falls in the deep, steady rhythm of genuine sleep, which means the Lieutenant trusts this room enough to have let himself go under.
Which means something, though you're too foggy to figure out what.
You shift slightly, testing your body. Everything aches. Your thighs, your hips, your abs, your jaw for some reason, and there's a deep, bone-level exhaustion settled into your muscles that reminds you of the tail end of a bad flu.
The cramps are gone, though. The tingling, the feverish heat, the desperate, clawing need—all of it has receded, leaving behind a hollow, wrung-out emptiness.
And memory. Fragments of it. Arriving in pieces like delayed radio transmissions.
Kyle's hands shaking as he touched you. I'm only doin' this for you, babygirl. Johnny's mouth on you, hot and relentless. The sound he made against your thighs.
The shower. The water. Voices.
John.
Your eyes open wide and your body goes rigid, and the arm around your waist tightens reflexively. Ghost pulling you closer in his sleep, an unconscious response to a perceived threat, even though the threat is just you waking up and remembering.
You lie very still.
The flat is quiet. Early morning light edges around the curtains, pale and grey, and somewhere in the distance, you can hear the muffled sounds of the base waking up—vehicles, a distant shout, the rhythmic thud of boots on tarmac.
You don't move, don't speak. You stare at the wall and breathe and try to organise the wreckage in your head into something you can process.
Behind you, Ghost's breathing changes. Shifts from deep and even to something shallower, more aware. His arm tenses around you, a brief contraction of muscle, there and gone, and you know the exact moment he wakes up, because his entire body goes perfectly, absolutely still.
Neither of you says a word.
His hand is still tangled with yours against your bare chest. His thumb rests against your knuckle. But he doesn't pull away.
The silence stretches. Not uncomfortable, exactly. Heavy. Full of things that need to be said and won't be. Not now, certainly not yet, and maybe not ever. And there is a fragile, terrified understanding that what happened in this room changed the molecular structure of something that can never be unchanged.
Finally, after what feels like an hour but is probably two minutes, Ghost speaks.
"How do you feel?"
You consider the question. Really consider it, not the reflexive I'm fine that sits on your tongue out of habit.
"Like shit," you answer honestly. Your voice is wrecked, raspy, and it hurts to talk.
Then, so quietly you almost miss it, he answers, "Yeah."
His thumb moves once. A single, slow stroke across your knuckle.
Then he lets go of your hand, carefully disentangles himself from around you, and gets up without another word. You hear his boots being pulled back on. The soft click of the door.
You lie in the bed that smells like all four of them and none of yourself, and you stare at the wall, and you breathe.
How To Court a Vigilante Masterlist series on hiatus!
You’re determined to get Red Hood to fall for you. However, courting a vigilante proves to be difficult when he won’t look your way! Thankfully, getting into trouble is what you do best…
── ONESHOTS
Wanna be yours
You run into your best friend while he's on a date
Kiss or Miss
A quiet Saturday at the shooting range becomes anything but when Jason decides hands on help is the best kind
ice skating with him
ice skating with him and the titans turns into him accidentally confessing his love
baby making music
after telling him you made a playlist that reminded you of him, you accidentally send him the wrong one
tw// mdni (18+), adult content, sexual content, Simon Riley x Reader
What a mug.
He had a mean mug.
There was an utter inability to wax poetics when it came to his face. The first time he whipped off his balaclava, his features had taken you completely aback. Had made you come to a complete standstill. You stood there, rooted in place, transfixed by the dips and the angles, the scars and the harsh slant of his brow.
It was mean. Good of you to keep your stupid mouth shut. He had a mean face, no offense, but through your admission alone, it was full offense. What other words could you use to describe it, however? Because, truthfully, he had a mug that could put the toughest sonovabitch to shame; he had a mug that really put the "mug" in mugshot, a mug that belonged to someone you didn't wanna run into on the streets at night.
A mug of a killer. Snapped necks, rained bullets, crunched spines with the flat of his boot. Good at what he did, to put it bluntly. No wonder he put his cover on at all times; this wasn't some generic, run-of-the-mill face you forgot in a lineup. This was a mug that had you in its clutches until raw mortification and gooseflesh took over your nerves.
Took over your goddamned mind ever since that day you saw it.
Took over every waking thought. Every single cell. All the space in that head of yours. You'd committed every single line, expanse of flesh, shadows, puckered matter and pockmarks in his skin, every harsh facade. Over and over, color and hair and skin and muscle, the hard glint of his eyes overtaken by the ridge of his brow, played like a never-ending film. Lit up the rods and cones, the hungry fire in your gut. What were the chances you'd ever admit that when you dared to close your eyes, you swore you'd open them to that cursed mug right in front of your own.
Never. Never, ever, ever. Never. Time kept rewinding to the din of the chopper blades, the red flashing lights, the squad all huddled up in that flying tin can. Mission over, time and time again, since you joined, and it was at that moment, in the air, returning to base, that he let out one last sigh before pulling off his balaclava. One last second before he'd turned you into the worst version of yourself.
It was disgusting, you know. All that staring you did. Guilt ate at you. You knew it took a lot of trust for him to do that; that action alone meant that he trusted every single person in the heli. And, apparently, that meant you, included. You would've done a small celebratory dance in your head at that milestone, but all you could do was consume the sight of his bare face.
Feel the quiver in your loins. Disgusting. You were dis-gus-ting. This was wrong. What you did to yourself was wrong. What you thought of him, how you thought of him, was dead fucking wrong. What you did in the dark. Hands and fingers and a repeat of filthy cinema, customized by your imagination, all for you. How you came to the sheer terror of the primal nature of his mug, the grim set of his mouth; how there was pitch black staring straight at you, drowning out any brown. How you played with yourself so much that you swore his hands were the ones wrapped around your throat, his scarred cheek pressed into your neck as he fucked you, his back that you added your own scratches to, the both of you rutting and grinding and tangling tongues mug-to-mug. Skin-to-skin. Like a wretched loser, you pleasured yourself alone, wishing it was him and only him, wishing to feel that first moment you felt awe and terror and sudden surprise and how your heart nearly leapt out your mouth in the form of carnivorous words.
Shameful. So shameful. This wasn't a naive crush you had on him, anymore. It was obsession. Bugs under your skin. Tickling you maddeningly, buzzing in your ears, forcing you to grasp pathetically at pen and paper and draw. You couldn't do art to save your life, but this was the only way to save your life. And you didn't need to go to school because every line and curve and slash and concave and convex you mapped out on newspaper, napkins, documents, ads and the measly scraps from the printer. Anywhere and everywhere, your world your padded cell. Drawing and drawing and drawing and drawing, angle after angle, in the dark and in the light, drawing like you could make another one of him through every cursed visage of his face by ink alone. Because if you didn't, you'd go mad. Because if you didn't, how else could you ever be able to look at him at work. Because he only tolerated you at work, and what he knew of your blatant staring, he chose not to acknowledge, and you wondered if that was even worse than him confronting you at that moment.
Because day by day, you grew obsessed. What started off as shy glances and innocent admiration at his retreating back turned into mortification. You turned into a wraith; you shouldn't be able to stand in the debriefings, man the comm lines for the task force, anymore. You shouldn't be able to stand next to him, but you do, and he allowed you to. You shouldn't be there. You shouldn't be in the task force. You were a burden. If he and everyone else knew just how revolting you were, they'd hate you; and to you, social excommunicado and broken trust in a job you gave your lifeblood to, was worse than death. This wasn't you. This couldn't. But it was. And sooner or later, you wouldn't be able to keep your secret under wraps. In life, everything in the dark would eventually come to light. Your days were numbered. It would only be a matter of time.
oOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo
The day you requested a transfer to another squad, you'd caught the worst flu you ever had. You wondered if Laswell knew everything just by taking a look at your pathetic self, like she could see how much you fidgeted and stuttered and suffered under your own guilty conscience. Like she knew what you were trying to do, knew that this was the last thing you ever wanted, but you'd lose your shit in due time. But at the end of the day, Laswell always knew best, and after a lit cigarette, had told you to get better before thinking about "all this" while she talked to Captain Price.
Your gut had tumbled. God, Captain Price. You'd surely retch and cry from shame when he'd sit you down and talk to you in that fatherly voice of his, ask you why you suddenly wanted to leave. You hoped she'd avoid going to him, but that was quite impossible. So you went back to your barracks room in heavy silence and ate stale pizza, alone like a loser.
A gross one, mind you, because you drew again after the last bite hard crust even with a fever. His face. His aquiline features that were too sharp for comfort, but in that delusional spiral, you'd do anything for said comfort. Anything. Paper and ink and hordes and piles of your manic creations enclosing you as usual. This was your safe haven. Your kingdom. Your hermitage, and when you were finally removed from the task force, maybe then...everything would go back to normal. Maybe then, time would fade his face, fade the memories of him taking literal bullets for you, ease the pain of how you'd forget the weight of his heavy hand on your shoulder and back that must've been nothing to him, but everything to you.
Maybe then, you'd bear to throw away your paper towers, every available surface etched with his face. You wouldn't be a freak, anymore. You could bear to hold your head back up again and—
"Hey."
You could recall how and when you went to answer the door, and how severe your flu was, because there he stood. Ghost, the usual mask hiding his face. Like a ghost, he lingered before your threshold, and maybe you did hear the knocking, and maybe you did greet a guest with grease stains all over your ratty pajamas and your hair looking like a rat's nest. Somewhere in the hot haze in your head, you had enough propriety to peep your head out and angle the door just so so that he wouldn't be able to see the mess in your room. The lights were off, too, of course.
"Heard you caught the lurgy. Brought some meds," he said, and the plastic bag from the chemist's looked tiny in his large hands. "Here."
"O-Oh! I'm okay—"
But you still held the bag full of medicine, snacks, and drinks. You wanted to cry; no one really went out of their way to do something like this for you in a long time, not since you left home and drifted from place to place, always searching, seeking for a connection of some kind, and never finding it until you joined the task force. And, now, you were self-ruining your belonging. If only he knew.
"Thank...you..."
If only he knew who you really were.
You had to get him away. The stifling feeling in your chest, regardless if whether it was due to the flu or not, was overwhelming. The ink stains on your fingers burned. Guilt. A stark reminder that no matter how much your flesh trembled to lift his balaclava, shame clamped onto your hands with its hungry maw.
He needed to get away. Get away from your disgusting self.
"I appreciate i-i-it. Now, if you wouldn't mind—" You hated how damned rude you were, but it had to be done. You couldn't have him discover your secret. Discover what nightmare was hiding in your room. "—I'd like to rest—"
"Laswell. She said you wanted to leave."
No.
No, you never wanted to leave.
He had to leave.
He had to leave your place right this instant. Before it was too late.
"...My face..."
Before he hated you forever.
"...You really do hate it that much."
Before you were now pulling at his hands, begging him to stay. That this was all a misunderstanding? That what the hell was he talking about? It was you who was the problem. You! Not him. Not Simon Riley, who you could mold a figure of with your eyes closed, whose face bled as ink on your fingertips.
Not Simon, not Ghost, who stood in silence as you rambled and raved, who tried to steady and calm you down as you protested with your sore throat. Even amidst your own doing, he still prioritized your well-being.
Even with his face covered, you knew there was nothing but kindness underneath his flesh, even if his intentions contrasted the exterior. When his hands held you, you nearly fainted on the spot.
Well, you really were fainting, because your knees literally buckled when you started to unleash a series of rough coughs.
Your knees buckled under you as another coughing fit racked your body. You weakly swatted at him to get away, not wanting him to get sick or see you like this, but he held his position before reaching out to steady you. His sudden movement had you panicking, freaking out over the possibility of him coming into your cursed space. Freaking out justly, because he did finally step across the forbidden line after you nearly fell to your knees, and went into your room.
"N-N-No, w-wait, please!"
Too late. You knew he had good intentions. He wanted to help. He wanted to know why. He felt bad. He was too kind. He was in your room, in this cursed haven that was more like hell, and he had seen just how wrong he was.
He saw.
Thinking. Reading a book. Tiding his time on the heli as the squad was en route to a new mission. Staring. Cleaning his gun. In action. Sideways, direct, from behind, random doodles to full on sketches and portraits that you bled ink into with utter still life. He’d hit the light switch in order to help you get back to bed, but instead witnessed the sacrifices of a loon, standing in the altar where he was the deity awoken from slumber.
You froze. Fear and dread clawed at your guts and manifested as feeble attempts for you to scramble away from your god. He’d seen them! He knew! He knew, he knew, he knew! You wanted to throw up, and it sure as hell wasn’t from your flu. Frantically, you attempted to wrestle your shoulder from his grip, but he held on.
And turned to look at you.
“…That me?” he spoke after a good while, looking directly into your eyes. His gaze had you transfixed, and you could do nothing but nod in an awkward manner. “What’s…What’s the meaning of this?”
"...I...I..."
"Why me?"
He looked directly into your soul. And then stepped forward with eyes that were all too perceptive.
He knew.
"Tell me to stop."
He knew. And he knew that you knew. That the want wasn't just there beating out of your chest, but mirroring in eyes so liquid brown, you could drown in his glory.
And how you wanted to drown.
He turned your body towards him, angling your head up at the hard flint of his eyes. Even with confusion and the front of steel, you adored him. Worshipped him, all whatever gargantuan unit of measurement he was, the mug of someone who could easily snap your neck in two. Sickly sweet. Damn that flu to hell the way you wanted him to dig his fingers into bone and tell you how fucked up you were, if only for him to regard you more than the few seconds you ever got with him. How fucking sick you were.
Sick, sick, sick. Sick and suddenly bemused when he came closer and wrought his head down to where you trembled, one hand awkwardly holding the goodie bag and the other subconsciously gripping onto his bicep when he moved. Instinctive, and there should've been more surprise at realizing that he didn't swat your hand away, but moved so that there was but a hair's breadth of distance between you both.
You were breathing hard. Or maybe his breaths were equally as audible. Who knew. What you did know was that your heart was beating a million times a minute, you wanted everything to stop so you could flee and hide, yet you didn't want this moment to stop. Not ever. Not at all.
If Simon Riley was the one looking back at you—not as, but also as—Ghost, consider yourself an eternal prisoner, and you'd gladly accept the sentence.
"Tell me," he whispered against the heat of your cheek, and you trembled when his hand on your shoulder slid down ever so slowly to grasp your own hand, "to stop."
Never. You'd never say.
"Tell me."
You silently turned your head, baring your neck. What was there to tell?
He understood that all too well.
That was Ghost for you: Simon. With a mug too ugly for the conventional. With a mug you wanted tattooed deep into your guts like you could wrestle his frame into your body. Commit his skin onto your own, like you could possess it all for yourself.
Because you wanted it all. When that mouth you could sculpt with your eyes closed came to claim yours, you sobbed in desperation as you melted down into his hold. He took your body, meshed it with his, a greedy hand grabbing the meat of your ass, the other staking its ownership of your nape. The flu, Laswell, sadness, confusion, anger, disappointing Price and Soap and Gaz, your obsession; everything made sense, yet nothing made sense with the manner in which he made your body and mind mush when tongue met tongue, spit swapped for spit, channeling the duration of want from both sides that were kept suppressed.
"M-My flu! Simon, I-Ohhhhh." You scrabbled for purchase in his arms as a very evident part of him made its presence known. Large hands cupped your ass as his lips brought your attention back to the kiss, and you shuddered when a particular knead stretched your cheeks apart.
Couldn't blame the fever entirely for the strong haze of delirium that overcame you. Instinctively, you clenched, your body lamenting that there was nothing stretching you out like you dreamed of alone at night, and you flushed with heat.
You wanted him. You wanted him badly, and he was right here, right in your arms, just the way you wanted. Right here, making you hot and needy and desperate and greedy and feeling a million degrees—
"Hey, you all right?"
Feeling a billion degrees, in fact. Gazillion. Feeling way hotter than being roasted in a furnace. Maybe he baseball pitched you into the sun, because why the hell were you smiling?
And why was the room spinning?
"Hey!"
"S-S-Simon—"
oOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo
Now this was embarrassing.
"I'm sorry for fainting on you, Simon," you apologetically stated, trying to fight the urge to snap a million pictures as drawing references for later. "I got way too carried away. Ugh."
If he wasn't a literal hulk with a face that could give a baby nightmares, you'd laugh and awwwww at him wearing your cat apron while he finished cleaning your field gear. But you stayed quiet and watched him as he cleaned the last bit of your handgun case with utter precision.
"It was my fault. I was the one who couldn't help myself, as Laswell said." He gingerly put the box on top of your shelf and fetched you your ginger tea. "Careful: It's hot."
"Thank you."
Enjoying the atmosphere and still feeling shy, you slowly sipped on your tea, recollecting the events after your disastrous loss of consciousness. According to Price and Laswell, Simon had barged into the med bay and nearly threatened to hold the doctors hostage if they didn't come to help you immediately. After they'd stabilized you, he'd taken off with you like a bear making off with its cub. claiming that anything hospital-related was traumatizing to you. How he knew that, you never knew, but he was right.
And apparently, Laswell was right, too. Right about the both of you and the reason for your weak attempt to flee to another unit. The reason was right there, huffing like a bull, barricading the both of you in your dormitory and telling everyone to "fuck off." She said, over the phone once you woke up, to take your meds and not ever worry her like that again.
"The both of you really annoyed me, truth be told. Simon, especially. If you thought you were being bad when it came to him, think different: I had to endure his wallowing self since the day you joined the task force. Kept me smoking double the packs to keep me sane.
"Now rest and recover. Next mission's in a week. And it's not like the both of you will listen, but try to get sleep, the both of you, and not mash your bits all night long."
Mash your bits. All night long. Hell, you wanted to so bad. So. Bad. Now that you had him, it felt so unfair to be sick.
"Mind if I join you?"
You should protest. You really should. You had the flu, serious enough to faint like some overexcited debutante, so you should've said no and have him keep his distance instead of getting on your bed. Instead, you greedily roosted in his embrace when he put an arm around you to let you lay on his chest.
Well, he literally kissed you in a way that was freak nasty and had you humping the air; trading saliva like it was candy, grinding and stroking, doing all types of devious work with that tongue. DNA transfer became DNA transferred.
Oh, shoot. Simon could get sick. The thought of it had you worried, ready to voice your thoughts, but one muscled arm cuddling you close emptied that head of yours. Again.
That face that had enraptured you since the day you saw it had you speechless. Again.
"So...Since when...How long did you...You know..."
The warm sunlight that filtered in through the window illuminated the neatly stacked piles of sketches. Ink and pastel and pencil and charcoal made you smile as you looked at the muse on paper to the muse that was looking at you with a quirk of amusement in his lips.
You smiled. Maybe now was a good time to start from square one.
"Simon, as you can already tell, I've liked you for a long time—"
His mean mug was ever so kind.
oOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo
"Now that's a fifty you owe me," Gaz stated with confidence, and Soap groaned before slapping a fifty pound note into the other man's hand. "Told you he'd soften up like butter."
Price blinked, then looked like he was going to speak, before seemingly shutting his mouth and ignoring whatever was going on with the rest of his crew. Wise move, you suppose, and you confusedly looked on at the not so secretive bet Johnny lost to Kyle. The Scotsman muttered disappointed nonsense before fixing his gaze on you and Ghost and letting the both of you have it.
"Now how's a man supposed tae think a mean oaf like him wud give in like that?" he complained. He snorted, crossing his arms against his chest as he regarded the cause of his financial loss nonchalantly sitting in silence. "Maister Stone Statue wouldnae look at me for four months straight when we first met."
You paused in thought, took a moment, looked at Gaz, then Soap, and up at Simon right next to you, and blinked. Oh. It was the mask.
"Ach, look at him: All crouss sitting next tae his birdie with his cover off. That's a right unco business."
Might be weird to him, but it was more than all right for you. You gently looked at his geared up form before beaming, snuggling closer, your thigh pressing on his. The bare skin of his chin rested on top of your head.
He had his balaclava off, held in one hand, ready to don as soon as the helicopter landed and it was showtime. He'd never been exposed so long like this, and even though there was some ribbing, it was all in good humor. Gaz knew. Soap knew. Price knew. It took an immense amount of trust to be this exposed, yet Simon did it.
Because of you apparently. Because there was more, and maybe it was selfish to take the credit, but he showed his face like this, scars and wounds and dark circles and all. Exposed. He wanted them to see it for more than the few seconds they were exposed to. He wanted them to see Simon.
And holyyyyyyy shitttt did he look so damned good right now. After that heartwarming scene of the both of you cheesily admitting your feelings to one another, he wrecked the hell out of your guts. Wrecked them. He split you open on that bigass dick like it was the most natural thing to do, and you screamed your vocal cords out when he pounded your ass like he meant it. That mean mug was doing nasty things to your genitals; the face, the cock, the ass, that body and those delicious scars—
"You're drooling, you know? Take it down a notch, lovebirds. Might not want to start gooning on the helo when we're about to take down some bad guys." Kyle's amused and exasperated voice cut through your daydream that involved you gagging on something very big. Oops.
"What does 'gooning' mean?" Price suddenly asked, joining in on the conversation; the three of you nearly jumped when your fearless leader walked to the back. "Johnny showed me some videos...they call them 'reels.' Anyway, some of the young people were talking about 'gooning', like in movie theaters and at church." If you weren't embarrassed by Gaz's observations of you hallucinating about riding an oh-so-perfect nose at 0200, you would've fainted again, no flu involved. "Can someone explain it to me?"
You blinked. Gaz blinked. Soap blinked. Simon blinked.
"Hello? Anyone?"
Maybe Laswell could handle another problem in the task force.
simon 'ghost' riley x f!reader | soulmate!au | 18.8k (oops)
Ghost didn’t want a soulmate, and he was sure, if they existed, that they didn’t want him either.
cw; soulmate!au in which soulmates share scars, references to self-harm, lots of talk about scars, angst, fluff, references to domestic abuse and past violence, references to simon's past, descriptions of pain, military inaccuracies, miscommunication, touch aversion, reallllly slow slowburn, ghost being sort of really bad and weird at affection
Simon didn’t remember how he got every scar on his body.
The big ones, the important ones, sure. He remembered them all too well, even through the haze of pain and fatigue that often hung thickly around their reception.
But there were too many to account for. To remember the particulars of each slash and burn and gunshot wound was a losing battle. He’d long since given up on keeping track of them. Little lines on the sides of his fingers, stretchmarks on the backs of his biceps, winged fans of a burn on the side of his thigh, a pale line along the point of his elbow that he might as well have been born with.
There were ones from further back, too. Scars that time and pain had eroded the precision of the memory, but not the feeling. Cigarette burns on his forearms, a necklace of animal teeth on his side, a craggy line across his hip, accompanied by the shadowy memory of hand reaching for him, and not being quick enough to duck out of the way.
They all meshed together into the hard patchwork of scar and muscle his body had wrought itself into.
Almost none of them could be helped, out of his control, out of his hands.
They were a catalogue of his life, a story traced on his skin.
