Bleach and glitter
⋆˚࿔ 𝜗𝜚˚⋆ ────𝜗𝜚────⋆˚࿔ 𝜗𝜚˚⋆
(Simon “ghost” Riley x rave/party girl! Reader)
started at a fast food place by a gas station at 2:13 AM.
Simon Riley was bone-tired, freshly back from deployment, his boots still dusted with desert sand. He and Soap had wandered out of the airport base in search of food while Price and Gaz passed out on lobby chairs. The place they found was fluorescent-lit, smelling like fryer grease and apathy, with plastic chairs bolted to the floor and the kind of silence that made Simon’s skin crawl.
Then the door opened—and you happened to him.
You didn’t walk in. You arrived. Like a meteor shower in human form.
Bright pink hair in wild waves, glitter like stardust across your cheekbones, strutting into the building in white fishnets, a bra and underwear combo that could’ve doubled as art, and a confidence that made time bend. Your laughter crashed through the quiet like music, your friends trailing behind in equally blinding rave gear, all of you high on life (and probably monsters).
You looked like you belonged to another dimension. And Simon—dusty, jetlagged, clad in black—looked like he crawled out of the one he lived in.
He couldn’t stop staring. And somehow, you stared back.
You called him a “cryptid.” Asked if he was single. Stole a fry. Wrote your number on his hand in glitter-pink ink like you were giving him a spell. Told him to text you, then skipped away like a chaotic little comet.
He didn’t know it then, but that moment would split his life in two. Before you. And After.
Two years later, your apartment smells like bleach and blue hair dye. There’s a tree in the bathroom. A real one—potted, decorated with twinkling fairy lights and little plastic mushrooms you found at a craft store and declared “magical.” “It gives the room good vibes,” you’d said, swaying with your arms out like a tiny forest fairy. Simon hadn’t understood at the time. Now he waters it every Sunday morning without fail.
You’re sitting on the bathroom counter in an oversized green hoodie that once belonged to him and a towel draped over your shoulders, legs swinging like you’re a kid waiting to get candy. Your hair is half-bleached, the other half a faded purple from the last rave two weeks ago. Simon is behind you, carefully parting sections with gloved hands like he’s handling a bomb—not out of fear, but out of reverence.
“Okay, hear me out,” you say, twisting to look at him with bright, mischievous eyes. “Electric blue roots, then galaxy purple tips, and maybe a hidden pink underlayer.”
He raises an eyebrow. “That sounds like a crime.”
You gasp, clutching your chest with one dye-stained hand like he’s wounded your soul. “Sir, I am the crime. Don’t be a hater.”
He smirks, fighting a laugh. “You’ve had sixteen hair colors since we met.”
“Seventeen after tonight, baby. Thirty-two in my whole life.”
He leans in and presses a kiss to your temple, leaving a dot of bleach on your skin. You don’t even blink. “You gonna stick with this one for more than a week?”
“Absolutely not.”
And that’s exactly who you are. Wild. Loud. Shiny and unpredictable, burning with a kind of chaotic joy he still doesn’t know how to describe. You forget your keys at least twice a day.
Leave crystal bracelets on his nightstand and charge them under the moon. Your bedroom ceiling is covered in glow-in-the-dark stars because you said “you should always sleep under the sky, even on your worst days.” You once brought home a life-size cardboard cutout of a DJ and made Simon pose next to it like you were best friends. That photo is still on your fridge.
And the apartment? It’s transformed.
What once was sterile, quiet, borderline military in neatness has become… you.
The hallway closet, once filled with Simon’s tactical gear, now overflows with neon rave outfits, fuzzy leg warmers, goggles, body glitter, and a rainbow’s worth of wigs. Hair bleach bottles are stacked next to unopened boxes of fuchsia, cosmic green, ultraviolet pink—colors that don’t even sound real. There’s a curling wand jammed between old field boots. A rave tutu stuffed inside Simon’s old rucksack. Glitter palettes balanced on a stack of smoke grenades. He never stopped storing his gear—you just filled the empty spaces he hadn’t realized were there.
The living room has a 3-foot inflatable mushroom that you insist is seasonal. There’s a disco ball above the dining table. Lava lamps scattered like sentries throughout the apartment. He once caught you whispering affirmations to the bathroom tree. He didn’t interrupt.
And somehow, in the middle of all that color, chaos, and life, he found peace.
Because you ground him—in your own wild, glitter-dusted, dance-until-dawn kind of way. Before you, he lived in grayscale. War. Shadows. Silence. Now his life is a constant loop of festivals, laughter, paint-stained fingers, and midnight dye sessions—and he wouldn’t change a thing.
You paint stars on his scars. Call him “Ghostie” in public. Leave sticky notes in his gear that say “remember to eat or I’ll cry,” or “hydrate or die-drate.” And when the nightmares crawl back in, you wrap yourself around him and hum trance music softly into his shoulder until his breathing slows.
You call him your “guard dog.” Your “tall cryptid man.” Your “goth forest protector.”
But truthfully? You’re the one protecting him. From silence. From numbness. From forgetting what it feels like to live.
“All right,” you say, snapping your fingers to pull him out of his thoughts, “section me, sir. Let’s get this blue in before I change my mind and dye it flamingo orange instead. Again.”
He grins—soft, easy, the kind of smile only you ever see—and dips the brush into the bowl. He starts working again, carefully, reverently, like this is sacred.
Because for you, he’ll learn the difference between magenta and fuchsia. He’ll dance under laser lights in a sea of glitter and bass. He’ll protect your joy like a mission.
And if you want to dye your hair a thousand more times, he’ll be right there—bleach brush in hand, glitter on his hoodie, hopelessly in love with the rainbow-streaked hurricane who turned his haunted little world into something that finally feels like home.
This one kinda sucks 😭 but here you go💋