postsurgery!simonriley x reader
He accidentally spills a massive secret about a ring when groggy from anaesthesia after surgery.
The recovery room smells like antiseptic and recycled air, and you’ve been sitting in it long enough that the bad coffee has gone cold in your hand. You set it down on the plastic chair beside you and check the time. They said twenty minutes, maybe thirty. It’s been forty-five. You’ve read the same NHS poster about handwashing three times without retaining a single word.
Then the door swings open, and a nurse backs through it pulling the far end of a hospital bed, and there he is —your six-foot-something, usually-immovable man, flat on his back under a thin blanket with the tucked-in, slightly helpless look of someone who has absolutely no say in how they’re being transported right now. His head lolls toward you the moment he clears the doorway, and the second his eyes find your face, they light up.
“Babe.” He raises a finger and points it in your general direction, missing by about a foot. “That’s my person.” His voice is louder than it needs to be. The nurse guiding the head of the bed is staring very hard at the wall in front of her. “That one. Mine.”
You stand and cross to him, pressing a hand to his forearm. “Hi, love. How are you feeling?”
Simon stares at you with deep, grave seriousness for approximately three seconds. Then his whole face softens into something so unguarded it makes your chest ache a little, and he says, very slowly, “You have two heads.”
“Two.” He blinks, squinting, like he’s working through something genuinely complex. “Both beautiful. Don’t know which one to kiss.” He attempts to sit up, is immediately defeated by his own IV line and the fact that his arms have apparently stopped cooperating, and sinks back against the pillow with a defeated expression.
You laugh and press your hand gently to his chest to keep him still. “Maybe focus on one for now.”
He doesn’t hear you. He’s already tugging at the blanket tucked around him, studying it with intense concentration.
“I’m a burrito,” he announces.
“You like burritos.” He says it like a fact he’s just remembered, important and certain. “So I’m… your burrito.” A pause. He blinks once, slowly. “That’s good. That’s very good, actually.”
The nurse at the head of the bed makes a quiet sound that she turns into a cough. You are half-embarrassed and entirely melting.
“Can you believe,” Simon says, voice shifting to scandalised, “they just let me sleep in there?”
“That’s generally how surgery works.”
“I closed my eyes for one second.” He holds up a finger from where his arm lies flat on the mattress. “One. And then—” he waves the same finger vaguely “—appendix. Gone. Just taken.”
“They did tell you they were going to do that.”
“Did they?” He looks incredibly uncertain. Then, with suspicion: “Was it a prank?”
“It wasn’t a prank, Simon.”
He absorbs this and then frowns at the ceiling. “Feels like a prank.”
The nurses finish their handover and quietly take their leave. You pull your chair flush to the side of the bed and settle into it, threading your fingers through his where his hand rests heavy on top of the blanket. He looks down at the contact, and something passes over his face—slow and warm and unhurried.
“Just saying.” His thumb moves over your knuckles, back and forth, back and forth. He’s watching your joined hands like he’s not entirely sure they’re real yet. The anaesthesia makes everything about him loose and unfiltered—no armour, no careful restraint, just him, sitting just below the surface of everything he usually keeps so close to the chest. “You’re the best thing,” he says quietly, to no one in particular. “You know that?”
“You’re a bit biased,” you say softly.
“‘M not.” He shakes his head against the pillow, slow and certain. “Ask anyone. Price’ll tell you. Soap’ll tell you—well, Soap talks too much; he’ll tell you a lot of things—” He pauses, reconsidering. “Maybe don’t ask Soap.”
You laugh, squeezing his hand. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
He falls quiet for a moment. The monitor beside him beeps steadily, and somewhere down the corridor, someone drops something metal, and the sound echoes and fades. Simon’s thumb has stilled against your hand, but he hasn’t let go. His eyes drift half-closed, then open again, fighting it.
“Got you something,” he mumbles. “Well. Not here. At home. It’s at home.”
“Mm.” His brow furrows faintly. “Well. It’s more… it’s more for both of us, really. Well—it's for you. And for me. And for—” He stops. The frown deepens. “It’s a ring.”
The word lands in the room very quietly.
“In my sock drawer.” He says it with immense seriousness, as though the location is the important part. “Second one in. Behind the grey ones. Been there three weeks, I keep—” He shifts against the pillow, blinking. “Keep waiting for the right time. Was gonna do it somewhere nice, but I think it should be more personal. Have a whole—” Another slow blink. “I have a plan.”
Your heart has done something that makes your ribs feel too small for it.
“Simon,” you say, voice barely above a whisper.
“You’d say yes,” he says, like it’s not a question, like it’s just something he knows the way he knows north from south. “You’d say yes, wouldn't you.” Still not a question. His eyes are drifting again, the pull of sleep getting heavier by the second, his words softening at the edges. “You always say yes to me. Even when I’m—even when it’s hard. You stay.”
You press your free hand over your mouth for a second.
He lets out a long, slow breath. His grip on your hand slackens slightly, not letting go but going loose and easy. His head settles deeper into the pillow, the line of his shoulders dropping as the tension finally, fully, leaves him.
“I want it to be perfect,” he says, almost to himself. “But suppose it’s—s’fine either way. You’ll still say yes.”
And then, with all the unbothered peace of a man who has absolutely no idea what he’s just said, he falls asleep. Completely and utterly out, breathing slow and steady against the hospital pillow, hand still curled loosely around yours, a little furrow between his brows the only remaining sign that he was ever awake at all.
wrote this manually with paper and pen btw