Stamped, more like. Branded.
Survived.
And soulmates shared scars.
Their hurt was his; his hurt was theirs. Literally or metaphorically, he wasn’t quite sure. Simon had so many, spent so much time in pain, it was impossible to know if any of them didn’t belong to him originally.
He didn’t like the thought of someone sharing his scars, having felt what he did. Possessive of them and the pain in a strange way.
It’s ironic, then, that he should be able to find his soulmate more easily than the average unmarred person, and wanted to do nothing of the sort. Simon dismissed the whole thing as drivel a long time ago, anyway. If they did exist, if they weren’t just incredibly rare instances of luck, Simon was sure that he hadn’t been afforded one.
There was guilt, too, settled somewhere deep inside him, that someone had to endure it alongside him. It was easier to believe he’d been left out of the whole thing.
Better he was alone.
The likelihood of finding that person was slim. It almost never happened. Eight or so billion people swanning around the planet would do that. A one in eight billion chance.
A grand, cosmic joke. The unfairness of it drove some people crazy, drove them to do insane things to increase a probability that couldn’t be altered—to know that person probably existed somewhere and yet know that they would probably never run across them.
A trend of self harm cropped up online every few years, healed over self inflected wounds posted in forums of people seeking their other, fated, half. The presumption being that they were being desperately searched for in turn.
Idiotic. Determined. Fallibly human.
And taboo. Most saw it as circumventing fate.
Violently frantic for the thing Ghost had been unwillingly given. A way to find them, or, at least, easily identify them. And he never would.
But, sometimes, he wondered.
He tried to picture the imprint of a person somewhere out in the world wearing his wounds, suffering his losses. The thought would circle his brainstem in an unrelenting loop, a bright fish whispering around the perimeter of its bowl before it dissipated in lieu of something more pressing.
It was always there, though, waiting to be grappled with again.
He always came up blank. Nothing but a shadow in his mind where a person should be. Fitting, typical.
It was a cruelty he couldn’t imagine, somehow. Someone being fatefully, inescapably afflicted with him.
Simon didn’t want a soulmate anyway, and he was sure, if they existed, that they didn’t want him either.
If there was someone out there, someone wandering around with his scars on their skin, he was certain they hated him already.
He didn’t particularly believe in fate; life had taught him not to. He believed in himself, his capabilities, planning and contingencies. And Simon didn’t relish the thought of something he couldn’t control, someone holding the other end of his corded, deformed soul, like a leash they could tighten and use to yank him to his knees. Compromised, vulnerable.
It wouldn’t happen; the margin for discovery was so small it was practically nonexistent.
He blamed Soap, then, for tempting fate.
Ghost listened to Johnny yammer on, the sound of his voice louder than usual in the rattling dark belly of the transport plane home. The glow of green light, the roar of engines, the jangle of gear.
It was an irritating, and sometimes endearing, quirk of Johnny’s that he couldn’t stop talking in the post-op cortisol and adrenaline drop, his words a smeared haze of jumbled thoughts spoken aloud for hours afterward.
The notion of a soulmate was at the front of Soap’s mind, not for the first time. He’d always seemed to enjoy the idea of it, and find some comfort in it, particularly after a close call. There was someone waiting for him, somewhere, after all, it couldn’t all come to nothing yet.
Simon glanced out the window, watched the sea below morph into land.
A yellow network of light winked below, a sea of reverse stars swimming in the black.
“Lucky that way, Lt,” Johnny declared with finality, finally winding down, sounding exhausted. “Findin’ ‘em will be easier.”
Ghost glanced over, the first time in nearly an hour that he’d acknowledged the conversation beyond a hum and a nod. “What do you mean?”
Soap gestured to his scarred chin, then his temple. “Know ‘em straight away, wouldn’t I?”
Simon’s own thoughts spoken out loud; his hopes to never see his own scars reflected back at him turned on its head.
Johnny made it sound like a good thing, instead of the nightmare it was.
No, he thought for the nth time in his life, not that, not for him.
But he’d always had an extraordinary knack for beating the odds.
.
.
.
The base was a constant flurry of activity, a relentlessly buzzing hive of people. There were very few places that skirted away from the general chaos of life on a military base, but Simon had catalogued them all—the field behind the barracks when drills were not being run, the concrete service walkways beneath the base, crowded with spiderwebs and dust, the cool, sterile medical wing, and, the orderly administration offices.
Each place had caveats.
The service walkways were the most reliably quiet, but Simon hated being underground, hated the claustrophobia of it, like some part of him would always be clawing at black earth, and so usually avoided it.
Soap had found him smoking behind the barracks once and now regularly joined Simon there.
The medical wing could be crowded and frenzied, depending on the day.
The administration offices were practically serene in comparison. Neat file folders, tidy desks, windows that let in the watery, gray English sun. Square offices with their doors propped open, conference rooms bathed in the light of glowing intel reports, data convergences, and map overlays, uniform gray walls and floors.
The admin wing only occasionally spasmed into restless activity if an emergency op was underway or about to be, and if that happened, Ghost was usually already swept up in it himself, probably already long gone.
A spare office stuffed away at the end of the hall with the name plate removed technically belonged to him. A mostly unused space he sometimes finished reports in but, more often than not, sat empty.
He preferred to haunt the corridors, observe the more peaceful, inner workings of the military, breathing in the quiet air for five minutes at a time. It gave his perpetually over taxed nervous system, his forever-in-fight-or-flight-mode body, to relax, if even it was only an increment or two. The lightning was softer, the constant bark of orders and drills, the snap of gunfire, the general loudness of the rest of the place, was muted and far away.
Simon knew of all of the staff and their precuilarities—names, ages, birthdates, minor feuds among each other, immediate family members, previous posts, favorite foods, habits, complaints about the building’s irregular temperatures and the pervasive scent of diesel. It wasn’t information he necessarily collected on purpose. Gleaned over years of half heard conversations, glimpses of photos on desks. They, like the medical staff, didn’t often change, not like the revolving door of soldiers and operators.
It was a regular, routine, quiet place.
So it would be difficult for even the most oblivious person not to notice when the familiar order of the place was interrupted.
Soft, dandelion light flooded the hall from a doorway that had always before been shut tight.
The scent of an unfamiliar perfume lingered in the hall in a feathery streak, oakmoss and lavender. It settled hard in his lungs, made his footsteps slow slightly, caution prickling at the back of his neck.
The click of ceramic being sat on wood, the soft shuffle of files, tapping of computer keys emanated from within the now open office. The faintest notes of bubblegum pop floated by, at odds with the chill, still air.
Inside, you were hidden behind two massive computer monitors, the very top of a pair of lilac headphones just visible over the rim. Plants in colorful painted terracotta pots lined the window to your left absorbing what they could of pale winter light, a thick blanket was thrown over the back of a chair in the corner, a jumble of bright, hand crocheted squares. A brass floor lamp with a circular shade sat behind your desk and drooped forward like the antenna of a giant radio, or a bug, casting a delicate halo of light around you like a protective ward.
There was something. . .lambent that emanated around the room, that had nothing to do with the ridiculous lamp.
Simon hovered in the doorway, in the shadow of the dim hall, just to get a glimpse of your face. Start a mental file on you, begin his careful catalog. Something to match the color and light to.
It was a surprise to you both, then, when you glanced up and caught him at it.
You stood hastily, headphones sliding down your neck when the cord jerked taut, the tinny sound of pop echoing loudly from them until you slammed your fingers down onto the keyboard and silence descended abruptly. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t see you there. Can I help you with something?”
Simon could only stare at you, a curl of dread snaking its way between his ribs.
Johnny was right, then, he would know his own scars anywhere.
He would know his own face anywhere.
He would, apparently, know you anywhere.
Your face was a faded mapping of his own, the same scarring traced with a lighter hand. The same crack over your lips, a line drawn across your cheek, a faded check through your brow, the bridge of your nose bisected, the outline of webbed burn scars crosshatched at the edge of your jaw and shoulder. A jagged, thick line crossed your throat.
Despite his legacy marring your face, you were pretty. Beautiful, even, with curious, cautious eyes, one side of your mouth pulled up into a half grin that tugged at the line across your cheek and somehow didn’t ruin the brightness of it.
You were watching him watch you with a tentative gaze, brows drawing slowly together the longer he stood there staring at you, breathing around the newly minted cavern under his lungs.
His eyes met yours again, and as soon as the realization settled in, something clicked violently into place inside his chest, like a missing rib bone had suddenly slotted into the cage around his heart.
Pain bloomed hot and tight across his chest, so acute he covered his side, expecting to find a knife inexplicably lodged there. He grunted mutely. The discomfort receded as quickly as it had come, leaving behind a vast hollow just beneath his breast bone. Cavernous, lurching, undone.
The hollow hardened into a solid brick of pain.
Nausea swept into the back of his throat.
“Are you okay?”
He was frozen in the direct line of fire. Your eyes swept over him, fingers curling around a folder on the edge of your desk which you thumbed nervously. You began to lift your other hand, an aborted half movement toward your face that you dropped at the last second. But you didn’t avert your gaze. You looked past the mask, past him, and into his eyes.
You saw him.
Simon was not to be seen.
Ghost didn’t get caught, didn’t freeze.
Didn’t feel like an animal trapped in a cage, pinned and weak and panicked.
Not anymore.
He was a ghost, a shadow, a silent—
The silence unspooled, thin and fragile as unraveling lace.
Your smile widened, a slow, confident thing that stretched across your face crookedly, pulled at your scarred skin as you tilted your head. It was, maybe, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“Sir?”
Amusement threaded your voice; a laugh curled like a sleeping animal in your throat.
Instead of answering, he faded back into the hall.
As he retreated an uncertain realization prodded at the back of his mind. One wonderful contingency.
You had not felt the shift, the world turning horribly on its axis, the pain that radiated hot as a wildfire.
You hadn’t recognized what he was.
And he was going to keep it that way.
.
.
.
It felt like there was a hook in his chest, slipped right between his ribs, a constant painful tearing that landed him again and again outside your office door. Like he was a fish on a line, and you held the reel in your fist, totally oblivious to it.
He didn’t love you, that’s not how the soulmate bond worked. You were tied together, for some reason, though that reason remained to be seen. Resentment was all he felt, a burning desire to chew his leg out of this trap, to grip the line that bound you and run a knife through it.
Better yet, through you.
Sever the tie as cleanly as a blade through an artery.
One sure way to free himself was your death.
It was unusual, but it happened—headlines of a soulmate killing their pair because they couldn’t tolerate the connection. It was taboo, considering how rare the bond was. The link suffocated them, instead of comforting them.
Simon understood the urge.
He thought of your office, the way your back was angled half toward the door, how easily he could slip in and slice your throat open. He had seen and done worse, but the thought of you lying in a pool of blood, let alone at his hands, was so abhorrent and wrong that he doubled over as an acute, sharp pain pinched between his ribs, like someone wriggling their fingers between the bars to claw at his insides.
Which irritated him. Things like that didn’t bother him, not anymore. At the very least, he was better at handling discomfort than this.
It did start him thinking about someone else doing it, though. Slipping quietly into your office and nudging a knife between your ribs, pressing a silenced pistol against your temple, Ghost left to find your cold corpse.
It was wrong.
He could feel your life wrapped around his fingers, tangled in little ribbons around his wrists. A pulsing, glowing, bright thing.
The resentment doubled because he should not care. He didn’t know you, trust you; your death should mean nothing. You should mean nothing.
Still, he found himself walking the administration wing again the following day, even though the sun was out and it’d be nice to sit behind the barracks and smoke and listen to Johnny rattle on about something or the other when he inevitably showed up.
Your door was open again, gold light spilling into the corridor, the low flutter of too loud music in your headphones accompanying it.
Simon would never admit it to himself, but he also needed to know that he could remain hidden from you. The shock of your eyes finding his still hadn’t left him. It had never happened before—not on an op, not about the base, not out among civilians. He blended in, he remained invisible, but you saw him, sensed him, and he needed to know if that was something he had to adjust to. Planning was survival, and you were an unknown factor he needed a method for handling.
Simon stepped close to your door, out of the beam of light.
Your office was bathed in soft, cream light but not from your antenna bug lamp.
Your back was fully turned toward the door, face tilted into the scarce winter sun streaming in the window as you leaned back in your chair. Your eyes were closed, headphones over your ears as he suspected they were.
Fuuucking hell.
Couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, back toward the entry point of the room.
Your life hung there, trusting, fragile as spun crystal.
He waited, but you didn’t turn, didn’t seem to know he was there. Something in his shoulders uncoiled, tension slowly replaced with an odd sense of calm. The pain in his chest eased for the first time in twenty-four hours, fading to a tender ache.
Your lunch, half eaten, laid abandoned on your desk. The blanket that had been on the chair in the corner was swaddled around your shoulders.
You yawned, eyes still closed.
He waited for you to sense him, glance up, but you seemed unaware of him. He wouldn’t admit it then, but he half hoped you would.
Ghost backed away, left you to your peace.
The weight in his chest intensified again.
He hated you for it.
He went back the next day.
And the day after that.
.
.
.
Anchor might be a better descriptor.
Hook was too violent.
Simon knew what it felt like to have a hook between his ribs, and this feeling was not that.
He was satisfied, after weeks of observation as late winter turned to a wet spring, that you did not have a preternatural sense of his presence. In the process, he learned other things.
You hated the cold, and your office always seemed to be chillier than you would prefer, blanket perpetually tucked around your shoulders. He watched you fiddle with the radiator one morning, bottom lip caught between your teeth, sigh, and resign yourself to it. He waited for you to complain to your coworkers like everyone else did, to call maintenance to fix it, but you didn’t.
You liked to sit in the sun, however you could, squinting against the glare of it against your computer screens just to have it on your skin.
You hunched over your desk, and clearly had pain in your neck and back because of it.
You often stayed later on base than many of the staff and walked out of the building alone late at night.
You didn’t drink tea, but politely accepted the tea several different coworkers made for you with the very good intention of showing you a proper cup. You drank every drop as you chatted with them, even though you clearly detested it. It didn’t show, but Simon could tell. He didn’t like that he could, that it was instinctual and nothing else.
They were also plying you with shit tea, of course you weren’t going to like it. He watched as one bloke let it steep for a full fifteen minutes and then presented you with what must have been the bitterest lukewarm tea to ever pass through the base. An older secretary took the opposite approach and handed you a cup of barely brewed tea with approximately four tablespoons of sugar in.
Absolutely bloody foul.
Horrific crimes committed in your name, and you swallowed them with a smile.
And you smiled a lot. From the tiniest twitch of your lips when you were alone, to a grin so big he could see all your teeth, that your eyes squinched closed.
You nearly always had headphones on—wired earbuds dangling from the collar of your shirt as you walked down the hall, or over ear headphones looped around your neck at your desk, usually pop, occasionally 70s rock or alternative spitting from the speakers.
You talked a lot, and your voice carried. One of those truisms about Americans, you could be heard long before you were seen even if you weren’t being particularly loud. He didn’t need to be close to hear you, and he found himself thinking one afternoon good. It would be easier to keep track of you.
He liked your voice, anyway, liked your laugh, liked to hear you say English phrases in that accent of yours that made them sound ridiculous.
You could likely give Soap a run for a world record of useless chatter. Anyone who walked into your office was subject to your stream of consciousness if they lingered long enough.
Lonely, he might have called it. But you were new, to the base, and to the country. Your only connections were those you were attempting to craft with stuffy intelligence officers who sometimes seemed to regard you as below them.
He found his thoughts drifting to the sound of your voice once he’d left you for the day, replaying things he’d heard you say in the period of observation he allowed himself, like the tune of a lullaby. It calmed him.
The resentment in his chest festered like a badly healed wound. You were nothing but a distraction, a thorn stabbed into his side, stealing his focus from nearly everything that was more important.
That used to be more important.
Now his every thought was asterisked by you.
Distracted.
He didn’t do well with it.
He didn’t like that he could feel the newly rended hole in his chest corroding and throbbing when he wasn’t near you, suffocating him. He’d felt worse in his life, so he could mostly ignore it.
Simon decided that the nature of the bond was at least neutral. You were not a threat.
He was tired, anyway, of constantly thinking about your back to the door, your headphones playing too loudly.
After you left one evening in mid spring, he moved your desk.
Simon sat in your dark office for longer than he should have, letting the pain ease out of his chest.
It was enough to be where you had once been.
That was as close as he cared to be.
He fixed the radiator before he closed the door again.
.
.
.
He went by Ghost, you learned eventually.
His was a redacted, blacked out name in the files on your computer, so Ghost seemed less a name than a description. You briefly scanned the ops he had been on. It was a horrifyingly long list, most of them totally classified or excised beyond comprehensibility. And those were only the missions you could see, likely his involvement in many ops had been scrubbed entirely.
It was clear that he was good at his job, though it left you to wonder what he had been doing in the administration wing of the base, let alone peering into your office like a silent wraith.
It should have been terrifying to find him looming in your doorway. His massive frame had blotted out the corridor behind him. Mostly in black, a skull mask covering his face. You hadn’t been able to see his eyes in the low lighting. But you had only felt curiosity, apprehension, a delicate wrenching in your gut.
Something that a different person might liken to butterflies. Absolutely absurd, but nonetheless true.
Fear, afterward, of course, that you’d missed some kind of order or request.
It had also been a while since someone stared so openly at you, since you’d felt the urge to duck your head, obscure the scars littered across your skin. You never had before, and you wouldn’t have started then. You wore them proudly. Most bore their soulmate’s scars better than their own, and you were no exception.
It had become a rarity, really, in recent years that anyone spared you more than a glance. Being surrounded by military personnel who had seen worse, might have had worse on their own skin, meant you didn’t stand out.
When you mentioned the incident to Laswell, worried that some kind of disciplinary report, during your first month at this post no less, was headed your way, she had only shook her head. “That’s just Ghost. He probably didn’t say anything. You get used to it.”
The base, especially among the operators, was filled with odd personalities with even odder quirks, so you decided not to question it. You had only nodded, and said, “Okay.”
Laswell had smiled. “You’ll do well here.”
You suspected you were being watched in the weeks following the incident, though you couldn’t say why at first. The suspicion was confirmed when you arrived one blissfully sunny spring morning to find your office warm and your desk moved. Your other furniture was rearranged neatly around it. You rounded it, dropping your bag as you went, half expecting to find a note.
There was nothing, and you started to rotate it back, a bit irritated, when you paused and sat. The new angle gave you a clear view of the door and window. The sun hit your face without causing a glare on your screens. The monitors had been lowered ever so slightly so you could easily see over them.
You left your desk in its new position. It was better that way.
Ghost appeared in your office that afternoon as suddenly as he had left it.
You sensed that he’d been there for a long time when you finally noticed him in the doorway, that you were only seeing him because he wanted you to.
You smiled and turned away from a report. A welcome reprieve for your strained eyes and hunched back.
“Hi. Something I can help you with, Lieutenant?”
This time, he stepped into your office, grasped your offer with both hands.
The room seemed to shrink and adjust to his size. He was more massive than you remembered, in height and breadth. His eyes didn’t leave yours, a deep blackened honey brown half hidden by skull. Neither of you looked away.
“Have I passed?”
His head tilted ever so slightly. When he spoke his voice was like an iron rod shoved down your spine. Deep and jagged and rough, it settled between your ribs, in the pit of your stomach. “Passed?”
“Your test?”
“Think I’m testin’ you?”
“You moved my desk.”
He didn’t answer for a long moment, still not dropping your gaze. The silence lasted so long you began to think he wouldn’t answer at all. “Practically had your back to the door,” he said eventually, as though that explained it.
It conjured the image of Ghost creeping around the base in the dead of night to adjust offices into more tactical configurations and you had to bite the inside of your cheek to keep the giggle in your throat from bubbling out.
You nodded and then shrugged instead. “I guess I don’t think about things like that.”
“Should.”
“Maybe.”
“Especially in the field.”
“I don’t do field work.”
He nodded slowly and finally took his eyes off yours, glancing around the room again. When his lashes caught the light, you saw that they were a light blond.
“Welcome to sit,” you offered, taking up a pen and a pad of yellow paper. “Ghost.”
He didn’t sit, but he didn't leave either. When he remained mute and motionless, you looked back at your report and continued working, resigned to the new addition to your office.
Minutes passed in silence, with only the scratch of your pencil over paper, the tapping of computer keys, for company.
All at once, the room sighed, and when you looked up, he was gone.
Ghost was strange, slightly off putting.
You liked him.
Maybe, you thought, he’d come back.
.
.
.
Ghost visited regularly after that.
Sometimes he simply stood at the door and watched you work.
His boots were so silent that you often didn’t know he was there until he was leaving again. It felt as though he often melted into nothing but shadow, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable feeling.
You didn’t feel watched, so much as observed, minded.
But the lengthy silences began to wear thin, so you started talking to him.
Talked at him, more like, about anything that came to mind.
The shit weather and how cold you always were. Recounted phone calls with your sister and noted things you’d seen on your commute. You told him of your slightly creepy neighbor who would follow you occasionally down high street when you did your weekly shopping trip, but that was probably harmless.
You were sure he wasn’t actually listening, his eyes focused somewhere in the middle distance as he stood statuesque in the middle of your office.
The visits were occasionally broken up by operations that could last days or weeks, once up to a month. Time passed either way, but you found it passed more easily when you could reliably count on a visit from Ghost. Hearing his voice in staticky communications wasn’t the same. A blinking green dot on a map that you tracked just a little more closely than the others.
Ghost sat down for the first time toward the middle of a particularly miserable and cold spring afternoon. He sighed as he did, the only sign of any feeling. Almost a resignation in the soft cut of it.
You didn’t comment on it, just chatted as you usually did, buoyed in a way that you could not explain.
He started to bring you coffee, done up to your preference, always when you were hitting the midday lag.
In exchange, you left offerings at the edge of your desk. Baked goods, protein bars, chips, sweets— which disappeared when you looked away from him. You noted what went first so you could invest in it. Chocolate went more frequently.
But Ghost, whether he was listening or not, made you feel less alone. The ache of loneliness in your heart eased, and maybe that said more about you than him.
If he was around, he usually slipped in while you ate lunch. He didn’t eat with you, the mask never moved, but you began cooking extra in the evenings, leaving tupperware containers at the edge of your desk in addition to brownies wrapped in waxpaper, chocolate chip cookies sprinkled with sea salt. “Don’t have to,” he always said.
“Want to,” you answered, and then received the empty, clean container from the day before as though it were an offering.
Your office always smelled like tobacco and tea for hours after he left, a comforting combination that you began to wish you could bottle.
He didn’t appear one day at his usual allotted, precise time. You figured something came up or he finally got tired of you, but he turned up instead late in the afternoon.
“Sorry,” he said as he sat, without explanation, a paper cup of coffee steaming at the edge of your desk like it appeared there by his will alone.
“Oh,” you answered. “You didn’t have to—“
“Did,” he said simply. “‘ave you eaten?”
“Yep. Got something for you, too.”
