cw: post MW3; angst; hurt/comfort | fem!Reader Ă S. Riley
Simon has been watching you for the past weeks since the world has tilted on its axis a second time in his life.
Johnny is dead. Price is gone. Kyle is trying to keep things running. The 141 is no more as it once was.
And then, there is you.
Shattered. The light once beaming in your eyes now gone. Buried with Johnny. Extinguished by Price's abandonment.
You're nothing but a shell of your former self; of the woman who could give all of them a run for their money with her banter, her discipline, and fierce loyalty.
And Simon has been observing the decline in real time while refusing to deal with his own grief, like watching a wild animal deteriorate in a zoo cage.
The base at night is a different kind of quiet.
Not the quiet of the field, that loaded silence where every snapped twig is a countdown. This is the quiet of fluorescent lights and linoleum and men who don't know what to do with their hands when there's no mission brief on the table.
Simon knows it well by now. Decades of it.
He finds you at 0247 hrs by the eastern wall of the compound, sitting on an equipment crate in the cold with your jacket somewhere that isn't on your body. Not crying. Not staring at anything in particular. Just present in the way that means absent.
He's seen it before. In the mirror.
He doesn't announce himself. You'd only straighten up, roll your shoulders back, manufacture something that looks like fine. You're good at fine. Good enough to fool the man with the clipboard and the psychology degree who'd nodded along and signed your clearance form three weeks ago.
Simon had read the report. Sergeant displays healthy coping mechanisms and strong unit cohesion.
He'd thought about what healthy coping mechanisms looked like on you in the months before. The way you'd drag Soap into the worst film you could find on a Friday, just to hear him complain. The way you'd argue tactics with Price over terrible coffee like it was sport. The way your laugh carried down the hall and somehow made the hall feel shorter.
Simon hasn't heard it since Verdansk.
He crosses the yard without a word and sits on the crate beside you. Not close. Just present. The cold doesn't bother him. He's a sniper. He can wait.
You don't tell him to leave, and that's something.
The silence between them stretches long enough that Simon starts counting his own breaths. An old habit. Something to do when there's nothing to do.
Eventually, you speak first.
"Couldn't sleep."
It isn't a question and it isn't an explanation. Just words to fill the air, thin as the excuse they are. He doesn't call you out on it.
"No," he replies.
Another stretch of quiet. Somewhere across the compound a door opens and closes. Neither of you moves.
He watches you from his periphery the way he watches everythingâwithout appearing to. You've pulled your knees up slightly, arms loose over them. Relaxed posture. Practiced relaxed posture. There's a difference and you've never known that he knows it.
Your eyes are doing that thing again. Open but somewhere else entirely. Not quite a thousand yard-stare, but close.
Verdansk. Or before it. Or the specific seventeen seconds he suspects you replay on a loop because he has his own seventeen seconds and he knows what they do to a person's face in the dark.
"Soap used to hate the cold," you remark somberly.
It comes out almost conversational. Like a grenade with the pin already pulled, lobbed gently into the space between you.
Simon lets it land.
"Aye," he agrees. "Complained about it enough."
The corner of your mouth moves. Not quite a smile. The ghost of the muscle memory of one. It's the closest he's seen in weeks and it costs you somethingâhe watches you pay it.
"He complained about everything." Your voice stays even. Careful. "Terrible sleeper. Ate like a bloody labrador. Couldn't fold a map to save his life."
Could save yours, though. Simon doesn't say it. Neither do you. It sits between you anyway.
He waits.
"I keepâ" you start, and stop. Your jaw tightens. He watches you decide whether to finish, watches you weigh the cost of it. "I keep forgetting. For a second. In the morning. Before I'm fullyâ" A shaky breath. "And then I fucking remember."
Simon says nothing.
Because there is nothing. Because he does it too, that horrible half-second of grace before the weight of it crashes back down, and he knows that anything he says about it will be either a lie or a uselessness. So he says nothing, and he stays, and after a moment his broad shoulder finds yours in the dark. Gentle.
Not too close, not a press. Just contact. Proof of another person.
You don't pull away.
"Price should have told us," you say, quieter now. Something harder underneath it. "He should have. We fucking deserved to know. We deserved the choice."
"Aye," Simon agrees again. "We did."
It's all he can give you on that. It's all he has. The anger about Price lives in him too, in a room he hasn't opened yet, and he suspects when he finally does, it'll take a wall down with it.
But not tonight.
The cold finally wins. You shift, and the movement seems to drag you back into your body, into the practical fact of being a person sitting on a freezing metal crate at three in the morning.
"My arse has gone numb," you announce.
Simon huffs through his nose. The closest thing to a laugh he's got in stock these days.
"That's what the jacket's for," he says.
"Didn't ask for commentary, Lieutenant."
"Wasn't commentary. Was a fact. You're sat out here freezing yer tits off out of spite."
You turn to look at him properly for the first time all nightâactually look, eyebrow up, something sharp flickering behind your eyes that he hasn't seen since before everything went to hell.
"Out of spite," you repeat.
"Aye."
"That's rich, coming from the man who once stood watch for nine hours in monsoon season because Price suggested he take a break."
"Different."
"How."
"I'm not the one with a numb arse."
It surprises a sound out of youâshort, ugly, real. A guffaw. An actual one, dragged up from somewhere you'd buried it, and it shocks you both. Your hand comes up like you can catch it and put it back, eyes going wide for half a second like you've done something wrong.
Simon watches you sit with the fact that you're still capable of it.
"Soap would've had something to say about your arse, Lt.," you mutter, recovering.
"Soap had something to say about everything."
"He'd have offered to warm it up. Cheeky bastard."
"He'd have gotten decked for it."
"He'd have deserved it." You wipe your face with the heel of your hand, quick, businesslike, pretending it's the cold. "God. He was so fucking annoying."
"Worst man I ever served with," Simon agrees.
It's a lie and it's the truest eulogy either of you has managed in weeks, and you both know it, and that's exactly why it works.
He stays beside you in the cold until your breathing evens out, until the rigid set of your shoulders drops two degrees, until you're no longer somewhere else entirely but here, on a crate, in the dark, next to him.
It isn't healing. It isn't fine.
But you're still here.
And for Simon Riley, who has learned not to ask for more than what he's given, that is enough.
For now.