He settled back. “Neighbor still botherin’ you?”
You blinked in surprise, the slightly creepy neighbor had not spoken to you in a few days. “Oh. . .I—You were listening.”
He tilted his head. “‘Course I was, bird.” He leveled you with a look. “So?”
“Not recently. Not in a couple days.”
“Good. Let us know if he does, yeah?”
Then he sat back and waited, shoulders relaxed as though attending a sermon, but content with silence anyway.
When you glanced up from a report a while later, for clarification on a mission detail that he happened to be on, his eyes were closed.
It felt akin to having a wolf willingly curl up in your lap, blood wet maw dripping peacefully onto the floor.
.
.
.
When you turned from watering your plants one innocuous spring day, you found Ghost entering your office with a different mask on. A soft black balaclava. You could see his eyes and brows, the bridge of his nose and the thin, bruised skin beneath his eyes.
You froze and then smiled at him, tried hard not to stare. His eyes were always pretty but now you felt you could actually see him. Blond brows and lashes, his irises were lighter, amber honey in the yellow light of your bug lamp, as Ghost had called it one afternoon without a shred of humor.
It was raining, and the dim light made the small space cozier than usual. The patchwork blanket was around your shoulders, a ward against the chill bleeding beneath the window.
In his usual chair, you’d laid a gift.
He pointed to the blanket you had carefully folded there earlier.
“It’s for you. I knitted it.”
He froze, hand half extended toward it. You swept past him around your desk again, inundated with the scent of black tea and cigarettes as you went. His was alternating black and dark blue squares to your brightly colored purple and teal. “Just in case you were cold. You’re always so buttoned up after all,” you joked. “And you fixed my radiator this winter. So it’s a thank you, too.”
Ghost only moved it to the back of the chair. You hadn’t expected him to take it, really, but his gloved fingers lingered on it for a moment, rubbing the fabric gently. “How d’you know it was me that fixed it?”
“Who else would have?”
He grunted. “You knit?”
“When I can’t sleep,” you answered. “Keeps my hands and brain busy.”
His brows furrowed, and seeing even that small movement felt like seeing him naked, like seeing something he didn’t want you to. You averted your eyes, heat crawling up your neck.
“Can’t sleep?” His fingers slid off the blanket and he sat.
You shrugged. “Must seem silly to you. You see it with your own eyes. But some of the reports. . . stick with me.”
Ghost considered this for a long moment. “It’s not.”
“What?”
“Silly.”
The way he grunted the word made you laugh.
“Could I ask you something, Ghost?”
“Reckon you just did.”
You rolled your eyes. “Am I allotted only one question?”
“Just two.”
It was. . . funny. You giggled and shrugged. “Guess I’m shit out of luck.”
“And out of questions.”
You laughed again.
He surprised you by laughing too. If a low, graveled grunt counted as a laugh. You certainly counted it, a cache of swollen pride bubbling in your stomach. “Go on, then.”
“Where are you from?”
The levity vanished. His brows lowered. “Why?”
You shrugged. “Just curious. I’m not good with all the accents yet. Just can’t place you.”
He relaxed back into the chair again, but didn't answer.
The pinch of his brows, the tense line of his jaw, remained, his expression considering as he tilted his head back.
“Why do you come here?” You asked instead.
This question he answered readily. “It’s quiet.”
“That’s one way to tell me to shut up.”
He blinked and lowered his chin to meet your eyes. “Not the kind of noise I mean.”
You decided not to take offense at being called noise.
You snorted and reached beneath your desk, taking some pride in the fact that Ghost did not tense anymore than usual when you did, withdrawing your lunch.
“Hungry?” You asked.
“Tryin’ to see my face?”
You smiled. “Never,” you answered, “Not sure I want to see what you’re hiding under there.”
The rain tapped against the window as you popped the thermal lid off.
“Why are you here?” He asked as you folded your legs beneath you on the chair and tucked the blanket around them. Ghost rose without asking and twisted the knob of the radiator beneath the window a bit higher.
You waved your fork, indicating the office. “Fairly positive I work here. But perhaps base security is more lax than I thought.”
He sighed, a long suffering sound. “England, smartarse.”
You smile and dig your fork into last night’s spaghetti bolognese. The steam caressed your face in a warm puff as you lifted a bite. “I’m on loan to Laswell.”
“On loan?” He asked as he settled back into the chair, broad shoulders pressed to the wall behind him, against the blanket. It slid over his elbow a little, curled over his forearm. He didn’t move it.
When you lifted your gaze to his, his stare was piercing, brows lowered, furrowed. You imagined he must be frowning.
“Temporary replacement for whoever used to be in this office,” you explained. “She needed someone quickly, who she could trust.”
Ghost folded his arms across his chest, something more tense than usual in the movement. “How long are you on loan for, then?”
You shrugged, twisted your fork into the noodles. “It’s unclear. So, for now, indefinitely.” You smiled, “Hopefully not through another winter, though, I don’t think I’m cut out for the rain and cold.”
His shoulders eased, but only marginally. If it weren’t for all the hours he’d passed in your office, you weren’t sure you would have caught it at all.
“From somewhere warm?”
“Warmer than here. Especially in the winter.”
“Must be nice, that.”
“Has its perks. But the summer is its own kind of hell.”
“One you enjoy.”
“But of course. I like feeling like I’m baking alive.”
He snorted again.
You ate in silence for a bit. The quiet had become comfortable between you somewhere along the way, silken and gentle.
When you were scraping the last bit of sauce from the bottom of the container, Ghost said, “Manchester.”
“Hm?”
“Where I’m from.”
His voice was low; he wasn’t looking at you, eyes trained on the door instead.
“Manchester,” you repeated, trying to place it on the map of the UK in your mind. “And do you all sound sort of like—“
You were about to say like you have gravel in your mouth but he makes an affected noise, that stiff grunt again. “Are you laughing at me?”
“It’s your fucking accent.”
“My accent?” You asked incredulously. “Have you heard yourself?”
“Got a thick one, bird.” He imitated your voice. “Manchester.” The sharp rhotic r sound was like a gunshot in his mouth, each letter enunciated to the point of being butchered.
You scoffed, not bothering to fight your smile. “Takes one to know one, I guess.”
“Suppose it does.”
“Fucking Brits,” you said, without any venom. “I can’t do anything right according to you all.”
He tilted his head, something predatory in it. It made your heart flutter a little. “Who’s tellin’ you you can’t do something?”
You sighed, long suffering. “My coworkers. Can’t make tea, apparently. I don’t care for it and everyone keeps insisting I just make it wrong.”
“They make it wrong too.”
You groaned. “Not you too.”
Ghost rose to take his leave as you snapped the lid back onto the now empty container.
“I’ll show you how to make a proper cup sometime.”
You paused, a warm surprise sweeping into your chest, and decided not to linger on this solitary acknowledgement that Ghost would return to your office. “Big fan?”
“I love tea.”
It made you laugh. “Of course, English afterall.”
He nodded, just once, and started toward the door. “Ghost?” You called.
Ghost turned and you slid another tupperware container across your desk. “For you.”
He stared at it, for a moment too long, as he always did, like he was telling himself to leave it. “Didn’t have to.”
“I know.” You nodded at it again and then then ducked behind your computer screens. “I always want to.”
Ghost moved so silently that you didn’t hear or see him take it, but when you looked up again he and the container at the edge of your desk were gone.
.
.
.
It should be a good thing.
You would be gone soon enough, none the wiser of who Ghost was. Of what you were to each other.
But it didn’t sit well. It was a new thing to nag at the back of his mind, finding your office empty, you becoming a ghost in your own right. He hated the ache in his chest, the thought of you so far away. He could only assume you’d be stationed back in the US.
The thought festered, burrowed.
“Laswell.”
She jumped, hand going beneath her desk before she spotted Ghost in the corner of her office. She sighed and closed her eyes, fingertips rubbing her eyes instead.
“Ghost,” she sighed, “Don’t do that.”
Simon said your name, and Laswell lowered her hands to look at him. “How long has she got?”
“What do you mean?”
“Said she’s on loan. I want to know how long.”
Laswell considered him; Ghost waited. He wouldn’t explain himself, and Laswell knew that.
“Maybe as long as a year.” She tilted back in her chair and asked anyway. “Why?”
Ghost didn’t answer, slipping back out of her office and down the hall.
You were still in your office, hunched over the desk, lavender headphones pulled down around your neck. He watched you for a long moment, eyes tracing over scars that belonged to him. It was jarring each time to see pain he experienced threaded over your skin. It made him feel exposed by proxy.
As he watched, you lifted a hand and rubbed your neck with a wince, fingers lingering on the long scar slashed at the base of your throat. The grimace faded from your face and your expression receded into the impassive, blank, focused slate it always settled into as you continued working.
When he sat down in your office, you just shot him a tired smile and continued working.
He walked you to your car around midnight.
“Tell us if you’re here this late again,” he said, not looking at you.
“Ghost,” you said. “It’s almost enough to make me think you like me.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he answered.
You just laughed.
.
.
.
“Tea?”
You jumped, just as Laswell had, only your hand didn’t go beneath the desk. Nothing there to reach for, he knew, your vulnerability like a beacon, or a stain.
It would need remedied.
But first, this.
It was the sixth time in two weeks that you were at your desk well past when everyone else had gone home.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Unfortunately not.”
You laughed; his shoulders eased. “Ghost,” you said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” You tilted your head. “I’m starting to think you’re spying on me.”
“What’re you still doing ‘ere?”
“What are you doing wandering around our wing after hours?”
Not a line of questioning he was keen on following. That just being near a place you had been earlier in the day was enough to loosen that fucking tether in his chest. That he was worried incessantly about you being alone at night.
“Offerin’ to make you a tea,” he answered. “Obviously.”
“Obviously,” you echoed. “Of course.”
“You’re supposed to tell me when you’re stayin’ late.”
“Ghost,” you said seriously, lifting your brows, “I’m here late again today.”
“Hilarious, you are.”
You giggled again. “Are you really offering to make me tea?”
He nodded. “C’mon then.”
You smiled and shrugged the blanket off your shoulders. He waited while you locked your computer and stood.
Simon allowed you to lead toward the breakroom where he’d observed the many cups of tea you’d politely swallowed from well meaning coworkers, who left it to steep for too long or too short, added too much sugar and milk, or left it totally plain.
The overhead lights were too bright, a blue-white glare that made you frown and squint. Your nose scrunched up in distaste. There were circles beneath your eyes, exhausted loops that matched his own.
“So,” you prompted, leaning against the counter, “How does one make a proper cuppa?”
“Not bad,” he said of your accent, lifting the electric kettle from the hook to fill with water. “Little posh.”
“I’ve been practicing.”
He grunted, and put the kettle on, before rooting through the cabinet above the sink for tea bags. A grim selection awaited him, but he’d make due with what was available.
“Ah, so you boil the water. I was under the impression you could just stick it all in the microwave.”
He involuntarily made a pained sound. “Fucking hell,” he muttered, “That your usual method?”
You bit the inside of your cheek, poorly concealing a laugh. “I scandalized a data analyst with that joke.” You cup your chin in your hand, peer up at him from beneath a thick fringe of lashes. “I do know how to boil water, I’ll have you know.”
“Got a head start then.”
You laughed again, shoulders shaking. Simon watched the corner of your mouth curl, and it eased something in his chest. You were painfully close, the woodsy, floral scent of your perfume curled in the air. Your elbow brushed his. He didn’t know how you could be unaware of the bond at that moment, when being that close to you felt like being lit on fire. He wanted to reach for you so badly that he had to clench his fist closed to avoid it.
If someone were to ask him to move away from you right then, it would end badly. Bloody.
The thin, needle sharp connection ached, begged.
Simon ignored it.
When you glanced up, he looked away. He could feel your eyes on his face, and didn’t mind the scrutiny in it. He didn’t mind you watching him, and wondered what you saw.
“I like being able to see your eyes,” you said, just as the kettle clicked off.
He met your gaze, disarmed by the declaration. Your features had softened, melted into a dangerous fondness. “Why?”
“You have pretty eyes,” you shrugged. “And it’s hard to see you with the other mask.” You shifted, watching him lift the kettle, pour the hot water into a mug and over the teabag he’d dropped into it.
“You can tell me to fuck off, if you want,” you began carefully, fingertips drumming nervously against the counter. “Why do you wear it?”
Simon watched the teabag bob on the surface of the water, thin amber trails unfurling, coloring the water slowly brown. “Five minutes,” he nodded at the tea. “Don’t touch it. None of that dunking shite.”
“Yes, sir,” you agreed. “Five minutes, no touching.”
He huffed, and your smile widened. You bumped your shoulder against his. The contact only lasted a second or two, but the relief it provided was so intense that he nearly choked on it.
The pain, softened by your proximity, returned immediately, crept down into the soft ligaments between his bones. He felt the loss in the roots of his teeth, the middle of his chest; it was like losing his breath in a different way, being suckerpunched in the solar plexus, knocked on his ass.
“To hide my face.”
“Your identity, you mean.”
“My identity,” he agreed.
“Why?”
He released a long, slow breath, and thought about telling you to piss off, maybe even just to see how you’d take it. Were you as good as your word? Would you let the subject drop?
Instead, he said, “There are a lot of bad people in the world, bird.”
You pursed your lips, fingers toying with the teabag string, flicking the tab at the end with your nail. There was another question swimming in your eyes, but you let it go unasked, dropping your eyes from his instead.
“You’ve seen more of them than most,” you said. “I would guess.”
“Part of the job.”
Your mouth curled a little, lashes fluttering against your cheek. “Hm. But y’know something? I think I’d know you anywhere,” you said, without a hint of shame or irony. “It’s all in your eyes.”
Before Simon could respond, you hid a yawn in your sleeve and rubbed your hand over your face, exhaustion layered in thick rings beneath your eyes. “Even if this is gross,” you indicate the tea, “At least it will keep me awake.”
“I take offense to that.”
You laughed again. “Hm. Sorry, Lieutenant.” You leaned in, “It smells so nice, so why does it taste like shit?”
He rolled his eyes. “I’ll make you a coffee if it’s shit.”
“You’re kind.” This time when you leaned your shoulder against his, you left it there. The empty soreness like a bruise inside his ribs loosened again. For the first time in a while, he was left with the absence of pain.
When the tea was done steeping, he did yours with a bit of honey. There was no way you’d take it plain and like it, but he drew the line at milk. Especially the blasphemy that was the military issued powdered milk in a canister that sat on the counter. Abso-fucking-lutely not.
“There you are,” he said, “Cup of tea.”
“A proper cuppa,” you tried again. It was a little less posh this time.
He huffed. “Better all the time.”
“And I have you to thank.”
Your face creased as you took the cup between your palms, an unreadable expression flitting across your features. Then your mouth twisted to the side, a sure sign you were attempting to keep some emotion or thought in check.
Your shoulder was still pressed heavily against his.
“Thanks, Ghost.”
“”S just tea.”
You shook your head and lifted the cup, blowing gently on the surface before you took a tiny sip. He watched your face, watched your throat move as you swallowed, the flickering web of your lashes. A step up, at least, from all the shit tea from your coworkers that make your brows tense in an effort to conceal a grimace. “One good thing has come of this,” you said after a moment of contemplation.
“What’s tha’?”
“I know how to make tea for you now.”
“Like it?”
“I love it.”
You briefly tilted your head onto his shoulder, then pulled away entirely. The flood of discomfort was worse than before. His muscles spasmed around it in a violent convulsion. “I mean that really.”
He breathed out, through it. “I don’t take honey.”
You studied the contents of the cup, tilting it one way and then the other, like something important laid at the bottom of the porcelain well.
“Noted.”
Sure enough, the next day, a hot cup was waiting for him, which he drank as you chatted from behind your computer, decidedly, pointedly, giving him the privacy to do so.
.
.
.
Things settled into a pleasant rhythm.
A regimented, regular existence that you had long ago learned to embrace. The base became home more than the tiny apartment you rented and spent only enough time to sleep, bathe, and cook in.
You timed your days to the ebb and flow of the base, to visits to your office, debriefings and conference rooms, the restless energy of so many people in one place moving. You breathed around absences, the pockets of emptiness that sometimes cropped up. The loneliness that felt like an unfillable pit in your stomach.
People often saw your scars and thought not to bother. Why would fate have marked you so heavily if you weren’t meant to find your pair? The scars meant nothing, really. They were no more significant than anyone else’s. Your chances of running into your soulmate was no higher than someone who had accrued no scars from their bond.
You were a stopping off point, a bit of fun, but not someone to invest time and effort into, not when the reminder that someone else might come along and render it all moot was so visible, so literally in their face. To look at you was to be reminded of that bond waiting in the wings, for them and for you, and that you could only ever be temporary.
It made friendships hard too. Some were jealous, others thought there couldn’t be room for anyone else in your life. You were important to no one.
It had been proven to you time and again, and you weren’t sure what kept you hopeful that someone would one day see past it. So when Sergeant Davies stuck his head in your office one Friday afternoon long after Ghost had departed your office for the day, and asked you out, you found yourself saying yes.
“Would you like to go out sometime?” He asked, hand rubbing the back of his neck. “Just round the pub for drinks?”
“Oh,” you said. “I—”
It had been a long time since anyone took interest in you. You’d only talked to him a few times before, but Davies was handsome in a boyish way and sweet and you liked him well enough, you found yourself hesitating for half a second. To your horror, your mind flashed to Ghost, stomach lurching painfully, a knot of tension fisting itself in your chest.
You looked at his usual chair, empty now, seeing his large frame sprawled there anyway, thighs spread wide, arms crossed over his chest, eyes steady and focused, locked onto you with an intensity and constancy you still weren’t used to.
Heat bloomed in your lungs, crept up your neck. You glanced away, back at Davies waiting at the door.
“Yeah,” you answered firmly. “Sure.”
“Brilliant,” he grinned. “How about tonight?”
Your belly gave another sour squirm that you ignored; it had just been a long time, that was all. “I’m free.”
“Brilliant,” he said again. “I’ll text you.”
“Okay.”
His grin was crooked and self satisfied as he exited your office.
So you found yourself walking off the base with Davies later that evening. You found yourself laughing and hopeful in a local pub that you hadn’t gotten the chance to explore yet, busy as you were, the base a tide that tugged you back again and again. Like a magnet, you wanted to be there.
And all of it came to nothing, the moment Davies saw the extent of the scarring when you took him home. It wasn’t just your face, it was your hands and arms and chest and belly. Your whole body was marked, dogeared for someone else. He looked down at you in your bed, his head framed by your ceiling fan and you saw the moment it clicked. The moment it wouldn’t work.
“Someone out there is really looking for you,” he said. “You’re lucky.”
“No more than anyone else,” you countered. “You know that’s not how it works.”
“I know,” he said, pulling on his shirt. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” you said before he kissed your cheek and retreated.
Still, you didn’t sleep, just laid on your side, half undressed, staring out at a sky that slowly lightened, stars fading, wondering if perhaps your truest fate was to be lonely for your whole life.
You didn’t hate your scars, or your soulmate. But sometimes you thought it would be easier if you didn’t have one at all.
.
.
.
Monday.
There was a knife in Simon’s pocket.
Not unusual in and of itself, he carried several at all times, slipped into his sleeves and belt and boot.
The one in his pocket, though, was for you.
A gift, a contingency, and an offer all wrapped in one.
The knowledge that it was yours was an uncomfortable weight in his chest. It meant admitting he cared enough to procure it, test it, hand it over.
It wasn’t quite your typical lunch hour, but Ghost was headed to your office anyway. It was sunny, for once, and he expected to find you taking an early break anyway, leaning back in your chair with your headphones on, absorbing the rare rays.
And, he wanted to be done with it, to stop tapping his pocket repeatedly, checking the blade was still there, like it might have run away.
Soap had noticed his fidgeting as they all sat through a briefing on intelligence reports with Laswell that morning. Ghost had forced his hand still, exuded a forced calm, but Johnny’s eyes hadn’t turned away.
When he arrived at your office, deliberately rustling against the doorjamb so as not to startle you, you glanced up and smiled tightly and his plan vanished.
Something was wrong. The blinds were closed, your office an unusual sea of gray air. Your shoulders were caved inward protectively, your expression wan and closed. Your smile didn’t reach your eyes, your voice was rough when you said, “Hey, Ghost.”
Simon took his usual seat, watching you type something, decidedly not looking at him. He watched you, the set of your mouth and eyes. He waited for your chatter to begin but it didn't.
“All right?”
“Hm?”
“You’re quiet.”
“Oh, only one of us is allowed to be quiet?” You joked, but it came out a bit brittle, and worn.
There were, he noticed as he looked at you, circles beneath your eyes. “What ‘appened?”
You looked up again, and shook your head. “I’m just tired.”
“Try again.”
Frustration crept into your features. “Who said I want to tell you?” With that, you ducked behind your monitors.
Simon waited, but you did not reemerge.
He stood, and rounded your desk. You glanced up then, leaning back when you found him so close. “Jesus, Ghost—”
“Nice weather.”
“I can see that.”
“And you aren’t out there sunnin’ yourself? Something horrible must have happened.”
Your mouth twisted to the side and you glanced away. “I. . .I’m just being dramatic.”
“C’mon, then.”
You blinked up at him. “Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer, but you rose anyway when he tilted his head toward the door. Simon snagged the blanket you’d knitted for him months ago from its place along the back of his chair, finally with a proper purpose, and carried it over his arm.
“Lunch.”
You grabbed it and followed him down the hall. Simon shouldered open an external door and held it open for you, the scent of your skin, the warm brush of your body so close to his as you ducked under his arm like a beacon, a light he wanted to follow.
Carefully, you nudged your shoulder against his as you walked. The familiar sharp, sweet pang whenever you brushed too close together settled in his chest. He wondered if you felt it too, if you felt that sickly flutter in your chest, or if his suspicion that he was holding one end of an untethered bond in his hand was right.
Just his luck.
Didn’t matter though.
He ticked his elbow out a little, and after a moment, you pushed your hand against the inside of his arm. His shoulders loosened; his jaw unclenched. The pain in his chest settled.
The absence of the ache was intense; he was so used to being in near constant pain.
“So, what are we doing?”
“Walking.”
“I can see that.”
“Why’re you askin’, then, bird?”
You huffed but didn’t ask anymore questions as he led you down one concrete pathway.
The sky was a flawless robin’s egg blue, only a wispy, thin line of cloud on the very distant horizon. The distant shouts of drill instructors snapped in the warm summer air. Your shoulders drooped as you walked, eyes fluttering closed for a few seconds at a time as you tilted your face to the sun, inhaling deeply.
He led you around the last building in a long line of barracks and brought you to a halt. The only thing beyond was a chainlink fence that marked the edge of the base. A faint breeze coated him in the smell of your skin, settled deep in the well of his lungs. He took a breath, watched your lashes flutter.
Your thumb stroked a pattern against the inside of his arm, lazy and slow. “You’ve got a soft spot for me, Ghost.”
He didn’t deny it.
“What are we doing back here?”
Ghost pulled away from you with some effort and spread the blanket over the grass. He sat on the concrete steps that led to the back door of the unused barracks.
You sat on the blanket, started to open your lunch and then flopped back in the sun instead. “A usual haunt?”
“Sometimes.”
“Secret’s safe with me.”
“Mind if I smoke?”
“No.” Then, “I won’t look.”
He grunted in acknowledgement, rolled the bottom of his mask up, carton of cigarettes and lighter pulled from the depths of a trouser pocket. Simon watched the rise and fall of your chest, tracing the latticework of scars over your face. They looked better on you, he decided. Not as noticeable as his own, faded and light, pencil through wax paper instead of the thick groves of his own.
They glinted a little in the sun, like the scales of an iridescent fish.
Your eyes remained peacefully closed, soaking up the sun like a long deprived plant. Sweat beaded along your forehead, and when you pushed up your sleeves, Ghost was reminded that all of you matched all of him.
He recognized a burn mark on your forearm that belonged to him, a cut that wrapped halfway around your wrist. He was pretty sure the burn mark was from a mishandled flare, the wrist scar from a rope that had gotten tangled and burned him.
Simon wanted to reach down and cup the side of your throat, feel the soft, sun warmed skin beneath his fingers. He wondered if your scars felt the same as his own, rough and grooved.
Probably not, they were imitations, ungenerous sketchings of his own.
He’d like to map them all against his own, find out if he bore any of yours. He wouldn’t have noticed something small that you might have collected yourself. A childhood fall, a careless burn while cooking.
He watched the delicate flex of muscle in your forearms. Your shirt was a little askew, more faded marks left like a tracery of veins on your chest and collarbone and shoulder. It was fucking awful, a wrenching feeling in his chest, to know all that had been inflicted on him, had fallen on you too.
He wondered about the pain again, imagined you writhing with terror and agony and confusion, every gunshot wound and burn and slash he received an echo inside you. Cigarette burns dotting your arms and wrists when you were just a child, months of pain without end when he was captured and tortured and his life was irrevocably changed.
Simon wanted to ask, needed to know just how much damage he’d inflicted. But the words stuck in his throat. A fear of knowing, if he asked about the pain, maybe he’d hear other things too, how much you must hate him and didn’t know it was the man in front of you your hate should be directed at.
When he stubbed out his cigarette on the heel of his boot and rolled his mask back down, you blinked into the sun and exhaled, long and slow, and then sat up, leaning back on your palms.
“What ‘appened?” He asked.
Your mouth twitched into your usual, if a bit more sheepish, smile. “You’re like a dog with a bone, you know that?”
“Affirmative,” he said.
You rolled your eyes and set up straight, brushing your palms together before reaching for your lunch. “I brought something for you.”
“Stalling.”
“Pushy,” you countered, giggling, rummaging around in your bag. Your smile faded as you pulled free one of the usual containers, what looked like lasagne within. He watched the edge of your mouth curl, the scar slitted along one side pulling at your expression. “I went on a date this weekend.”
Ice slid down his spine, curled in a viscous circle in his gut. “Bad date?”
“No,” you said, shaking your head adamantly, staring down at the container in your lap. “No, it went really well.” You glanced up at him and then dug in your bag again, passing another one to him along with a fork. “Until he saw my—” You fidgeted with your sleeve and then yanked it down. The other followed suit. “My marks. My scars.”
“He’s a prick.”
“No, he wasn’t,” you shook your head. “It’s happened before. They see the extent of it, and it’s like something biological clicks. I’m off limits.” You sat your food to the side and wrapped your arms around your knees. “Even though I’m no more likely to find mine than anyone else.”
You looked very small, and alone at that moment.
“I know it’s not my soulmate’s fault,” you said quietly. “I know that. I know that. And I don’t blame them for it. But sometimes I get so lonely I just—I wish—I wish I didn’t have one. Sometimes I wish I could hate them.”
The chill spreads outward.
It was confirmation enough. If you knew, you would hate him. All that repressed, sentimentalized resentment would come bubbling up the moment you were actually faced with the person who so fundamentally changed the course of your life.
He looked at his scars winking in the sun on your skin and felt a self hatred so intense it nearly made him flinch. He wished he could crawl out of that grave and kill them all over again, slower, just for this.
You glanced up and smiled tightly. “But I’m a hopeless romantic, and dramatic. It was just disappointing. I always have hope someone will see past it.” You ran your hand over the blanket and unfolded yourself to finally begin eating. “This helped, though,” you said. “Thank you, Ghost.” You nodded at the food in his hands, averted your gaze again.
And even though you could easily glance at him, Simon pushed up his mask and popped open the lid of the lasagne still warm between his hands.
You ate together for the first time, in silence in the sun. You closed your eyes, kept your face pointed up and away, a cool breeze ruffling your shirt sleeves.
“Have you found yours?”
Simon looked at you, the edge of your jaw, the soft shadows your lashes cast over your ruined cheek. “Don’t think someone like me is meant for one.”
You nodded. “Me either.”
.
.
.
He walked you back to your office.
You felt better, settled, but he sort of just had that affect on you, you were coming to find.
Ghost smelled like sun and freshly mowed grass and cigarette smoke. His shoulder kept touching yours, something in your chest lurching each time, like a rib bone had come loose and was knocking against your heart and lungs.
Ghost carried the blanket back, folded it and set it carefully along the back of what had become his chair.
You sat and turned, expecting to find him already silently gone as was his way.
Instead, he was very close and depositing something on your desk.
Matte black, compact, deadly, cold to the touch.
A folded pocket knife sat at the edge of your desk. Ghost loomed over you, his shadow curling around your edges.
He slid it toward you, watched you fold your fingers around it. For a long moment, each of you was holding it. “What’s this?” You asked when he released it, gloved fingers sliding across your desk, back to his side.
“A knife.”
“Oh, really? I've never seen one before.”
He rolled his eyes. “It’s for you. I’ll teach you how to use it.”
“Why?”
“In case you need to.”
“Is this about me staying late?”
“No.” He did not elaborate.
“You know I received firearm training. I can shoot a gun. Isn’t a knife a little—”
“But you don’t carry a gun.”
“No,” you agreed. “I don’t.”
He nodded as though that explained it. “Right.”
You considered it, flipped it open. Deadly, shiny blade newly sharpened and oiled and well cared for. It was odd to be given a weapon, and yet unsurprising where Ghost was concerned. You glanced up, watched his dark, intense eyes flick over your face. You weren’t sure what he was looking for, but his brows knitted the longer you stared at each other. Concern, weariness.
“Okay.”
His shoulders loosened. “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” you agreed.
.
.
.
If you thought you would receive one lesson in knifework and be done with it, you didn’t know Ghost very well.
You only ran drills first, as though Ghost were making sure the physical fitness exam you had to pass once a year was up to scratch. You proved again and again that you could run without getting too winded, disassemble, load, and fire a service weapon. When he was satisfied with that, the real training began.
You practiced with a rubber blade that bruised when stuck into your ribs. He did not go easy on you. You left the gym battered and bruised, sweaty and just a little bit resentful. But you could break a wrist lock hold, grapple and use your body and size to your advantage. The goal he repeatedly told you, was not to turn you into a fighter or a soldier, but give you an opportunity to get away, to run away.
What kind of danger he imagined you getting into between the base and your apartment you couldn’t begin to imagine. But you enjoyed spending time with him, enjoyed being in the gym. You found yourself laughing when you were repeatedly slammed into the mat, knife wrested from your fingers. It was fun. And, it was good for you, you decided, even if you thought his intense insistence was a tad dramatic.
Ghost was a bit dramatic about certain things, you were coming to learn.
This was one of them. You were, you thought with warmth, one of the things he was a bit dramatic about. For whatever reason, you’ve been tucked under his wing, into his shadow.
On the third week of relentlessly brutal training, you arrived at the base gym, empty as it always was, to find him holding a length of rope.
You eyed it warily and shifted from foot to foot, amused despite the discomfort. “What do you imagine is going to happen to me?”
Ghost didn’t answer as you set your bag down and pulled off your sweatshirt. The room was warm, close and humid, the scent of left over dregs of soldiers clogging the room for most of the day. The scent of plastic, lemon disinfectant, and sweat is thick on the air, but when you stepped toward Ghost, his familiar comforting smell of tea and cigarettes washed over you in a vacuous, orbital cloud.
You looked up just as his eyes slid away from you, blond lashes catching the light, skin pink around his eyes. You’d swear it was a blush if you didn’t know better. “Ghost?”
“Better to be prepared, yeah?”
“For what?” All the same, you turned with a sigh.
After a painfully long moment he stepped close and pressed the dark material around your wrists. His body was warm behind yours for that brief moment even without touching you, like the glow of a heat lamp that made the rest of the room feel cold by comparison.
His gloved fingers were carefully delicate against your skin. It sent sparks skittering up your arms. What would his bare skin feel like against yours?
Rough, warm. Safe.
It’s a thought that had curled its roots into your mind the first time you fell to the mat together and you felt his weight against yours, brief and heavy, but comforting somehow. It wasn’t supposed to be, he was playing predator, it should have been panic inducing.
Stupid, silly.
If your most recently failed date had shown you anything, it was that feeling anything for anyone that had seen your scars was a failing venture. And Ghost had seen more of them now, than most. Maybe you should start wearing a mask.
“What’s the goal today?” You asked, feeling a little like you couldn’t breathe. His warmth and scent and the weight of his presence was overwhelming in a way that made you want to curl into him, gladly suffocate.
“Same as always,” he answered drolly. “To get away.”
“Hm. I keep thinking you’ll challenge me,” you teased.
“Not a game, bird.”
“But what am I meant to do? I can’t fight.”
“Get out of the bindings. Get to the door.”
“Is that it?”
You would swear he’s smirking. “Simple enough, aye.”
It wasn’t easy.
For the third time in a row, you landed hard on your back.
Ghost’s weight was heavy against you, before it lifted away. Your sweaty skin stuck to his hoodie.
Your breath comes in hard, deep pants. Your wrists ached and panic had begun to set in.
“On your feet.”
Clumsy as a newborn deer, you stumble to your feet. You had to be faster than him, incapacitate him. “You won’t be getting away from me,” he’d said once, “so you’d have a chance.” It was a compliment; one that said you were doing good.
It didn’t feel like you were doing good now.
By the sixth time, you felt raw and helpless, wrists caught at an odd angle beneath you. It wasn’t fun; it wasn’t sparring. You couldn’t manage to wriggle out of the bindings and you were useless at anything he’d taught you without your hands.
“You’re hurting me,” you gasped.
He released you immediately and the pressure in your wrists eased. It hadn’t been pain, not really, just panic, just exhaustion.
But you knew instantly that you’d made a mistake, that he would not take it that way.
“Shit.”
.
.
.
The window was open and you were not in your office.
Simon paused in the doorway, noted your bag on the chair in the corner, the patchwork quilt trailing over the arm of your desk chair and spilling onto the floor. His was gone from the chair. You’d been wandering off without him recently.
He turned and marched back down the hall. An administrative assistant pointed toward the external door. “Getting sun, she said,” he said. “Sir.”
Ghost nodded and shouldered the door open. He found you behind the barracks, lying on his blanket, staring up at a patchy sky, slices of blue peaking from between low hanging gray clouds.
When his shadow fell over you, you opened your eyes and squinted up at him. “Ghost, you’re blocking my sun.”
“Not much sun to speak of.” You grimace and frown at the sky. “You weren’t in your office.”
“Sorry, should have left a note.” You patted the blanket next to you. “Sit.”
Simon sat on the concrete steps. “Where’s your lunch?”
“Forgot it.”
Worry sprouted, blossomed along his veins, ubiquitous as the pain that accompanies it.
“Canteen,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“It’s okay—“
“Wasn’t a suggestion.”
“You’re bossy,” you said but didn’t move, chin tilted up, eyes flitting shut again. “I’ll have a big dinner.”
He sighed and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, content enough to wait you out and smoke. The clouds continued to gather, putting your beloved sun to rest for the moment. The air grew steadily thicker with humidity.
“Gonna rain,” he commented.
You ignored him, eyes squinching closed harder, like you could will the sun to return. He watched you, made himself look at the bruises on your wrists and forearms, he knew there were matching ones on your ribs. They were harmless, just the usual consequence of sparring, but the ones around your wrists—that’s a mistake he won’t soon forget.
When a fat raindrop landed on your arm, you sat up with a grumble. “Ready now?” He asked, pulling down his mask again.
“I can see you won’t leave it alone.”
“Affirmative,” he said.
You rolled your eyes and started to get to your feet, pausing when he held out a hand to you. You stared for a beat too long before gripping his hand in yours.
Even through his gloves, it was like being electrocuted.
You released his hand as soon as you could, eyes skirting his. “Your lead,” you said. “I haven’t had the privilege.”
He grunted, followed you closely back inside.
As Simon’s misfortune would have it, Johnny was still in the canteen.
He lasered in on the pair of you immediately, a grin growing across his face as he approached. “Ach so this is where you’ve been off to LT.”
Ghost herded you into line, a raucous group of new recruits halting their conversation to ogle you before their eyes flicked to his and away, conversation continued at a more subdued level. He shifted closer, between you and them, though you didn’t seem to notice.
“Haven’t been off anywhere,” he grumbled.
“Who’s this then?”
You smiled and offered your hand and name. “It’s nice to see that Ghost has bad manners with everyone.”
“John MacTavish,” Soap said, all charm as he practically bowed. “Call me Soap.”
“Soap,” you giggled. “I’ve seen you in my reports.”
Soap’s gaze flicked over your face, sharp eyes making the quick calculations that had made Simon hope he wouldn’t be in the canteen. “Are they yours?”
“Sergeant—,” Ghost said sharply, a warning in his voice.
But you only laughed and touched your cheek with obvious pride as the line moved up. “No. None of them belong to me. They’re nice though, right?”
Simon went very still, swore his heart rate slowed. You held out your arm, showed off a sliver flash.
“Very becoming, lass.”
You smiled again and gestured to your own chin, the side of your head. “Yours?”
“Aye, all mine.”
“Ah, luck.”
“Lucky indeed.”
Johnny’s eyes shifted to Simon’s, brows raised, with a look that said he knew. Simon glanced away, gritting his jaw so hard it ached.
“Am I going to get food poisoning from this?” You asked as a tray was handed over, eying warily what was ostensibly mash, peas and carrots, mystery meat.
“Probably not,” Johnny answered cheerfully. “Been mostly fine.”
“Yes, but I think you military people might have tolerance to low levels of poison.”
“That’s for sure, bonnie.”
“Bonnie,” you said, giggling. “Are you calling me pretty?”
Soap covered his heart, balancing his tray with one hand. “You wound me. Simon only keeps us good looking bastards around.”
“Simon,” you said softly, glancing up at him. “I didn’t think anyone knew your name.”
Ghost didn’t answer for a moment, glaring daggers into the side of Johnny’s head, ignoring the way his heart was clenched so tight it felt like it was in a vise. Simon, his name on your tongue—
“It’s need to know,” he snapped.
Your expression folded and you glanced away. “Right, of course. Sorry.”
Simon clenched his jaw so hard it clicked as Johnny shot him a look. “This way, lass,” he said, leading you toward a spot in the corner of the mess.
“Oh,” you said weakly, “That’s all right. You don’t have to—”
Ghost couldn’t help but notice the anxious look you threw him, the thin line your voice had transformed into.
Soap wasn’t listening, already talking your ear off, pulling out a chair for you. You smiled and sat and Simon was left to silently watch it unfold.
.
.
.
“Fuckin’ hell,” Soap muttered when they’d safely returned you to your office where a contingent of lesser analysts awaited you. The corridor leading away from the now closed door seemed impossibly long. “D’ya know how many people would kill to meet their soulmate? You’ve got yours right under your fuckin’ nose and haven’t even told her yer name!”
“She doesn’t need to know.”
“Yer name?”
Ghost leveled Soap with a stare.
Soap gaped at him. “Steamin’ Jesus. You aren’t plannin’ to tell the lass at all?”
“Stay out of it, MacTavish.”
Johnny followed him down the hall, outside into a bleak, gray drizzle. “You know it can kill you?” Simon kept walking. “Simon.”
He stopped, glanced at Soap with a warning in his eyes. “Do ya?”
“It won’t.”
Johnny continues anyway, urgently. “There’s a pain, they say, under the ribs when—“
“Stay out of it, Sergeant,” Ghost growled, that very pain growing as it always did as he moved further and further away from you. “It’s nothing.”
“It‘ll corrode,” Johnny said to his retreating back. “She’ll feel it eventually.”
Simon ignored him.
But he wondered as he walked away, if he died, if you’d feel the corded snap of his life floating away from yours.
Somehow, being that sort of ghost, didn’t sit well with him.
.
.
.
Johnny, predictably, did not stay out of it.
He regularly and reliably began to show up in your office. More than once, he looped Garrick into accompanying him. Ghost had watched as the same realization Soap had snapped into place on Gaz’s face, and knew it was only a matter of time before Price knew too.
Luckily, they were the only three on the entire base that could make the connection, that had seen his face, so at least it was done with. None of them said anything to him about it, but there were a lot of worried glances being exchanged.
Ghost felt the edge of his sanity begin to wear thin the longer it went on, not that there was much left of it in the first place.
The disruption, the infiltration, the distraction grated until his insides felt raw with irritation. He hadn’t wanted anyone else to know, not because he was ashamed, but because you were his, and you didn’t deserve to be burdened by that. He would shoulder that horrible belonging for both of you.
But the way you’d tenderly touched your cheek remains burned into his memory. The soft look in your eye. The gentle way you and Soap always spoke of soulmates whenever they came up, reverent and tender.
You enjoyed their company, Johnny and Kyle, and seemed all the better for it. It was clear immediately how much you liked both of them. How much you desperately needed friends.
Ghost was loath to admit there was a seed of jealousy wriggling in his belly. The easy way you got on with them proof enough that a wire had gotten crossed somewhere, that you were more cursed by him than anchored by.
Then, the gifts left at the edge of your desk began to extend to the lads and not just himself, and it felt vaguely as though he were losing a vital piece of himself to it.
Then, you stopped coming to the gym. You were gone, office dark, before he could walk you to your car. You went on another date.
He didn’t know what to do with any of it.
One Tuesday at the end of July you were in your office, but Soap was there before him, tearing into a packet of crisps, lounging in Simon’s chair, patchwork quilt flattened beneath him in a heap. It was hot, and humid, a fan in the corner working overtime, window propped open.
You were happily listening to Johnny explain the ins and outs of football. A match was playing on your computer screen which you’d turned back so both of you could see.
Your eyes found Simon’s when he paused in the doorway, and you waved him inside, an unsure smile twitching at the corners of your mouth. “Hi, Ghost. Do you keep up with soccer, too?”
A groan from Soap. “Bloody Americans.”
“Sorry, sorry. You keep up with footie too, mate?”
“Horrendous,” Ghost said flatly.
Your smile faltered then brightened again. It didn’t quite reach your eyes. “You should hear my Scottish accent. Soap said I offended every one of his ancestors.”
“Aye and you did lass,” he said solemnly. “Yeh—”
“Sergeant,” Ghost interrupted loudly. “Aren’t you due for PT?”
“Ach, right,” he muttered, getting to his feet, “Thanks for the reminder, LT.”
“Oh, Soap,” you said, “Hold on.” You rummaged beneath your desk for a long moment, then passed him a brown paper bag full of cookies. “Your favorite, as requested.”
“You sweet on me or something, bon?”
You rolled your eyes and said, “Out of my office.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ghost took Soap’s vacated seat, watched you avoid looking at him as you moved things needlessly around your desk, twisted your monitor back around and muted the match.
The silence was suffocating.
“All right?”
You froze, then shuffled the papers together and slid them to a corner of your desk. “I wanted to apologize.” Your voice hitched a little.
He blinked, taken aback. He didn’t like that you could surprise him. “For what?”
You bit your lip, fidgeted again. “Your name, I guess. You didn’t want me to know.” Your mouth twisted to the side. “And your team bothering you here—”
“You’re apologizing for Soap?”
Your brow furrowed. “Well I encourage it—”
“No.”
“No?” You shook your head, “and that day in the gym—” You opened and closed your hands anxiously. “I think I upset you.”
He stared across the room, toward your big, sunny window, all those little potted plants that have flourished through the summer months. Your bug lamp seemed to droop in the heat, sad and watchful. He’d hurt you, and you’d taken the blame. Something horrible lurched in his belly, heavy and unforgiving. “Didn’t. I should have been more careful.”
“Right,” you said carefully. “So if it’s not that, why are you—”
He shrugged, watched one of the emerald leaves sway in the warm breeze. “I like you to myself,” he admitted. “Not the best at sharing.”
“Oh,” you said, voice tender. “Oh.”
“Mm.”
“I’ll make space.”
He didn’t quite understand what you meant by that, but he liked the way it sounded. Space for him.
“You’ll come to the gym later, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He stood, deposited your knife, which he’d snagged early in the morning to clean and sharpen, back onto your desk, along with the new box of tea because he noticed you were out the night before. “And don’t tell bloody Soap.”
“Aye, LT.”
He chuckled. “Take care of that.”
“Teach me how?”
He nodded.
“Thanks for the tea. I used the last bag yesterday afternoon.”
“I know.”
Your smile was soft, your fingers touched his. He breathed a little easier.
“‘Course you do.”
.
.
.
Simon couldn’t stop thinking about pain.
His body functioned at a constant low level of pain, had for years. Maybe it had his whole life, so he tended not to notice it. But the ache you caused had only seemed to grow over time, tendrils spreading to the furthest reaches of his body, the tips of his fingers, the backs of his knees, places he didn’t think could hold pain.
The intensity increased too, until he could no longer ignore it. It was like a whine, like a child begging to be seen to.
He kept thinking of your voice, too, dreaming of it. You’re hurting me. Panic ridden, laced with fear.
You said he didn’t, after, but he didn’t relish the thought of the possibility. Accidentally hurting you, hurting you on purpose. He thought of his mother, doing her best with a brutal man. He was afraid of unknowingly stepping into a cycle, to find himself standing above you one day, drunk, mean, angry.
You’re hurting me.
It echoed like a heartbeat. Inevitable.
You might collect his scars, but he would not add to them with his own hands. He’d rather die; he’d rather be burned alive; he’d rather crawl out of a grave a hundred times over.
He was afraid of it. Afraid that every terrible aspect of this bond between you could only bring you pain.
His father loomed in the recesses of his mind, all the violent men he’d ever known, every bloody fist. Simon’s scalp ached, the memories swam behind his eyes. Long nights, wild animals, dead girls.
There was one person who had a preoccupation with soulmates who was likely to know, who badgered him regularly about eroding the bond, about bond tears and pain. Simon could know, once and for all, if he was the cause of the indirect pain, at least. His own imposed on you, pushed into your skin like a punishment. He could cross that off his long list of sins.
Johnny, when Simon finally tracked him down, was sat in the armory cleaning a rifle. He watched over his Sergeant's shoulder for a long moment. The methodical movement soothed him, brought his heartrate down a little.
“Johnny.”
Soap jumped and glanced around. “Spooky fucker. Should put a bell on ye—”
“Does she feel it?”
“What—”
He exhaled long and slow. “My pain. If I’m shot tomorrow, would she feel it?”
“No, the lass doesn’t feel it.” Soap turned his wrist, pointed to a scar that was lighter than some of the others, a pale tracery that slipped from the inside of his elbow to mid forearm. “Not mine. Watched it fade in one mornin’. Didn’t feel a thing.”
Ghost looks at the scar, and Soap lets him. “Tha’ why you haven’t—”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Deserves better.”
Johnny nodded, continued cleaning the rifle. “Thing is, LT. She doesn’t. That’s the point.”
Well, at least he only had to worry about becoming his father.
Fucking perfect.
.
.
.
Two months deployment.
The pain in Simon’s chest was agonizing, a constant fire. He couldn’t sleep, pain meds did nothing for it.
He could only wait it out, wait until he was back on base and hope you were in your office, that the solace of your presence in that warm yellow light would be waiting for him. The pain would recede. He needed a plan, though. Clearly it wasn’t fucking viable to just let it go on. It was too distracting and only getting worse. It was no longer something he could ignore.
Maybe, he didn’t really want to.
Maybe, Johnny was right.
He half convinced himself that the lancing ache was so bad because you’d been posted somewhere else the last two months and you were further away than ever. Your office would be empty. This was just an agony he would have to learn to live with.
Finally, though, they were going home. Intel secure. One last building to sweep. Empty. A loaded silence that made the back of his neck prickle.
Not as empty as they thought.
Soap steps quickly into the last room ahead of him, gaze sweeping from one side to another before he lowered his weapon and stepped forward.
Ghost followed quickly, lowered his gun when he saw what Johnny had. Civilians. One curled around the other, sobbing so hard she made no noise.
When she lifted her face, Simon sucked in a startled breath. She looked like you, only without his scars. There was a mark slowly bleeding into place on her temple, one that matched the gunshot wound of the woman beneath her.
The wail that suddenly pierced the air was distraught, horrible, a lurch and a bang.
Soap was there, kneeling, looking for wounds that Ghost knew didn’t exist. Horror froze him for the second time in his life, your face swimming behind his eyes.
“I thought you said they couldn’t feel it,” he barked.
“What?”
“Soulmates.”
Soap looked at the pair with fresh eyes.
“They can’t, LT,” Soap said without glancing at him. “It’s no’ that. It’s just—”
Grief. The unbearable snapping of a fated cord. The tether in his own chest pulsed, ached. He thought of it breaking cleanly in two, as though it never existed, your light snuffed out, leaving him in total darkness again.
It wasn’t pain she was feeling, it was the absence.
“Ghost,” Johnny said sharply and Simon finally snapped out of it, went to his side.
It wasn't worth it, he thought. None of this could be fucking worth it. He was left with the sinking sense that all he could ever do was hurt you.
All the same, he felt an urgency to go home. To return to your side. To feel your pulse under his fingers.
Just to be sure.
It took them a long time to get her to leave the body.
.
.
.
Task Force 141 was deployed for nearly two months.
September and October passed slowly, in starts and fits that seemed to drag.
You developed a pain in your side, a stitch from taking it too hard in the gym you assumed. But nothing seemed to help it. The pang became a prick became a small misery that the base medical staff couldn’t pinpoint the origins of.
You missed Ghost, and Kyle and Johnny, tolerated the terrible tea your coworkers made for you, went on another series of failed dates, and finally became friends with your cross-hall apartment neighbor. Months of baked goods and hellos finally coming to fruition. Pieces of a life were falling together.
Finally, they were coming home. You left your offer that night with the assurance that they were uninjured, that Ghost, and likely Soap, would be in your office by noon the next day.
But Simon still managed to reappear as he always did, silently and without warning. A shadow crossed your back as you were locking your office near midnight, a hand grazed your back. You followed the series of steps you’d been taught months ago. Foot back, elbow out, knife in hand, open, turn—
Your wrist was caught by the flat of his palm, fingers of the opposite hand yanking it from your grip.
You blinked and breathed out heavily, relieved. The tight tenderness in your side leveled off for the first time in a month. “Ghost,” you murmured, lowering your now empty hand, “You aren’t supposed to be back until tomorrow morning.”
“That disappointed to see me?”
No. Never. But he was still in full tactical gear. The skin around his eyes was still layered with eyeblack, exhaustion and an acid tension rolling off him in a thick wave. His gaze was heavy, but steady, assessing you in turn. He smelled like diesel and cigarettes and gun powder. You lifted your chin. “Surprised to see you. Glad to see you.”
He only flipped the knife around and held it out to you. “Nice work.”
You smiled as you took the blade and stored it again. “You’re making me paranoid, I think.”
“Good. Paranoid keeps you alive.”
His eyes flicked over you, looking long and hard, though for what you couldn’t be sure. He stepped closer, until you were forced back against the door. He towered over you, corralled you back against the cool wood. Soft, dark eyes like wells of ink in the shadow of the hood pulled over his head, searched long enough that you began to worry something was wrong.
You reached out and rested your hand on his forearm. His body was so taut you could feel the tremble of exhausted, overwrought muscle. “Ghost,” you said gently, carefully. “Are you okay?”
He inhaled deeply, so hard and fast it sounded pained.
He looked at you again, eyes sliding over you slowly, like he was orienting himself, finding steady ground on which to stand.
“Why don’t you cover ‘em?”
Your belly clenched. “Cover what?” you queried, silently begging him not to ask that question.
“Scars.”
You went still, looking down at your skin. You had rolled up your sleeves earlier in the evening when furious typing had required it. They glinted silver in the low light of the hall. Pretty and delicate as dragon scales.
It wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before.
Still, you fought the urge to cross your arms. You hated when he stared at them.
“Why would I?” You rubbed your wrist. “I don’t want to. They belong to my soulmate.”
He glanced away from you, his jaw tight beneath the mask. “You actually believe in that shite?” His voice was harsh, aggressive in a way he had never spoken to you before. “It’s a bloody children’s tale.”
You bristled, felt something hard and mean well behind your breastbone in a tight knot. The pain that had been kicking you in the ribs lately reared again, made you wince and cover your side. “Well,” you snapped, gesturing to yourself with your free hand, “these aren’t mine, so I guess I have to.”
He scoffed and you felt your heart lurch, hurt settling in your gut, twisting an invisible knife that much deeper. You tried to side step him but he didn’t move, a terrible, solid wall of muscle and—anger? Irritation? You couldn’t tell. “What the fuck do you care? Maybe you’re ashamed of yours,” you said roughly, “But not all of us are.”
His brows furrowed and he shook his head again. “Oh, come off it.”
“What?”
“You’re tellin’ me that if you came face to face with the bastard that did this to you, you wouldn’t hate him?”
Indignation burned a righteous path up your throat. “You don’t get to do that,” you said lowly.
“You didn’t deny it,” he said. “You would.”
“No,” you interrupted vehemently, swallowing around the word like gravel in your throat. “No, of course I wouldn’t. It wasn’t done to me, it—”
But Simon was determined, his mind set.
“He hurt you, changed the course of your bloody life, whether you want to admit it or not. You’ll hate him for it, love.”
“For something he went through?” You asked incredulously, defensively. “Do you know how scared I was?”
Ghost’s eyes went blank, his stare suddenly flat and far away. His gaze drifted from yours, the weight of flinty amber lifted. “Of him,” he said viciously, like something terrible he’d always known had been confirmed.
“No,” you snarled again, not sure why Ghost was fighting you, not sure why he cared about your scars suddenly. “You aren’t listening. For him.” Your ribs ached, your breath came in short bursts. He was too close, the clashing sensations of safety and agitation calcifying the tension between you into a solid, immutable wall.
You inhaled shakily through the sudden distress. Your lungs hitched and spasmed before you could suck in a proper breath, feeling faint, glad for the wall behind you.
He blinked, looked down at you again. “Hey—”
“I was so scared I would lose him before I ever got to meet him. Ever since I was a kid I’ve had scars. Cigarette burns and scratches, bite marks. I used to hope he was older than me, so it wouldn’t have meant that he—so that he wouldn’t have been—” Agitation rises like a tide, all the nights you’d sat awake watching scars bleed into your skin. Your parents had been unable to look at you in the morning, wondering what the future held for you. What kind of person that child would grow up to be.
The same fear Simon seemed to be holding onto so tightly.
You stumbled over his concern, something prickling at the base of your neck.
“Once,” you continued shakily, “they just kept showing up, day after day, for months. I didn’t know what was happening and there was nothing I could do. I thought he was going to die and I couldn’t help him. I was so worried and all I could do was watch.”
You met his eyes, saw something so raw and wretched there that you flinched back, closed your eyes, breath caught.
You aren’t sure when you transitioned to using he instead of they.
It suddenly didn’t feel like you were talking about someone you hadn’t met yet.
You thought of how strangely intense he was about you. How you had felt so strongly about him immediately. How the only bit of his skin you’ve ever seen has been around his eyes; the delicate veins at his wrists.
You thought of him making you tea and teaching you to defend yourself. You thought of him walking you to your car and pulling you into sunny days. You thought of all the cups of coffee and boxes of tea, the gentle way he handled the blanket you made him from cheap cotton like it was spun gold.
You thought of Johnny asking after your scars the first time you met him. How not long after you’d been personally introduced to the rest of the 141 for no discernable reason. How they checked on you. How they were probably the only people that knew what Ghost’s face looked like.
“No,” you whispered, pieces of a terrible puzzle sliding together in your mind.
You opened your eyes.
“Ghost?” you asked softly, tentatively lifting your hand.
He jerked back. “Don’t do that,” he warned.
You stepped closer, knowing you were playing with fire, that he might burn you, lash out like a dog with its leg in a trap.
But if he was yours—
If he was yours, you would not be the one to inflict more hurt on him.
He did not want this, he did not want you, that much was clear.
You closed your hand and let it fall, pushed your fist against your heart instead. “I see you,” you said gently. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“You don’t understand,” he rasped.
“You survived.” You backed away. “That’s enough. To know you’re okay.”
The empty spot in your chest ached, seemed to grow tendrils that wrapped around your heart. A bond so close and not latched. Because you haven’t seen him. He has to let you in.
“When you’re ready. If you’re ever ready. I'm here.”
He finally returned his gaze to yours.
“Did it hurt?”
“Did what hurt?” You tilted your head but he didn’t answer, just stared at you with big, moon dark eyes, brows pinched inward, eyeblack creating a tiny white line there. “Oh, you wouldn’t know, I guess.” You shook your head, “No I was just scared. Just worried. It didn’t hurt. You’ve never hurt me.”
He moved so quickly and silently that you jumped when his hand curled around your wrist. Light enough that you could pull away if you wanted.
“You don’t have to. You never have to. I don’t want to take anything else from you.”
Ghost hesitated, his chest rising and falling quickly. “Do I have any of yours?” The question was quiet, almost reverent.
You nodded, “‘Course you do. I fell out of a tree when I was a kid. Gave me a nasty scar on the back of my elbow. I landed on a rock.”
His eyes flicked away, like he was trying to imagine it. You twisted your arm, showed him the thick line of scar there, totally different than the lighter version of his on your skin. “See? You’ll have that one in the same spot but lighter. Maybe not even visible, since you’re so pale.”
Your breath caught when he stepped closer, the pain in your chest was so intense it made breathing difficult.
“It’s not fair to you.”
“What isn’t?”
“To bloody leave it. Hurts, yeah?”
You didn’t admit to the spasming in your chest; it wouldn’t help anything. “When have you ever cared about fair?”
He made a pained sound. “Don’t.”
“I’m okay. I don’t need anything from you. I don’t want anything from you.”
“You’re supposed to need things from me.”
He peeled his gloves off, tucked them into his back pocket. The hall was still and silent aside from your combined ragged breathing. It sounded like you’d been running a marathon. “Ghost—”
“Simon,” he said. “Please, call me Simon.”
You closed your eyes, felt his hands graze your collarbone, your throat, before anchoring on your jaw, tilting your face up. “Look at me, sweet’eart.”
“I can’t.” Your voice trembled, tears clogging your throat.
“Can.”
Very gently, he leaned down and pushed his forehead against yours.
You shuddered and swallowed and stepped closer. Simon curled his arms around you, pulled you into his chest. He was so broad and tall, you felt swaddled against him, warm and secure. His scent wrapped around you like ribbons holding you together. “No point dragging it on, yeah? No point you being in pain.”
“How long?”
“The whole time,” he admitted after a moment. His voice rumbled against your cheek. It felt like home. “First time I saw you.”
“You have had this pain for almost a whole year—”
“Not your fault,” he interrupted, one massive hand sliding down your spine. “Not your fault.”
You huffed, hooked your fingers beneath his tac vest. “I’m sorry anyway.” You pulled back, felt his arms tighten around you for a moment. He didn’t want to let you go. “Is there anything you need to take care of? Reports or debriefing or something?”
“No.”
“Would. . . would you want to come to mine—”
He reached under your arm and plucked your keys out of the lock before you could finish, guiding you down the hall, his hand never leaving your skin.
You had never seen Simon outside the base, you realized suddenly, and everything felt vastly more fragile. It also felt as though that hollow pulse in your chest would tear if you were asked to walk away at that moment, something real and physical would tear and drop out of you, an irreparable part of your soul.
You weren’t sure how you drove home, Ghost huge in your passenger seat, your hands shaking each time he shifted his grip on you.
In your apartment, you hesitated, not sure where you belonged in your own space anymore. Simon looked strange in your tiny living room, among soft blankets and years of collected books and knicknacks. An all consuming shadow. You wondered if this would end like all those dates, just another failure, another loss.
When you started to step toward the lamp, Simon’s fingers curled around your wrist to keep you by his side. “No.”
“Just turning on the lamp.”
He released you.
As you stepped away, a hollow pulse in your chest retched with pain that made you gasp and clutch the edge of the sofa. It felt real, like something was breaking, jagged edges clawing at the inside of your skin. You wondered what Ghost’s self imposed distance might have done to the bond. There were stories, albeit few, of corrosion. The bond literally rusting out, slowly poisoning the soulmate and their pair.
“Come ‘ere,” he muttered. “Sit down.”
When his palm cupped your elbow, the world became softer. Like purr instead of a shriek. He guided you onto the sofa.
Your hands shook when he released you, making quick work of the lamp. The room flooded with soft yellow light. He glanced around. Art on the walls, forest green rug over hardwood floor, molding you had painted a delicate gold. You felt embarrassed of it all suddenly.
“God,” you muttered. He didn’t seem to feel the pain at all, which made your chest ache in a different way and guilt pool heavily between your bones for it. You didn’t want him to be in pain, but you felt as though you were breathing water, choking on your own lungs. “How have you dealt with this?”
“Worse now,” he said, though you felt it was his version of a kind untruth.
He sat next to you, reached for you, then faltered, unsure. You closed the space, folded your fingers between his. The scars made a fucked up little mirror when you looked down at your hands. They matched exactly. “I’m sorry.”
Simon didn’t answer, but stayed close to you, letting you hold his hand. Even the smallest amount of space between you seemed to burn, a brazier that flared hot and demanded attention. But it was better; just having his bare hand in yours helped.
“Nothin’ t’be sorry for.” He said after a few minutes of uneven breathing, eyes trained on your hands, thumb running over the back of your fingers.
“You don’t want me.”
It wasn’t a question.
He glanced up, something razor sharp in his eyes. You flinched a little, but his hand tightened on yours.
“You don’t have to—We don’t have to bond,” you tripped over the last word. “It’s okay.”
“Obviously it’s not, bird.”
Your heart sunk and you glanced away. A one in eight billion chance was sitting under your nose for months, and he wanted nothing to do with you. He was being forced into it.
“I’m sorry,” you murmured again. “Ghost, I’m—”
“Simon,” he corrected.
“Simon,” you echoed.
He curled his hands around your wrists, lifted your palms to the bottom of his mask. He let your hands settle at the base of his throat, eyes never leaving yours. “I didn’t want you,” he said plainly. “I never wanted you to know.”
You swallowed and nodded. “I’m s—”
“No.”
You closed your mouth with a click of your jaw. You don’t expect a speech and he doesn’t give you one. “You deserve better,” he said. “But I’m all you get.”
His knee touched yours. Your faces were tilted together, so close that the only thing you could see were the soft depths of his eyes reflecting the gold light.
It didn’t feel close enough.
You wished it were all different.
That he didn’t feel forced, that you were what he wanted.
“I deserve you. Isn’t that the point?”
He watched you for a long moment, an unreadable expression on his face, then nodded.
“Go on, then.”
Your throat felt tight as you tugged the mask upwards, heart lurching when you recognized the same scar on your throat on his. You pushed the fabric over his chin and mouth, up until you could pull it over his head.
You looked at him, the same scar over his mouth, along his cheek, the bridge of his nose was nicked, the outline of burn scarring crossed the edge of his jaw and neck. When you looked past that, you saw him. Crooked nose, thick, furrowed brows, dark eyes you’d loved for a long time cast darker by the black around them, light eyelashes and hair, longer on top and curling.
Something seemed to. . .snap then. A warmth broke between you, filled that awful, dark, pained well in your chest. It hurt, but the pain was brief, like stitches done by a seasoned medic.
Breathing was easier. You could feel the pulse of him without the threat of imminent pain. It was a warm, comforting, safe thing in your lungs. You inhaled, attempted to stand, to give him a bit of space. “Should be able to separate now. Shall we test it—”
You didn’t get a chance to move away, tugged suddenly from your seat and into his lap. You fell heavily against his chest, wrapped tightly in his arms, foreheads slanted together.
“No,” he said, sounding, for the first time since you’ve known him, breathless. “No.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Good.”
“Can I touch you?”
“Can do anything you like to me, bird.”
You stroked the side of his throat, felt him shiver. “Well, I won’t. Not anything.”
He made a content noise of agreement.
You touched his jaw, his cheek, the tail of his brow, the faded check through it that you’d never noticed matched your own. His arms tightened around you in increments until the pressure forced you to take shallow breaths. “You’re beautiful.”
“Lookin’ in a mirror, are you?”
“Sort of,” you answered. “A little.”
His hands shifted, anchored on your hips, and pushed you back a little.
Disappointment that it was over so soon pinched at your throat but you backed off, attempting to slide from his lap. His hand caught at your hip. “Stop trying to bloody move.”
“What—”
He was only taking off the vest, which probably should have been left at the base. It dropped heavily to the floor as he pulled you against his chest. It was warmer, softer like that, thick muscle coiled beneath your cheek when you rested it against his shoulder, heartbeat hard against yours.
“No more pain?”
“None.”
“Good.”
You pushed your face against his throat, felt him tense and then uncoil. One large hand cupped the back of your neck, holding you there. You brushed your lips against his pulse point, felt a scarred flutter against your mouth, a muted grunt.
“You’re all I want,” you admitted quietly. “I think I knew. I think everyone knew. I’m sorry,” you finally said, “that I’m not who you need.”
His hand squeezes your neck and then he’s pushing you down against the cushions, pressing one massive thigh between your legs, hauling you closer like it could never be close enough. The space between your bodies would always be too large, because you couldn’t climb into his chest, nest among his veins.
It would have to do then, his hand tilting your jaw up, his eyes searching yours as you part your lips.
“You are, sweet’eart,” he said simply, mouth brushing yours before he kissed you properly.
He tasted of black tea; his eyeblack rubs off on your temples.
Already, he was leaving pieces of himself behind with you to mark safe.
“Simon,” you murmured against his mouth. Just to say it, just to be rewarded with a shudder.
The kiss slipped into something more desperate, your hands felt the skin of his back, your own scar on his elbow, and you thought, maybe, you could become what he needed.
if you made it this far thank you for reading! I'd love to know what you thought!
The first time Jason cried about marking you wasn’t even the moment he did it. It was three weeks before anything actually happened.
It hit him hard and ugly in the middle of an otherwise routine evening. Rain dripped softly onto the apartment windows, the city humming with distant sirens and muffled tires screeching over wet pavement, the heater inside hummed like it was trying to compete. And you were curled up half asleep against his side, safe and warm wrapped up in a nest of blankets and pillows, smelling like sweetened milk and the heavy softness of sleep herself.
Your breaths were slow, your shoulders relaxed, turned into him like you trusted him with everything you had and everything you were, your hand had slid up under his shirt at some point, palm pressed against his stomach.
And Jason’s head was against the back of the couch, staring up at the ceiling with his jaw clenched so tight it was starting to ache, yet he didn’t let himself relax it.
Because instinct was getting stronger, louder. Day by day, it sunk deeper into him, this need to make you his. Not in the ugly way possessiveness was, not to own you exactly. It was something older than any language that could describe it. It was something deeper than just an ache, or want or desire. It was a type of biological, animal instinct that required permanence so violently it nearly bordered on grief.
And marking was permanent.
That was the problem, wasn’t it ? Not sex, or heat. Not even instinct alone was the big issue here. It was the permanence, what was needed for it.
Jason’s mouth goes dry every time he thinks about it, because he knows the only way to mark someone is to hurt them badly enough their body remembers it forever. And the thought of causing you any pain makes something within him tear apart.
You shift against him, your cheek rubbing against the side of his chest, pulling him back to the living room so hard it makes his head spin. Your scent blooms in your sleep, fills his world warmer and stronger —honeyed and that impossible softness that smells like dusk filtering through thin curtains, dripping in lines onto wrinkled blankets.
He feels his throat tighten. He adores you so deeply it frightens him.
“You okay ?” You murmur at his side, he didn’t even know you were awake.
Still, he answers too quickly; “Yeah.”
A lie. One so obvious it hangs in the room like a heavy smoke. You lift your head, hair mussed up, eyes heavy in between asleep and awake. Soft in the way he knows is dangerous for him, in the way he knows he can’t look too long without his ribs beginning to hurt.
“Jay …”
And that’s all it takes for his throat to squeeze and his face to twist before he can do anything about it.
“Oh, baby …”
Jason turned his head towards the back of the couch like hiding will somehow save him from all of this. His chest already feels like he’s being stepped on. He presses the heels of his palms against his eyes so hard stars start dancing behind his eyelids, he keeps them there even when it starts to burn.
“I can’t do it,” He confessed, “I can’t hurt you like that.”
The words left him shredded, the thing that’s been poisoning him for weeks now.
“Jason …” You spoke and looked at him so gentle it undid him further.
“Don’t look at me like that” He didn’t actually need to see it to know which look you had in your eyes.
Tears were already spilling under his palms. Humiliating. He hated crying. Hated it more than most things, it made him feel like he’s been flayed open. But this feels worse than usual, because instinct keeps tearing at him, night after night, demanding that he do this. Demanding that he keeps you with him in every permanent way possible.
But all he can think about each time is how he would have to hurt you first.
“It’s supposed to hurt” Jason’s voice dropped to something raw and small enough to feel unreal coming from someone his size
You didn’t say anything, because there was no point in trying to deny it, there was no point in trying to lie to him. Marking is a fundamentally painful process, everyone knows that. Very rarely can the body remember something otherwise.
“You’d cry,” He continued. “You’d be cryin’ and I’d be the reason.”
His body tenses, his shoulders shake once, again.
Your chest aches at the sound he makes next, something choked and crushed beneath the guilt of something he hadn’t even done yet.
“I want it so bad,” He admitted, “That’s the fucked up part. I need it, and I hate that I need it.”
You reached towards him gently, like reaching for something wounded.
“Y’know what I think.” You whispered,
Jason shook his head hard, eyes still squeezed shut.
“I think … That if there was anyone in the world that I would trust with something painful, it would be you.”
“That doesn’t make it better”
“No,” You agreed. “But it makes it safe.”
And that hurt more than it soothed.
Because Jason Todd has spent most of his life terrified that he’ll become something cruel, or even worse, that cruelty isn’t something he learned, but something he stepped into the world carrying. Violence has followed him for as long as he could remember, his own and that of those around him. It was stitched into him in the womb, followed him into the world, laid with him in his grave, and clawed its way back out with him.
He knows how easily hurt can become instinct, and instinct to become justification. He knows how men can convince themselves that wanting something badly enough gives them the right to take it so easily it's like second nature.
So he built the self he gave you around gentleness instead. He centered it around restraint, asking, stopping, around making himself safe when every ugly part of him insists that it should be impossible for him.
And now instinct asks him to sink his teeth into the person he loves most in the world hard enough to mark her forever. And it feels like the world is coming to an end.
You pull his hands away from his face, he doesn’t resist. His cheeks are wet, and he looks furious about it.
“Oh, sweetheart,” You breathe
Jason lets out a laugh, small and shaky, but surprisingly real. “Don’t call me ‘sweetheart’ right now, baby. I’m tryin’ real hard to have some dignity here.”
That pulled a small smile from you as you thumbs swiped gently under his eyes “You’re the only person I’d ever want, you know that ?”
“For what ?”
“For this. All of it.”
For devotion, for promises and permanence carved into flesh.
. . .
The night it finally happens, Jason nearly changes his mind six separate times.
The room smelled so strong of both of you it was overwhelming. Like cedar, and rainwater, and old books, and sweet soap, and the sharp tinge of salt from tears building before anything had even started.
And Jason is shaking, not violently. But his fingers are trembling as he slides his hands up and down your sides, his breaths are unsteady, his heart is so loud it’s ringing in his ears.
But the instinct is everywhere, think in the air, alive under his skin. Building itself into something alive, making a home in his chest like it’s another heartbeat. There couldn’t be anymore waiting.
Yet he still hesitated.
“Baby,” he whispered for what may be the hundredth time in the past thirty minutes, his forehead pressed against yours “Are you sure ?”
You nod without hesitation, despite the tears already gathering along your lashes, making them clump together into pretty little sections. And somehow that made it feel worse for him, because you trusted him so much, completely, enough to let him do this, enough to want him to do this.
His scent had gone storm thick with anxiety and distress hours ago. Panic twisting with black coffee and love and fear all mixing together in a knot he couldn’t get undone.
“Jay, please” Your words quivered as you reached up to hold his face.
You could feel how careful he was being, each of his movements strained and hesitated, his body hovered over yours, scared to do anything too much, scared to make this more than it already was.
“You can stop it,” He told you, the words spilling out faster than his brain could really put them together “Any time, sweetheart, okay ? Tell me. Tell me to stop, and it stops. Okay ? I mean it.”
“I know.”
“And don’t try and tough it out for me. I know you’ll try. Don’t do that.”
You tried to laugh at that, at how well he knew, instead your bottom lip wobbled.
“Oh, honey”
He kissed you everywhere. Your forehead, your cheeks, your temples, the corners of your damp eyes. His lips brushed against your earlobes, and your collarbone.
“I’m sorry,” He said against your skin. You were so warm, sometimes he wished he was able to push into your skin, make himself small enough to make a home in your ribs, with your heart and your soul as his neighbors. That desire used to unsettle him, now it lived so deep in his bones it fed off the marrow inside them.
“You haven’t done anything.”
“I know —” He was sure he had more to say, but his voice cracked so bad he didn’t trust himself to keep going.
He lowered his face slowly towards that sensitive, tender spot where your neck curved into your shoulder. His nose had just barely brushed against your skin when your body tensed to brace yourself.
Jason made the softest, most heartbreaking noise you’d ever heard from another living creature.
“Fuck,” he rasped, voice rough around the edges “Baby, baby, I know. I know.”
“I want it,” You promised quickly, because he looked like he was close to stopping entirely. “Jay, I want you to.”
He was crying again. You had seen Jason cry before, of course you had. But it had never been like this. You’d seen it quiet, and rarely, never with his entire heart so exposed.
“You’re so soft,” He whispered, his hands running across your ribs feeling across the bare skin of your chest and stomach and hips. “God, sweetheart. You’re so damn soft and I —”
He couldn’t finish, instead he pressed his face into the side of your neck, breathing in so hard it felt desperate. It was desperate.
Warm, milky, and sleepy sweetness. Home.
You felt his mouth part, heavy breath ghosting over your skin. And then pain, sharp and sudden enough it pulled a sob from your throat immediately.
“Oh God, I know. I know, baby.” He choked out, “Oh, my baby. I know. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I know, baby, I know.”
His arms wrapped around you tighter, pulling you closer when restraint lost to instinct just enough for him to finish the mark properly, sinking his teeth deeper into you.
You cried harder too, because it hurt. And he cried because he knew.
Your fingers curled into the hair at the back of his head, tugging at it though not really to pull him away from you, just to hold.
“Jay –”
“I know, honey. I know, I know.” He kept repeating it, over and over between kisses and apologies, and his teeth sinking deeper. “Almost done. I’m almost done, baby. Almost done, sweet girl. I’m sorry. Fuck, baby. I’m so sorry –”
And then all of a sudden, there was warmth, bond settling in all at once, replacing the sharp pain with a dull aching throb. You felt it flood you, filling every sense you had. Not just physical, it ran much deeper than that. It moved through the both of you, like heartbeats and souls clicking into place.
Jason went completely still for a moment that felt longer than it actually was.
“Oh,” he whispered.
His scent changed instantly, the sour scent he’d had for weeks as denied instincts built and built and built finally shifted to something kinder, fuller. Relief, and love wrapped around him, and you, and the room, and the little world that was just the two of you. It was nearly overwhelming the amount of love that rushed over him all at once.
Jason pulled back, just enough to look at you, and tears that had managed to sooth themselves started all over again once he saw your tears.
“I hurt you …” He sounded miserable
You shook your head, too quick despite the way you were still sniffling with cheeks still damp from crying “It’s okay –”
His hands cupped your face so carefully it cut off anything else you might have said, “Don’t do that, baby. Don’t pretend it didn’t hurt just for me.”
He pressed a shaky kiss against your forehead before lowering himself back down to the mark. The soothing followed; soft, slow passes of his tongue over the mark. So careful and deeply instinctive it didn’t have a chance to feel strange. The ache lessened with each pass, easing slowly under the warm repetitive attention.
“There we go,” He whispered between tiny kisses and soothing licks. “There you are. Good girl. My sweet girl. My baby. I got you. It’s okay.”
Your fingers ran through his hair as he fussed over the mark like he could push the pain back out of it from sheer will and love alone. Every few seconds he’d pause to breathe and apologize again.
“I’m sorry.”
A soft kiss
“So sorry, baby girl”
Another slow swipe of his tongue across your skin
“You did do good for me”
A shaky breath
“God, I love you.”
By the time he had finished you were both exhausted, faces damp, and emotionally spent. Jason curled himself around you, like he couldn’t get himself close enough. His nose pressed into your hair, brushing against the crown of your head. One arm locked around your middle, the other hand resting carefully near the mark, fingertips just barely grazing the edges of it, trying his best to not look at the way the skin was still red and angry.
He still felt guilty, but he didn’t hate it anymore, and under the ache of tears and exhaustion he could smell the way you changed, something even sweeter now, warm and alive. Permanent now, in a way that couldn't be anything other than his.
Obsessed with the idea of dad!Simon. He’s so obviously a girl dad.
But then one day they get called at school bc the wee girl hit a boy, because he said her dad looks weird and scary, he’s a monster. While Simón could see it coming one day or another — and let’s not lie to each other, so did his partner —, he didn’t react except for a simple « good. ». His partner, on the other hand, was fuming, because what do you mean you are talking to us about our girl defending herself from the mean things other kids are saying and defending her father, have you talked about the other kid’s parents? Have you talked to the kid himself about not saying things like this ? About not judging people and the whole « dont’ judge a book by its cover » type of shit ? About how they will not be punishing their daughter for dealing with what the school was incapable of fixing, her own way. Just because he had scars on his face did not mean he’s weird, he is a veteran for fuck sake, he has seen things you wouldn’t dare to imagine, and you let children make fun of that and people’s appearance ?
Simon stays silent. He’s parted between shame of being defended by his partner + little girl and not saying a word (he is a big military man after all) and pride of seeing his partner so adamant to defend him and his baby whenever it was necessary.
Simon Riley may be a big man, many compared him to a guard dog. Big and imposing and mean and willing to bare his teeth to anyone that he deemed a threat. And while that may be true while at work it was not true at home.
In his home, Simon Riley was more like a cat.
Stereotypically he was more like a boy cat with a girl owner. Simon Riley's owner was his girlfriend, girlfriend was certainly a weak title but he wasn't sure what else to do. Although he has never tried he imagines that marrying a man who is technically dead wouldn't be easy. It didn't matter anyways for all the reasons he could think of you were his wife.
Perhaps that's why he felt so comfortable, to act like this. Simon had come home two days ago and in that time he hadnt done much of anything. He often felt like this after missions in an empty limbo where for the first time in weeks he didn't have to be aware or alert and he didn't have to think about much at all.
Much like a cat Simon Riley slept a lot, he would deny it and pretend but you both knew deep down. Simon just felt so safe at home with his woman! He didn’t have anything he needed to do and could close his eyes and place his head down on your lap and suddenly he was sleeping. It was very common for you to come down downstairs after being upstairs for 5 minutes to find him awkwardly curled into the edge of the couch, his head lent onto the couch arm, his hands clasped under his chin.
He was so fucking cute.
His sleeping habits were certainly unpredictable at best and you had once consulted a sleep tracker to find out that he had slept 15 hours in one day. That has annoyed and endeared you.
Simon also ate like a cat, scoffing down what was put down in front of him and never making any effort to source food of his own. You could also compare his complaining about being hungry with the meows of a cat looking for a victim to provide another meal. He would eat a hearty meal and then find a nice sunny spot in the arm chair to fall asleep.
Perhaps the most “boy cat” thing about Simon was the clinging, it wasn’t just the clinging the holding onto your arm or needing to nuzzle into your neck as you cooked or watched tv together. It was following you around. Every time you turned around he was right there, peaking over your shoulder as you put on a load of laundry or holding onto the back of your sleeve as you applied skincare. He always wanted to be near you. You had once found him in the same place you had left him after going out for a morning tea, sitting on the shoe rack by the door he was dwarfing it in size almost so much that it looked a little comical.
He wouldn't have any of your teasing, instead leaning his head against your stomach.
He almost felt he could purr when you scratched the back of his neck lightly, pouting down at him.
“My sweet little kitten waiting for me”.
Simon dug his head further into your stomach, attempting to hide the blush creeping up his cheeks.
CW: fake marriage, undercover as a couple, masquerade ball, mutual pining, sexual tension, secret identities, violence, blood/injury, guns, knives, suggestive banter, explicit sexual content, semi-public kissing/touching
Summary: Red Hood and Moxie know each other well enough to fight back-to-back, but not well enough to know each other’s real names. When a criminal masquerade admits only married pairs, Jason asks her to play his wife for the night, and the line between cover and confession gets dangerously thin.
Author’s Note: this is my first reader-insert fic!! i know it's not really full on smut but i did my best...
Red Hood called you at 2:17 in the morning and opened with, “I need you to marry me.”
You stared at the comm where it sat on the edge of your bathroom sink, its tiny red light blinking up at you with the smug patience of a device that knew it had just ruined your night.
There was blood on your knuckles, rainwater dripping from the ends of your hair, and half a strip of medical tape stuck to your wrist because you had been in the middle of wrapping a split across your ribs when his voice came through. Gotham was still rattling against your window in a hard gray sheet. Somewhere below, a siren cut through the Narrows and vanished toward the river.
You picked up the comm carefully. “Say that again, but slower and less like a hostage negotiation.”
A pause. Then Hood, sounding annoyed in a way that meant he had probably practiced the line and hated that you had ruined it. “I have an infiltration job.”
“You need me to marry you for an infiltration job.”
“Fake marry me.”
“Oh, good. For a second there, I thought you were being impulsive.”
“Can you be serious for ten seconds?”
“I can. I just usually charge extra.”
A low sound came through the comm, almost a laugh, before he caught it and killed it. Red Hood had a habit of doing that, letting amusement slip halfway into his voice before remembering he was supposed to be terrifying. The criminals of Gotham still believed in the terrifying part. You believed in it too, mostly. You had seen him put a man’s head through drywall for threatening a kid. You had seen him walk through gunfire like pain was an inconvenience rather than a warning. Red Hood was not soft.
But he was funny when he forgot not to be.
That had been one of your first problems with him.
The second had been the way he trusted you at his back.
You leaned against the sink and pressed a clean cloth to your ribs. “What’s the job?”
“Masquerade tomorrow night. Private estate outside Bristol. Guest list is a who’s who of Gotham’s worst-dressed with too much money. Arms brokers, corrupt judges, traffickers, one Intergang accountant who’s either brave or stupid, and a host who calls himself Mr. Argent because apparently Gotham finally ran out of normal criminal names.”
“Argent,” you repeated. “Subtle.”
“He’s auctioning off a ledger.”
“You called me at two in the morning because of bookkeeping?”
“It’s a buyer list. Names, routes, shell companies, offshore accounts. Enough to gut a weapons pipeline running through the East End, the Narrows, and half of Blüdhaven.” Hood’s voice changed there, the humor thinning out into something harder. “Kids have been turning up with military-grade rifles in their backpacks because these assholes are selling like they’re moving party favors. I want the ledger.”
That sobered you fast.
You pulled the cloth away from your side and looked down. The bleeding had slowed. Good enough.
“What’s the catch?” you asked.
“No solo guests.”
You blinked. “Sorry?”
“The invitation admits married pairs only. Spouses. No exceptions. They verify rings at the door, cross-check the aliases, then keep paired guests together for most of the night. Argent’s paranoid about undercover cops and lone operatives. Thinks people are less likely to make a move if their partner can be used against them.”
“That is either deeply stupid or unfortunately insightful.”
“Both.”
“And you thought of me.”
The pause on the other end went a fraction too long.
You knew Red Hood in pieces, because that was how everyone knew each other in Gotham. You knew the red helmet, the leather jacket, the guns he carried like extensions of his hands. You knew the brutal efficiency of him in a fight, the dry commentary over comms, the way he always put himself between civilians and bullets before anyone could accuse him of caring. You knew Arsenal liked him enough to insult him creatively, Nightwing worried about him with the exhausted fondness of an older brother, and Oracle treated him like a migraine she would still guide home through a burning building.
You did not know his name.
He did not know yours.
That had always been safer.
“Yeah,” Hood said finally. “I thought of you.”
Your fingers tightened around the comm.
Outside the bathroom, your apartment was dark except for the neon wash bleeding through the blinds. Moxie had been a joke once. A stupid little word spat by men who thought it made you sound small, cute, harmless. You had been new to Gotham then, fresh from Star City with one duffel bag, two batons, seven knives, and Roy Harper’s warning that Gotham had teeth. You had kept the name because it annoyed people. Then, you had made it expensive to laugh at.
Red Hood had never laughed.
The first time you worked together, he had found you pinned behind a half-toppled bar with four rounds left, a dislocated shoulder, and a mouth still running badly enough to make three smugglers hesitate before rushing you. He had dropped through the skylight like divine punishment with a gun in each hand and said, “You always this chatty when you’re bleeding?”
You had said, “Only when I’m bored.”
He had trusted you after that. Slowly. In the grudging, suspicious way Gotham vigilantes trusted anyone, but it had counted. You had traded intel, patched wounds, covered escapes, and spent too many dawns sitting on rooftops while the city turned bruised and gold beneath you. Friendship had crept in under the armor. Attraction had followed like a bad idea wearing boots.
Neither of you had said anything.
“So,” you said, because your silence had begun to feel too revealing, “you need a wife.”
“I need a partner.”
“But the invitation says married pairs.”
“Yes.”
“Which makes me your wife.”
“Fake wife.”
“Still hearing wife.”
“Moxie.”
You smiled despite yourself. He only used that tone when he was trying not to react, which made it one of your favorites. “What, no other options? Arsenal busy?”
“He offered.”
“He offered to be your wife?”
“He offered to wear white and make it everyone’s problem.”
You laughed, and this time Hood did not quite hide the answering warmth in his voice.
“Nightwing?” you asked.
“Would spend the whole night making heart eyes at the security cameras so Oracle could laugh at me.”
“She’ll laugh at you anyway.”
“Probably.”
“You could ask one of the Bats.”
“I’m asking you.”
The room seemed to quiet around that.
You looked at yourself in the mirror. The mask was off, leaving only the tired face beneath it. A fading bruise shadowed your jaw. Rain had flattened your hair against your cheek. You did not look like anyone’s wife. You looked like someone who had kicked a gunman down a stairwell forty minutes earlier and still had glass dust in one sleeve.
“You trust me that much?” you asked, softer than you meant to.
Hood did not answer immediately. When he did, the modulator could not quite strip the honesty out of his voice.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
The stupid thing was, you trusted him too.
“All right,” you said. “Send me the details.”
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow at nine.”
You straightened. “Absolutely not.”
“It’s a married couple event. We have to arrive together.”
“You can meet me two blocks out like a normal person.”
“A normal fake husband.”
“You’re enjoying this too much already.”
“You’re the one who keeps saying husband.”
“You started this call with a proposal.”
“It was a mission brief.”
“It was a cry for help.”
This time, he did laugh, low and brief and rough around the edges. It slipped under your skin before you could stop it.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Nine. Formal. Mask. Minimal weapons.”
“Define minimal.”
“Enough to keep you alive. Not enough to start a war before dessert.”
“You take all the romance out of organized crime.”
“Wear something you can run in.”
“Wear something you can bleed on.”
“Always do.”
The line clicked off.
You stood there for a moment with the comm in your palm and rain tapping against the glass. Then you looked down at your half-bandaged ribs and sighed.
“Fake married,” you told your reflection.
By the next night, you had decided that if Gotham criminals insisted on being dramatic, you were at least going to make them regret inviting you to be attractive.
The dress was black because subtlety had its limits. It skimmed close where it needed to, moved where it had to, and hid more than one blade in the places people politely pretended not to look. The slit up one side gave your thigh holster room. The structured bodice concealed flexible armor. Your shoes had been modified by a woman in Blüdhaven who believed all formalwear should survive a rooftop chase and at least one attempted kidnapping.
Your mask was matte black, simple and sharp, covering enough of your face to preserve the fiction without interfering with your sightlines. It lacked the tactical comfort of your usual mask. It also made you feel less like Moxie and more like someone who had been invited into a room specifically designed to test whether she could lie prettily while armed.
You arrived two blocks from the estate at 8:56.
Red Hood was already there. He stood beside a sleek black car under the cover of an old stone archway, rain misting silver around him. He was not wearing the helmet. That was the first problem. The second was the suit.
You had seen Red Hood in body armor, leather, Kevlar, blood, soot, and once an ugly green hoodie he had stolen from a safehouse after taking a knife to the shoulder. You had never seen him in a black suit tailored so cleanly that it looked as if it had been built around the breadth of him. His shirt was dark red, open at the throat instead of strangled by a tie, and his masquerade mask covered the upper half of his face in black and oxblood leather. A white streak cut through his dark hair, which had been pushed back like he had fought it into submission and lost only once.
His mouth was visible.
That was unfair.
You stopped under the archway.
He looked up from adjusting his cuff and went still.
The rain filled the silence between you.
You lifted a brow behind your mask. “Problem?”
“No,” he said.
His voice was not modulated tonight. It was lower than you expected, rougher, human in a way that made something in your stomach tighten. You knew Red Hood’s voice through static and armor. You knew the shape of his threats, the cadence of his sarcasm, the way he said your name when he was warning you not to do something dangerous you were absolutely about to do.
This was different.
This was close enough to touch.
“You look…” He stopped, jaw working once. “You clean up nice, Mox.”
The nickname landed differently without the helmet.
You gave him a slow look from shoes to shoulders to mouth, because if he was going to make you feel off-balance, he could suffer too.
“You look expensive,” you said.
“Emergency tailoring.”
“Obviously.”
His mouth twitched. “That obvious?”
“You’re wearing a suit that actually fits, Hood. Either someone threatened you, or you threatened them first.”
“Little of both.”
“That sounds more believable than it should.”
His mouth curved. “You ready?”
“For the crime gala or the fake marriage?”
“Yes.”
You stepped closer, close enough to smell rain, leather, and something faintly smoky beneath his cologne. “Rules?”
He opened the car door but did not move out of your way. “We stay together. We get in, find the ledger, copy it if we can, and steal it if we have to. Argent’s people are running heat sensors at the door and wand checks inside, so anything metal better be hidden well.”
“It is.”
His eyes flicked down for half a second before he caught himself.
You smiled. “Professional, Hood.”
“You brought it up.”
“Are you going to be weird all night?”
“Probably.”
“At least you’re honest.”
Something shifted in his expression. The teasing stayed, but a different tension moved beneath it.
“Speaking of.” He reached into his jacket.
You tensed on instinct before you saw the small velvet box in his hand.
He noticed. Of course he noticed. Red Hood noticed everything, which was one of the most annoying things about having a crush on him.
“Relax,” he said. “If I were going to shoot you, I wouldn’t be standing out in the open like this.”
“You got a velvet ring box.”
“It’s part of the cover kit, Mox.”
“You have a cover kit with rings?”
“I have a lot of things.”
“That answer raises more questions than it resolves.”
He opened the box.
Inside were two rings. His was plain and dark, brushed black metal with a thin line of red through the center. Yours was simpler than you expected, a narrow gold band set with a small dark stone that caught the low light like it had a secret. It was not flashy enough to be ridiculous. It was not cheap enough to be meaningless.
For a mission prop, it looked dangerously thoughtful.
Your mouth went dry.
“Hood,” you said slowly.
“They verify at the door,” he said. “Needed to look real.”
“You bought rings.”
“I bought a cover.”
“You bought rings, Hood.”
His jaw shifted. “They verify at the door.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
He took the smaller ring from the box. His hand was bare, no gloves, and the sight of it did something stupid to your pulse. Broad fingers, scarred knuckles, a pale line across the back of one hand that disappeared under his cuff. You had seen those hands reload guns, set bones, pull you out of an exploding warehouse by the back of your armor. You had not imagined one holding a wedding ring.
That was a lie.
You would never admit to imagining it.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
You should have made a joke. You usually had one ready, sharp and easy and useful for putting distance between yourself and anything that looked too much like vulnerability. But his voice had gone quiet, and the rain had softened the edges of the city, and there was no helmet between you tonight.
You gave him your hand.
He slid the ring onto your finger.
It fit.
You looked down at it.
Hood held your hand a second longer than necessary. His thumb brushed the base of your finger, barely there, and the carefulness of it landed worse than any joke he could have made.
“How’d you know my size?” you asked.
“I’m observant.”
“That’s a creepy answer.”
“In Gotham, paying attention is the difference between getting home and getting buried.”
The joke caught in your throat before it could fully form, because there was nothing theatrical in his voice when he said it.
“Fair enough.”
You took his ring from the box before he could close it, because letting him have the upper hand for too long was bad for your health. His eyes narrowed slightly, but he gave you his hand.
His ring slid over his knuckle with a little resistance. You felt the scars there. You felt him watching you.
“There,” you said, because your voice needed somewhere to go. “Tragically wed.”
He flexed his hand once, looking at the ring as if it had personally betrayed him. “For the mission.”
“Obviously.”
“Nothing else.”
“Never even crossed my mind.”
The lie sat between you, wearing formalwear.
“Names?” you asked.
“Anders,” he said. “Daniel and Elise.”
“Elise?”
“You hate it?”
“I sound like I own silk robes and poison my husbands.”
“Useful energy for tonight.”
“How long have we been married?”
“Three years.”
“Too long. I would’ve killed you by then.”
“Two years.”
“Better.”
“We met in Star City. You hated me.”
“That part’s true enough.”
“Got married in Atlantic City after a job went sideways.”
You stared at him. “That is the least believable thing you’ve said tonight.”
“It’s memorable.”
“It’s tacky.”
“It’s criminal.”
“It’s grounds for divorce.”
His mouth curved. “Then sell it, Mrs. Anders.”
He opened the car door wider. “After you, darling.”
You almost tripped on your own dress.
He caught your elbow immediately, steadying you with infuriating ease.
You looked up at him. “Don’t call me that.”
His thumb rested against the inside of your arm. “Noted.”
“You’re going to call me that again, aren’t you?”
Every guest wore a mask.
It made the whole thing feel less like a party and more like a confession waiting to happen.
Hood stepped out first and came around to your side before the valet could reach you. He offered his hand with the smoothness of a man who had absolutely been taught manners at some point and had chosen violence anyway.
You took it.
His ring flashed dark against his hand.
“Smile,” he murmured.
“I am smiling.”
“That’s your I’m-going-to-bite-someone smile.”
“It’s versatile.”
His hand settled at the small of your back.
The contact was light. Polite, even. It still burned through the dress like he had pressed his palm to bare skin. You hated him a little for being able to do that. You hated yourself more for leaning into it just enough that his fingers flexed.
At the door, a woman in silver looked over your invitation with the blank expression of someone paid well enough not to blink at murderers.
“Mr. and Mrs. Anders,” she said.
Hood smiled. It was small, controlled, and completely fraudulent. “That’s us.”
Mrs. Anders. You were going to murder him before midnight.
The woman glanced at your rings. Then at your faces. Then at the security guard beside her, who lifted a scanner.
“Hands,” he said.
Hood went first. Calm. Unbothered. The scanner passed over his sleeves, chest, waist, and legs. It did not beep, which meant either he had actually obeyed the minimal-weapons rule or he had spent the afternoon sourcing enough ceramic, polymer, and carbon-fiber problems to make the scanner irrelevant.
When it was your turn, Hood’s hand shifted against your back.
A warning.
You relaxed your shoulders, lifted your arms, and let the guard scan you. He found nothing. He did not know about the ceramic blade along your thigh, the garrote sewn into your hem, the lockpicks disguised as hairpins, or the tiny flash drive tucked beneath the dark stone of your ring.
Oracle would have been proud.
The woman in silver gave you both a final look. “Enjoy the evening.”
“We intend to,” Hood said.
You waited until you were inside, past the first curtain of security and beneath a ceiling painted with golden saints, before you muttered, “Mr. and Mrs. Anders?”
“You don’t like it?”
“I sound like I run a suspiciously profitable antique store.”
“You do have the vibe.”
“I’m divorcing you.”
“We’ve been married for fifteen minutes.”
“Annulment, then.”
His hand moved slightly at your back, fingers pressing once as a masked couple passed too close on your left. You caught the movement of the man’s hand toward his jacket and shifted before Hood had to pull you, putting yourself just out of reach while looking like you had only turned to admire a vase.
Hood’s mouth twitched.
“Nice,” he murmured.
“I know.”
The ballroom was a glittering fever dream.
Chandeliers spilled gold across polished floors. A string quartet played something elegant and mournful in the corner. The guests drifted in pairs, all silk, velvet, diamonds, and concealed cruelty. Masks transformed familiar monsters into myth. You recognized a judge who had buried evidence in three trafficking cases, a shipping magnate whose warehouses had burned twice under suspicious circumstances, one of Penguin’s accountants, and a woman from Blüdhaven who had once tried to stab Roy Harper with an oyster knife.
Above it all, on a balcony overlooking the room, stood Mr. Argent.
He wore white. Of course he did. His mask was silver, shaped like a fox’s face, and his hair was slicked back so severely it looked lacquered. Two guards flanked him. He lifted a champagne flute as the room applauded, and you felt Hood go still beside you.
“That him?” you murmured.
“Yeah.”
“Punchable.”
“Very.”
“Later?”
“If you behave.”
“I never promised that.”
“No,” Hood said, looking down at you with an expression you did not know how to read. “You didn’t.”
For the next hour, you were married.
It was alarming how well you both lied.
Hood kept you close, his hand at your waist or your back or curled around your fingers whenever someone looked too long. You let yourself be guided without seeming guided, answered questions with a smile, and invented a marriage with him in pieces. You had met in Star City, according to him. Blüdhaven, according to you. You handled private acquisitions. He handled security consulting. You had been married for two years, unless someone asked Hood, in which case it became three because apparently your fake husband believed in committing to details without warning you first. You disliked his driving. He admired your temper. You preferred clean exits, and he preferred making sure no one followed. Somehow, that was the most believable part.
Every time he called you his wife, your body reacted before your brain could remind it to be professional.
“My wife has better instincts than I do,” he told a broker with a scar cutting through one eyebrow.
“That must be difficult for you,” the broker said.
“You have no idea,” you replied.
Hood’s fingers tightened on your hip.
The broker laughed like he thought you were charming.
Hood leaned close to your ear as the man turned away. “Careful.”
“You brought me because I’m charming.”
“I brought you because you’re dangerous.”
“You say the sweetest things.”
“I could say sweeter.”
Your breath caught.
He did not move away.
The room kept spinning around you, music rising and falling, glass chiming against glass. Hood’s mouth hovered close enough to your ear that you felt each word more than you heard it.
“For the cover,” he added.
You turned your face slightly toward his. “Coward.”
His gaze dropped to your mouth.
The moment stretched thin.
Then a bell chimed from the center of the room, and Mr. Argent descended the stairs with his hands spread as if he were welcoming guests to a wedding rather than a criminal auction.
“Friends,” he said, voice carrying. “Partners. Devoted halves of dangerous wholes. Welcome.”
You felt Hood’s irritation through the line of his body.
Argent spoke for several minutes, all polished charm and predator’s teeth. He praised loyalty. He praised discretion. He praised the beauty of masks, of chosen names, of the sacred privacy between spouses. It was all ridiculous and unpleasantly effective. This crowd liked being told their secrets were elegant rather than filthy.
The auction would begin at midnight.
Until then, there would be dancing.
“Of course there will,” you said under your breath.
Hood looked down at you. “You dance?”
“I fight people on rooftops in steel-toed boots. What do you think?”
“I think that wasn’t a no.”
“It should have been.”
The quartet shifted into a waltz.
Couples moved toward the center of the floor.
Argent watched from the stairs.
Hood held out his hand.
You stared at it. “You’re kidding.”
“He’s watching.”
“Let him.”
“Sweetheart.”
There was the mission voice again. The one that made you want to argue and obey at the same time, which was probably why you usually chose to argue.
You placed your hand in his. “If you step on my dress, I’m leaving you for Nightwing.”
“Like hell you are.”
“He has better posture.”
“He has worse taste.”
“He still claims you, so clearly.”
Hood pulled you into the dance before you could look too pleased with yourself.
You had expected competence. Red Hood was good at nearly everything physical, which was obnoxious but useful. You had not expected grace. He moved like he fought, controlled and deliberate, except here the violence had been translated into something almost beautiful. His hand settled at your waist, the other holding yours. He led without forcing, gave you space when you needed it, adjusted to your rhythm so quickly you almost forgot to be surprised.
Almost.
“Where the hell did you learn to dance?” you asked.
“Crime Alley community center.”
You looked up sharply.
His mouth curved. “You should see your face.”
“I am going to widow myself.”
“You ask a lot of questions for a woman with at least six hidden weapons at a no-weapons gala.”
“Seven.”
“Anklet?”
“Hair.”
“Nice.”
“You missed it.”
“Did I?”
His hand shifted at your waist, just enough for his thumb to skim the reinforced seam where one of your hairpins had been before you tucked it into place. Heat shot down your spine.
You narrowed your eyes. “Show-off.”
“Observant,” he corrected.
The dance turned you beneath one chandelier, light sliding across his mask. For a moment, with his face half-hidden and his mouth bare, you felt the strangeness of knowing him and not knowing him. Red Hood had carried you once when smoke inhalation made your knees buckle after a warehouse fire. He had sat beside you on a roof while you stitched his arm and complained about his inability to hold still. He had told you which safehouses had clean water and which clinics would not ask questions. He had never told you his name.
You had never told him yours.
Yet his hand fit at your waist like it had always been meant to find you.
“Why me?” you asked.
His steps did not falter, but his expression changed.
“I told you.”
“You said you trusted me.”
“I do.”
“That’s not all.”
Around you, masked couples turned and glittered. Argent’s people watched from the edges. There were cameras in the chandeliers, guards at each door, predators in every corner, and still the most dangerous thing in the room felt like the pause before Hood answered.
“You don’t flinch,” he said.
You could have made that a joke. You should have.
“I do,” you said. “Just not where people can see.”
His eyes stayed on yours.
You hated the mask for hiding their color from you. You hated it more for making you want to know.
“I know,” he said.
The words were quiet enough that no one else could have heard them. They landed with brutal precision anyway.
The dance ended. Applause rose politely around you.
Hood did not let go.
You did not pull away.
Then Oracle’s voice crackled faintly through the tiny comm hidden in your earring. “Argent’s private office just went active. East wing, second floor. You have maybe ten minutes before the auction staff transfers the ledger downstairs.”
You stepped back first, mostly because someone had to.
Hood’s jaw tightened like he had been pulled out of a thought he did not appreciate. “Copy.”
“And try not to make the cameras work harder than they already are,” Oracle added.
“I make no promises,” you said.
Hood shot you a look.
He joined you inside thirty seconds later.
“Cheekbones?” you whispered as the door clicked shut behind him.
“They were very proud of them.”
“You’re mean when you’re jealous.”
“I wasn’t jealous.”
“They were looking at me.”
“I noticed.”
“That’s jealousy.”
“That’s situational awareness.”
“You’re very committed to being wrong.”
“Part of my charm.”
You grinned and headed for the stairs.
The office was exactly where Oracle said it would be, behind another locked door at the end of a corridor lined with bad portraits of dead men who had probably also committed tax fraud. Hood stood watch while you worked the lock. It took eighteen seconds, which was twelve seconds longer than it should have taken because he stood too close behind you and smelled too good.
“You’re hovering,” you whispered.
“I’m guarding.”
“You’re breathing on my neck.”
“Want me to stop?”
Your pick slipped.
Hood noticed.
You got the door open and shouldered your way inside before he could say anything smug enough to justify stabbing him.
Argent’s office was dark-paneled, overdecorated, and cold. A fire burned low in the hearth, more decorative than useful. The desk was massive. The safe behind the portrait was predictable. The pressure sensor beneath the rug was less predictable, but only because Argent had otherwise shown no taste.
“Left,” Hood said.
“I see it.”
“Camera above the bookcase.”
“I see that too.”
“Drawer’s wired.”
“You know,” you said, crouching beside the safe, “some husbands support their wives in silence.”
“You’d hate that.”
“You’re right. Keep talking.”
The safe took longer. Argent had invested money there, at least. You worked by feel while Hood disabled the camera feed through a device Oracle had given him with a warning not to break it. The room smelled like smoke and old paper. Music drifted faintly from the ballroom below.
When the safe opened, you found the ledger in a black case beside stacks of cash, passports, and a velvet pouch filled with diamonds.
“Bingo,” you said.
Hood came closer. “Can you copy it?”
You opened the case.
Inside was a slim encrypted drive and a paper ledger. Dramatic and paranoid. Gotham criminals really were exhausting.
“Copy the drive, photograph the paper,” you said. “Three minutes.”
“You have two.”
“You always say that.”
“You always take three.”
“And yet you keep asking me places.”
He stood beside you while you worked, close enough that his suit brushed your bare shoulder when he reached past you to shift the desk lamp. The contact made your skin prickle. You ignored it. Then his hand settled briefly over yours to steady the ledger page before it curled.
You stopped.
He stopped too.
For one suspended second, both of you looked at your hands. His ring. Your ring. Inked names of criminals between you.
Then footsteps sounded in the hall.
Hood moved first, crossing to the door with silent speed. He listened, shoulders going tense.
“Two guards,” he mouthed.
You closed the ledger, pocketed the drive, and grabbed the paper book because copying was suddenly less important than leaving.
The office door opened before you reached the safe.
Hood caught the first guard by the wrist and slammed him face-first into the doorframe. You threw the ledger case at the second guard’s throat, followed it with your elbow, and swept his legs when he choked. The fight was fast, ugly, and mostly quiet until the first guard got a hand on the panic button at his belt.
Red light flashed in the corridor.
“Well,” you said, breathing hard. “That’s unfortunate.”
Hood looked at the unconscious guard, then at you. “You said three minutes.”
“You said two. This marriage has communication issues.”
Shouting rose from downstairs.
Oracle’s voice cut in. “Alarm triggered. Multiple hostiles converging on the east wing. Also, Argent just noticed his ledger room is having a moment.”
Hood grabbed your hand. “Not the window.”
You glanced toward the glass. “I wasn’t going to suggest the window.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I was considering all exits.”
“You were thinking the window.”
“Fine. I was thinking the window.”
“Too exposed. Service corridor.”
He pulled the office door open just enough to check the hall, then drew you out after him. The alarm had not yet become a full lockdown, but the estate had shifted around you. Music still drifted from the ballroom, strained and elegant beneath the first signs of panic. Somewhere below, a guard barked orders into a radio. Somewhere closer, expensive shoes moved quickly over the polished floor.
You made it down one hall, then another, before voices rose ahead of you.
Hood stopped so abruptly you nearly collided with his back.
“Storage room?” you whispered.
“Locked.”
“Can you open it?”
“Not before they turn the corner.”
“Then what?”
He looked at you.
You had just enough time to understand before his hand slid to your waist and he walked you backward into the shadowed alcove beside a half-open terrace door. Rain breathed cold against your bare shoulders. His body covered yours, broad enough to block you from the hall, close enough to steal your balance. The ledger pressed between you.
The sensible thing would have been to wait until the footsteps faded completely, then slip away.
The less sensible thing was Hood looking down at your mouth.
“Careful,” you whispered.
His eyes lifted to yours. “With what?”
“You know what.”
“We’re still undercover,” he said.
“You say that like it explains why your hand is on my ass.”
He had the decency to look caught for half a second before the corner of his mouth tilted. “It’s a convincing cover.”
“We’re in the middle of an active alarm.”
“Gotham criminals love drama.”
“You are so full of shit.”
“Yeah,” he said, quieter. “Maybe.”
Then his mouth was on yours.
It was supposed to be a cover. You understood that. You understood it with the part of your brain still tracking footsteps, sightlines, cameras, and the weight of the stolen drive hidden beneath your ring. The guards were coming. You needed a reason to be tucked into a dark corner with his hands on you, and Gotham criminals were much more willing to believe in lust than competence.
Knowing that did nothing to save you.
Hood kissed like he had been waiting for permission and hated himself for needing it. His hand tightened at your waist, the other braced near your head, and when the first guard rounded the corner, you let yourself make a soft, irritated sound against his mouth as if being interrupted were the only crime happening.
“Hey,” the guard snapped.
Hood lifted his head slowly.
You had to give him credit. He looked exactly like a rich, dangerous husband being inconvenienced in the middle of something private.
His mouth was damp. His mask was slightly crooked. His hand tightened at your waist before the guard could decide whether to look embarrassed or afraid, and when his voice came, it was low enough to make the man rethink his life.
“You lost?”
The guard looked like he was seriously considering saying yes. His gaze flicked from Hood’s face to your hand fisted in his lapel, then to the ring on your finger.
“Restricted wing,” he said, but the authority had already leaked out of him.
You smiled from beneath Hood’s shoulder, breathless enough that it was not entirely acting. “We were looking for somewhere quiet.”
“This isn’t—”
“My wife gets bored at parties,” Hood said.
Your nails dug warningly into his jacket.
He did not even flinch.
The second guard muttered something into his radio. The first looked between you again, then made the obvious and incorrect calculation that two half-dressed socialites sneaking away from a masquerade were less urgent than the alarm coming from Argent’s office.
“Return to the ballroom,” he said.
“Eventually,” Hood said.
The guard looked like he wanted to argue. Then Hood smiled.
The guard chose life.
When they disappeared around the corner, neither of you moved.
The sensible thing would have been to break apart immediately and run.
Instead, Hood’s eyes dropped to your mouth.
“Convincing,” you said, but your voice had gone thin.
His thumb moved once against your waist. “Yeah.”
“For the cover?”
“That was the idea.”
“And now?”
His gaze lifted to yours.
The alarm wailed louder somewhere behind you. Your heart was worse.
“Now I’m waiting for you to tell me to back up,” he said.
You should have. The mission was still burning around you. Argent’s men were searching the estate, Oracle was probably developing a stress migraine, and you had a stolen ledger digging into your stomach.
Instead, you caught his lapel and pulled him down again.
The second kiss had no excuse at all.
Hood made a low sound against your mouth and crowded closer, one hand sliding from your waist to your back, the other cupping your jaw with surprising care. He kissed like he did everything else, with focus, hunger, and a barely leashed intensity that made your knees threaten to forget their job. You kissed him back just as hard, biting at his lower lip because you had wanted to know what he would do.
He groaned.
That sound nearly undid you.
“Fuck,” he muttered against your mouth. “You have any idea how long I’ve wanted to do that?”
Your laugh came out uneven. “I was hoping it wasn’t just tonight.”
His forehead touched yours. Rain slid down between you. “Not just tonight.”
The admission settled under your ribs, warm and terrifying.
Then Oracle said, with the precise exhaustion of a woman who regretted every friendship in her life, “I know this is a very meaningful moment for whatever emotionally constipated thing you two have going on, but the armed men are still armed.”
You closed your eyes. “Oracle.”
“East stairwell is blocked. West service corridor is clear for maybe ninety seconds. Also, Hood, if you get lipstick on that suit, Roy is going to know the emergency tailor trip was for a date, and I refuse to moderate that conversation.”
Hood froze.
You pulled back just enough to stare at him.
Roy.
The suit.
Hood’s mouth tightened.
Your brain, traitorous and quick, began putting pieces together. Arsenal’s teasing. Nightwing’s fondness. The way Hood moved through certain rooftops like he knew the Bat-routes and hated that he knew them. The way Roy had texted you earlier that week, complaining that getting his friend Jason into a tailor’s shop had required bribery, threats, and the promise of post-mission chili dogs.
Jason Todd, scowling in Roy’s kitchen three months ago with a beer he barely drank and a book tucked under one arm like a threat. Jason Todd at a crowded charity event Roy had dragged you to, wearing a suit with the stiff irritation of a man who understood formalwear but resented having to surrender to it. Jason Todd, who had once apparently threatened a tailor over sleeve mobility.
Oh.
Oh, no.
“You’re Jason,” you said.
Hood’s eyes narrowed. “We are being hunted.”
“You’re Jason Todd.”
“Moxie.”
“I made fun of your tie at Roy’s birthday.”
“It was an ugly tie.”
“You said you liked my boots.”
“They had knives in them.”
“You noticed?”
“I notice a lot of things.”
You stared at him, outrage and desire tangling so tightly you could barely separate them. “Did you know?”
His expression shifted, something almost helpless moving through it. “Not until tonight.”
“Tonight when?”
“At the door,” he said. “You smiled like you were about to rob the place and insult me for helping.”
“That is not specific. I smile like that often.”
“Yeah,” he said, voice dropping. “That was part of the problem.”
The shouting grew louder.
Oracle cleared her throat over the comm. “The identity crisis is very compelling, but your ninety seconds is down to thirty.”
Jason—because it was Jason, because of course it was Jason—looked down at you, rain bright on his mask and your lipstick smudged at the corner of his mouth.
“We’re finishing this conversation later,” he said.
“You showed up in a custom suit, called me your wife, and let me figure out you were Jason Todd during an active alarm. We’re finishing several conversations later.”
His mouth curved. “Looking forward to it.”
“Thirty seconds,” Oracle warned.
You tightened your grip on his lapel, outrage and desire still tangled somewhere behind your ribs. “Run, husband.”
His grin flashed, sharp and delighted.
You ran.
The next twenty minutes were chaos in formalwear.
You and Jason moved through the service corridors like you’d done it a hundred times before. He covered your left without needing to be asked. You ducked under his arm when he fired over your shoulder. You broke a man’s wrist with one hand and held the ledger against your chest with the other. Jason used a serving tray to knock a guard unconscious, which you appreciated as both violence and commentary.
At one point, you vaulted over a dessert cart, and he caught you by the waist on the other side because the floor was slick with spilled champagne.
“Careful, honey,” he said.
You elbowed him in the ribs.
He laughed as he shot out the lock on a service door behind you. The door swung hard enough to clip one of Argent’s men in the face, which was probably not intentional but still felt like a gift from the universe.
Argent made it as far as the conservatory before his sense of self-preservation failed him. He had two guards, a silver briefcase, and the deeply unfortunate confidence of a man who had never been tackled by Red Hood while wearing formal shoes.
Jason hit him beside the orchid display.
The fountain took both of them.
Water surged over the marble lip. Argent shouted. Jason came up soaked to the chest, one hand locked in the back of Argent’s expensive white jacket and the other already reaching for a zip tie.
You handled the guards.
By the time Nightwing arrived through the shattered glass roof with far too much acrobatic flair, Argent was bound to a marble cherub, Jason was dripping wet in a custom suit, and you were holding the ledger in one hand and one of your broken heels in the other.
Nightwing landed lightly beside you and took in the scene.
Then he looked at Jason.
Then at you.
Then at the rings.
“Oh,” he said, with terrible delight. “This explains so much.”
Jason pointed at him. “Say one word.”
Nightwing’s grin widened. “Mazel tov?”
You covered your mouth with your hand but couldn’t hide your laugh.
Jason looked betrayed. “You too?”
“You’re soaked in fountain water and wearing a wedding ring,” you said. “I’m only human.”
Nightwing pressed a hand to his chest. “I’m honored to have been here for the reception.”
Jason started toward him.
Nightwing wisely flipped backward onto the fountain edge, still grinning. “Oracle says police are six minutes out. Arsenal also says, and I quote, ‘Tell the happy couple I’m claiming visitation rights.’”
“I hate all of you,” Jason said.
“No, you don’t,” you said.
He looked at you.
For a second, the wreckage of the night narrowed to the space between you. Broken glass glittered on the conservatory floor. Rain poured through the ruined ceiling. Your mask was still in place, and so was his, but the fiction was gone. He knew you. You knew him. Not completely, not all at once, but enough to make the wanting feel less like a dangerous mistake and more like a door neither of you had realized was unlocked.
Nightwing’s expression softened, which made you want to throw the broken heel at him.
“I’ll take Argent,” he said. “You two should go before the cops arrive and ask why she has seven knives and a ledger full of people who are going to want her dead by morning.”
“Six knives,” Jason said automatically.
Nightwing stared at him.
You stared at him too.
Jason glanced at you. “You lost one in the east wing.”
“You counted?”
“I’m observant.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Yeah,” he said, and there was something warm under it. “You noticed.”
Nightwing made a sound that was suspiciously close to a laugh. “Go. Both of you. Before I start making a speech.”
“Don’t,” Jason said.
“Oh, I have several prepared.”
Not awkward, exactly. You and Jason had survived too many injuries together for silence to become fragile that easily. But this was different from your usual post-mission quiet. There was no helmet between his voice and your ears. No modulator to make his breathing sound distant. No way to pretend you had not kissed him in a dark alcove, learned his name while being hunted, and liked both too much.
The rings were still on.
You noticed every time his hand moved on the steering wheel.
He noticed you noticing, because of course he did.
“Say it,” he said eventually.
You looked out the rain-streaked window. “I’m deciding which thing.”
“That bad?”
“Oh, there are categories.”
His mouth twitched. The bruise along his jaw had darkened. There was still a faint smear of lipstick near the corner of his mouth, half washed away by rain and fountain water.
You reached over without thinking and rubbed at the mark with your thumb.
Jason went very still.
The car slowed at a red light on an empty street.
Your hand remained against his jaw. The stubble there rasped lightly beneath your thumb. His eyes flicked to yours behind the mask, and the air in the car changed so quickly it felt like a drop.
You withdrew your hand. “Lipstick.”
“Right.”
“Couldn’t let Roy win.”
Jason huffed a laugh, but his fingers tightened on the wheel.
Neither of you said anything for the rest of the block.
When he pulled into the alley two streets from your apartment, the rain had softened to a mist. He parked beneath a fire escape and cut the engine. The sudden quiet felt deliberate. You could hear the ticking of the car cooling, the distant hum of traffic, your own pulse refusing to calm down.
Jason removed his mask first.
You had seen his face before. That was the worst part. You had seen him across Roy’s kitchen, half-lit by the open fridge while he argued about takeout like it was a tactical decision. You had seen him at that charity event, bored and handsome and restless, as if all that polished wealth irritated his skin. You had not known then that he was the man who called you Mox over comms when he was worried. You had not known he was Red Hood.
Now the two versions slid together and made something sharper.
You took off your mask.
Jason stared.
Not like he was surprised, not exactly. More like the last remaining doubt had just been removed, and he had no armor ready for what came after.
“Hi,” you said, because apparently you had lost access to every clever line you had ever had.
His laugh was soft and almost disbelieving. “Hi.”
“That’s it? No dramatic comment?”
“I’m having a moment.”
“Should I wait?”
“Probably.”
You smiled, and his gaze dropped to your mouth again.
The car felt much smaller than it had a minute ago.
“We should talk,” you said.
“Yeah.”
“About identities.”
“Yeah.”
“And boundaries.”
“Definitely.”
“And the fact that you apparently knew my ring size.”
“I guessed.”
“You did not guess.”
“I made an informed estimate.”
“That’s worse.”
He dragged a hand through his damp hair. The ring flashed again, dark metal and red line catching briefly in the low light.
Your smile faded around the edges.
Slowly, you twisted your own ring. It slid halfway up your finger before Jason’s hand closed over yours.
“Don’t,” he said.
The word came out too raw for the joke he clearly meant to attach to it.
You looked down at his hand over yours. “Jason.”
His name felt new in your mouth. His fingers tightened.
“I know it was supposed to be a cover,” he said. “I know. But don’t take it off like it meant nothing.”
Your throat went tight.
There he was. The man beneath the helmet, beneath the suit, beneath all that practiced brutality. Not soft, exactly. Jason Todd would probably never be soft in any simple way. But honest, when cornered. Brave enough to bleed where you could see it, if not quite brave enough to ask.
You turned your hand beneath his, palm to palm.
“It didn’t mean nothing,” you said.
He exhaled as if something in him had braced for impact.
“But,” you continued, “you don’t get to fake marry me, kiss me in a hallway, let me find out you’re Jason Todd, and then look wounded when I try to return the prop.”
“I didn’t look wounded.”
“You looked extremely wounded.”
“I have a bruise.”
“Emotionally.”
He made a face. “That sounds like something Nightwing would say.”
“Nightwing is emotionally literate.”
“Don’t compliment him right now.”
“There’s the jealousy again.”
“Threat assessment.”
“Jason.”
He looked at you then, really looked, and all the banter thinned into something warmer and far more dangerous.
“I wanted it to be you,” he said. “Before I knew. The job, the partner, the whole stupid fake-married thing. I wanted you there. Then you showed up in that dress, and you were you, and I kept thinking…” He stopped, jaw working. “I kept thinking I was screwed either way.”
Your chest ached.
You had imagined, once or twice, what Red Hood might sound like if he ever admitted wanting something. You had imagined arrogance, maybe. A filthy grin. A hand around your wrist in an alley. You had not imagined this careful, frustrated honesty, as if desire were easier for him than hope.
“You could’ve said something,” you said.
“So could you.”
“I was being professional.”
He gave you a look.
“I was being emotionally avoidant,” you corrected.
“Yeah. Same.”
You laughed, quiet and helpless.
Jason’s thumb brushed your ring again. “You can take it off if you want.”
There was the out. Offered plainly, because whatever else he was, Jason had never once tried to trap you. He had asked you to trust him and then given you room to choose.
You looked at the ring. Something bought for cover. Something worn through gunfire. Something neither of you had meant to make real, except maybe that was not true. Maybe the wanting had been real for months, and the ring had only given it a shape.
You slid it off.
Jason’s expression closed before he could stop it.
Then you placed the ring in his palm and folded his fingers around it.
“Next time you want a date, ask me properly.”
He stared at you.
The silence lasted one breath. Two.
Then his mouth curved, slow and stunned and devastating.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t make me regret being romantic.”
“You’re calling that romantic?”
“I’m new at it.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
You rolled your eyes, but your face had gone warm. “You owe me explanations.”
“I know.”
“Real ones.”
“I know.”
“And dinner.”
His smile deepened. “Explanations, then dinner?”
“That order, yes.”
He leaned closer. “What about kissing?”
You pretended to consider it. “Depends.”
“On?”
“How convincing you are.”
Jason reached out and touched your cheek, giving you plenty of time to move away.
You did not.
The second kiss was nothing like the first. There was no alarm, no audience, no cover to excuse it. It was slower, deeper, and somehow more dangerous for being honest. His hand slid into your hair carefully, avoiding the pins he knew were weapons. Your hands found the front of his shirt, still damp from rain and fountain water, and pulled him closer until the console dug into your hip and neither of you cared.
He kissed you until your breath broke.
Then he murmured against your mouth, “Tell me to go, and I will.”
Your fingers tightened in his shirt.
The heat between you flared so fast it almost startled you. It was not as if you had not wanted him all night. You had wanted him at the door, in the ballroom, in the dark alcove, in every narrow space where his hand found your back and his voice dropped low near your ear. But here, with your mask off and his name still warm in your mouth, the wanting became something else.
Still, you pulled back enough to meet his eyes.
“Not because of the mission,” you said.
“No.”
“Not because of the cover.”
“No.”
“Not because we almost died and adrenaline makes people stupid.”
Jason’s thumb swept along your jaw. “I’m always stupid about you.”
That should not have worked on you.
It worked on you.
You kissed him again, harder this time, and felt him smile against your mouth for half a second before hunger took over.
By the time you reached your apartment, you had both forgotten at least three reasonable boundaries about elevators, hands, and the general decency owed to security cameras. Jason kept one hand at your waist, his body angled between you and the hallway, even now, even here, and something in your chest went painfully soft at the thought.
Inside, the door barely closed before he had you against it.
He stopped before pinning you there fully, breath rough, eyes searching your face. “Still good?”
You hooked two fingers into the open collar of his red shirt and pulled him down. “Jason.”
His name was answer enough.
He kissed you as if the sound had snapped the last of his restraint.
The dress that had survived knives, guards, and a criminal masquerade nearly lost its battle against Jason Todd’s patience. He found the hidden zipper with insulting speed, paused only long enough for your nod, and drew it down slowly while his mouth moved along your throat. You shivered when the cool air touched your back. He noticed that too, pressing a kiss beneath your jaw as if the reaction pleased him more than he wanted to admit.
“Still six knives?” he murmured.
“Five,” you said, breath catching when his teeth grazed your skin. “Lost another on the way out.”
“Careless.”
“I was distracted by my husband tackling a man into a fountain.”
His hands stilled at your waist.
You smiled against his cheek. “Too much?”
He lifted his head. His eyes were dark, intent, and stripped of every joke. “Say it again.”
Your pulse jumped.
“My husband,” you said softly.
Jason made a sound that was almost a groan and kissed you hard enough to make your spine arch against the door.
After that, things blurred into touch and heat and the shedding of every last defense. His jacket hit the floor. Your heels followed. The dress slipped down, and Jason followed it with his mouth, kissing each place the night had left a mark as if he could argue with every bruise. You pushed his shirt from his shoulders and found scars beneath, old and new, a map of violence written into him. He went still when your fingers traced one across his chest.
You kissed it.
The breath left him all at once.
“Baby,” he said, rough and warning and wrecked.
The endearment settled low in your stomach.
You looked up at him. “That one for the cover too?”
“No.” His hands tightened at your hips. “That one’s mine.”
You should have had a clever answer.
You had survived worse nights than this. You had talked your way out of locked rooms, gun barrels, bad dates, worse missions, and once, memorably, a hostage situation involving a chandelier and three men who had severely underestimated your patience. You should have had something sharp ready for him.
Instead, you caught Jason by the front of his shirt and pulled him with you toward the bedroom.
His laugh followed you, low and breathless, half disbelief and half surrender. It lasted until you stumbled backward through the doorway, and then he was on you again, one hand braced against the frame, the other sliding firm and careful around your waist.
“Impatient,” he murmured.
“You’re still talking.”
That did it.
Jason kissed you like the words had snapped the last thread of his restraint. He crowded you back with the heat of him, with the rain still clinging to his hair and the city still written in bruises across both of you. His mouth found yours hard enough to steal the next thing you meant to say, and you let him have it. Let him have the sound you made when his hand settled at the small of your back. Let him have the way your fingers dug into his shoulders. Let him have the moment your knees hit the edge of the bed and you pulled him down with you because distance suddenly felt offensive.
He caught himself before his full weight landed on you.
Of course he did.
Jason Todd, who had thrown men through glass tonight, who had tackled Argent into a fountain like subtlety was a language he had never bothered to learn, stopped himself with one hand planted beside your head and the other cupping your hip like you were something breakable.
The tenderness almost annoyed you.
Almost.
“You can touch me,” you said.
His eyes searched yours, dark and intent. “I am touching you.”
“You’re treating me like evidence.”
That surprised a laugh out of him, rough and quiet. “You are evidence.”
“Of what?”
“That I’ve lost my mind.”
You smiled despite yourself, and his gaze dropped to your mouth like the expression had done him personal harm.
Then he lowered himself over you.
The weight of him settled slowly, carefully, and your breath caught before you could stop it. He noticed. Of course he noticed. His attention sharpened immediately, that same devastating focus he brought to fights and locks and exits turning entirely on you. On the way your fingers tightened in his shirt. On the places you tried not to flinch. On the places you leaned closer.
“You okay?” he asked.
You nodded.
“Words.”
The command should have irritated you. Instead, it went through you like heat.
“Yes,” you said. “I’m okay.”
Only then did he kiss you again.
This kiss was different. Slower. Deeper. Less like a collision and more like a decision. His mouth moved over yours with the kind of patience that made your pulse kick in frustration, like he had all night, like there were no sirens waiting in the distance, no bruises blooming beneath your skin, no ledger full of enemies, no blood drying at the edge of his collar.
Just Jason, above you.
Jason, kissing you until your cleverness dissolved completely.
His jacket hit the floor first. You pushed it off his shoulders with more force than grace, and he let you, smiling against your mouth when it caught at one wrist.
“Bossy,” he murmured.
“You like it.”
His smile flashed against your skin. “Yeah.”
The honesty in it landed harder than the teasing had.
You pulled at his shirt next, impatient with buttons, fabric, anything that kept him from you. Jason helped only when your frustration became obvious, sitting back just long enough to drag it over his head. The movement bared him to you by degrees: the broad line of his shoulders, the hard planes of his chest, the scars.
Old ones. New ones. Some pale, some angry, some so familiar-looking in their violence that your throat tightened.
You reached before you thought better of it.
Your fingers traced a line across his chest, not the worst of them, not the newest, just the one closest to your hand. Jason went still.
Immediately, you stopped. “Sorry.”
He looked down at you, and something in his face shifted. Not away from you. Not quite toward you either. Inward, maybe. Somewhere you could not follow unless he let you.
Then his hand covered yours.
“Don’t be.”
His palm was warm over your knuckles. His heartbeat moved beneath your fingertips, steady and alive and too close to miraculous for either of you to joke about.
So you didn’t.
You lifted your head and kissed the scar instead.
Jason’s breath left him all at once.
For a second, he did not move. Then his hand slid into your hair, not pulling, just holding, like he needed somewhere to put the feeling before it broke loose. When you kissed another mark, lower this time, his fingers tightened.
“Careful,” he said, voice uneven.
You looked up at him. “You first.”
Something in his expression cracked open.
Then he was kissing you again, and this time, there was nothing careful about his mouth.
He was careful with the bruises. Less careful with your lips. You liked both. You liked the contradiction of him, the control and the hunger, the way his hands could disarm a man in three seconds but trembled once at the zipper of your dress. You liked the way he paused there, waiting, until you nodded. You liked that he needed the nod. You liked that he looked wrecked by it.
The dress slipped down by inches.
Jason followed it with his mouth.
He kissed your shoulder first, right where the strap had been, then lower, where the night had left a shadow on your skin. Each bruise earned a touch so gentle it made your chest ache. Each scrape got the brush of his lips, the warmth of his breath, the silent fury of a man trying to argue with every mark violence had put on you.
“Jason,” you whispered.
His name changed something.
You felt it in the way he paused against your skin, in the way his hand flexed at your waist, in the half-second when his control faltered before he gathered it again.
“Say that again,” he said.
You should have teased him.
You really should have.
Instead, you said his name again, softer this time, and felt him shudder.
His mouth found your collarbone. Your throat. The place beneath your ear that made your entire body go tense and then loose beneath him. Your hands slid into his hair, and he made a sound against your skin that you felt more than heard.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
Not smoothly. Not like a line. Like the words had been dragged out of him against his will.
It hurt more than it should have.
You pulled him down until his weight settled over you. “You’re overdressed.”
His smile returned, brief and dangerous. “Still bossy.”
“And yet you obey.”
That got you his laugh again, but it broke when your hands moved over him, learning him in return. The strength of him. The scars. The heat. The places where his breath caught. The places where he tried, unsuccessfully, to pretend it had not.
Outside, thunder rolled over the city.
Inside, Jason bent his head and said your name.
Not Moxie.
Your real name.
You barely remembered when he had started saying it like that. Somewhere between the hallway and the bedroom, maybe. It mattered anyway. It mattered when he said it against your mouth. It mattered when he pressed it into your shoulder. It mattered when he used it like a promise, like a confession, like something he had no right to keep and wanted anyway.
Everything after that softened and sharpened at once.
The night had been all alarms and violence, all running feet and broken glass and blood under your nails. This was slower. Hotter. More dangerous in a way you had not prepared for, because Jason did not just want you. He paid attention to you. He watched your face, listened to your breath, checked in with quiet words and searching hands until you were almost angry with how much it undid you.
“You still with me?” he asked.
You touched his jaw. “Yes.”
His eyes closed briefly, like that single word had gone straight through him.
Then he kissed you through the next breath, and the next, and the next, until the storm outside felt distant compared to the one he built under your skin. You answered with your hands, your mouth, the tilt of your hips, the helpless little sounds you would deny later if anyone had the nerve to ask. Jason learned each one with ruthless attention. Worse, he remembered. He returned to every place that made you gasp, every touch that made your fingers twist in the sheets, every kiss that turned his name into something unsteady on your tongue.
By the time he moved over you again, bare skin warm against bare skin, the teasing had burned down to something quieter.
He paused.
Of course he did.
His forearm braced beside your head. His hair fell forward, damp and dark, and his eyes moved over your face as if he were trying to memorize you before the world remembered it had claims on either of you.
You touched his cheek. “Jason.”
“I know,” he said.
But his voice shook slightly.
Your heart turned over.
“Just looking,” he admitted.
The tenderness of it nearly undid you more than the hunger had.
For once, you had no armor left. No mask. No joke sharp enough to save you. There was only the warmth of him, the weight of him, the impossible gentleness in his hands after a night that had given neither of you any reason to be gentle.
You wrapped your legs around his waist and pulled him closer.
“Look later.”
Jason lay beside you with one arm under your head and the other across your waist, holding you like he was trying to pretend he was not holding on. His hair was a mess. There was a scratch near his shoulder that you were fairly certain you had left there. The bruise at his jaw had darkened, and your lipstick was long gone.
Your ring sat on the nightstand beside his.
Two mission props in a pool of warm lamplight.
You reached for his hand beneath the sheets. His fingers laced through yours immediately.
“Still awake?” you asked.
“Yeah.”
“Thinking?”
“Dangerous habit.”
“About?”
He turned his head on the pillow to look at you. Without the mask, without the suit, without the red helmet or the ballroom or the gunfire, Jason looked younger and more tired and more beautiful than was fair.
“You,” he said.
Your chest warmed. “That’s vague.”
“I’m working up to poetic.”
“Take your time.”
His thumb moved over your knuckles. “I’m thinking I should’ve asked sooner.”
You looked at him for a long moment, then shifted closer until your forehead touched his shoulder.
“You did ask me to marry you.”
He huffed. “Fake marry me.”
“You should be more specific next time.”
“Next time?”
You smiled against his skin.
Jason went quiet.
Then he reached past you toward the nightstand. You watched as he picked up your ring, turning it between his fingers. It looked smaller in his hand than it had any right to, dark stone catching the lamp light.
He did not try to put it on you.
Instead, he held it out.
“Dinner,” he said. “Tomorrow night. No masks. No aliases. Explanations first, because I heard you the first three times. Then dinner.”
You took the ring from him.
Your fingers closed around it. “That sounds dangerously like a date.”
“Yeah,” Jason said. His voice was rougher than it needed to be. “That’s the idea.”
“And if you completely screw it up?”
“I’ll ask for another one.”
“That confident?”
“No,” he said. “That stubborn.”
You laughed softly.
He smiled at you like he had won something he did not know how to hold.
You looked down at the ring in your palm, then slid it back onto your finger yourself.
His breath caught.
“For safekeeping,” you said.
“Right.”
“And because it’s pretty.”
“Obviously.”
“And because you look like you might pass out if I don’t.”
“I do not.”
“You absolutely do.”
Jason rolled toward you, pinning you gently beneath him with a look that promised retaliation and probably more bruises you would enjoy explaining to no one.
“Keep talking, wife.”
The word should have felt like a joke.
It did not.
You reached up, touched the bruise on his jaw, and smiled.
“Make me, husband.”
Jason kissed you again as Gotham rumbled beyond the windows, all rain and sirens and secrets.
On the nightstand, his ring waited beside your mask. In the morning, there would be explanations, consequences, teasing from every mutual friend with a pulse, and probably at least one lecture about professionalism.
For now, there was Jason’s mouth on yours, his hand over the bought-for-cover ring, and the dangerous, wonderful realization that some covers were only lies until someone chose to keep them.
[1.5k] “You’re thinking too much,” he muttered, fabric of his balaclava shifting slightly as his jaw set. “Can hear it from here. The ticking clock in your head. The bottle or the blade you’ll use to quiet the noise when all that tips over.”
The Anatomy of a Ghost | 2
[2.8k] Worried.
The word rolled around in his mind, unfamiliar, like a foreign language he’d forgotten how to speak. Simon didn’t get worried. Worried was a civilian emotion. It was an indulgence for people who had the luxury of a future, people who weren’t already ghosts walking among the living. He knew fear, he knew rage, and he knew the cold, dead vacuum of indifference. But this? This soft, gnawing irritation at the back of his mind that demanded he ensure your safety?
It confused him. It pissed him off. He stared at the scuffed leather of the bag, jaw tightening. He didn’t know what to do with a feeling that didn’t have a tactical purpose.
The Anatomy of an Apology | 3
[4k] He turned his head slightly, gaze dropping to your face. “But the coffee’s better here.”
You felt a sudden, sharp flutter behind your ribs at that, swallowing, trying to keep your eyes locked with his. “Just the coffee?”
Simon didn’t look away like you expected. “No,” his voice dropped to a rough, honest whisper. “Not just the coffee.”
The Anatomy of a Blade | 4
[5k] “I held it, Simon.” you murmured, voice dropping to an honest whisper as you whispered a half-inch closer into his space. “Held my lane, because I knew you were on the other side.”
Simon stared at you for a long, breathless moment, jaw setting as he processed the words. His eyes closed when your palms found the sides of his face, cradling it, whilst he exhaled a breath so deep he must’ve been holding it for decades.
“I’m always going to be on the other side.”
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