The first thing you notice is the smell.
The cold tang of metal; old pipes running overhead, faintly sweating in the dark, leaving the air tasting like a coin pressed on the tongue. Water drips from them in slow, uneven ticks. The concrete walls give off a sour, mineral scent that clings to your clothes, your skin, the inside of your nose.
You can feel its chill even at a distance.
The corridor beneath base isn't on any blueprint. You're almost certain of that. The blackout hit twenty minutes ago, throwing half the compound into emergency lighting, and you'd taken the wrong turn looking for a backup auxiliary generator just in case that failed in medical, too.
Down here, it's nothing but a maze of concrete veins and rusted pipes.
And then you see a light. Dim. Jaundiced. It flickers from behind a door left slightly ajar.
You think: maintenance worker. You think: maybe someone else got lost, too.
You absolutely do not think: Ghost.
Until you pull the door open.
The room is small. Windowless. Hidden. A tiny bunker nested inside another bunker, like a pearl in an oyster. Shelves line the walls from floor to ceiling, sagging under the weight of things that don't really belong there. Weapons. Tac gear. And then... other things. Stranger. Human.
A wristwatch with a spider-web crack on the glass. A cigarette box with a corner crushed inward. Dog tags with the chain snapped. A deck of cards stiff with old blood, tucked inside wax paper so they won't rot. And there are photographs too, warped by water damage, every face blurred or gouged out entirely.
And there, sitting on an old crate in the center of it, is Simon Riley.
You've barely seen his face, and it already feels like you've seen too much.
The sickly light above drags across him in pieces— sharp cheekbones, sunken, exhausted eyes, a nose crooked from breaks that no one tended. He looks so much older than he sounds. His broad shoulders are hunched forward, forearms on his thighs, gloved fingers flicking open the lid of an old lighter.
The sound ricochets strangely around the cramped room.
Ghost doesn't move for the mask beside him, doesn't curse, doesn't even look surprised. He just lifts his eyes toward you slowly, and the weight of that gaze pins you in the doorway harder than any weapon could.
The question comes out calm enough to make your stomach drop straight to the floor. You glance down at your boots because looking directly at him feels like reading someone else's obituary over their shoulder.
A dozen things suddenly crowd your throat, and all of them true. I was looking for a generator for the med wing. I didn't know anyone was down here. I didn't know anyone could come down here. But your tongue sticks uselessly to the roof of your mouth, like language itself has abandoned you in the scarred face of this man.
"I didn't— I, uh, yeah." Pathetic.
(Ghost doesn't seem like the type who wants anything more than the bare‑bones answer anyway.)
You should leave. Every instinct hammered into you by years around dangerous men tells you that much. You should swear silence, pretending you never saw the shape of his lips in this light. But your attention catches on a simple silver band. It's scratched to hell, and there are initials carved inside.
Your mouth moves before your better sense can catch it. "Whose was that?"
Ghost's thumb stills. "A dead man." Flat. Immediate. Final.
(You can't tell whether he means the ring or the lighter or every object in this room at once. Maybe he can't either.)
You swallow hard, mouth dry. "Sorry."
Click. The lighter snaps open, but the flame doesn't come.
"Should be." There's something wrong with the way he says it. It doesn't sound like grief, exactly. Grief is softer than this.
You don't know what compels you to step inside fully. Maybe it's morbid curiosity. Maybe explicit stupidity. Maybe it's because if you leave now, you'll never see this version of Simon Riley again.
The door shuts behind you with a muted clang, sealing the air in, sealing you in. The room immediately shrinks around it. It isn't large to begin with, barely bigger than a storage unit, but with Ghost inside it becomes suffocating.
Ghost's thumb drags slowly over the ridged wheel of the lighter. Once. Twice.
Your eyes flick unwillingly around the room again. The objects make more sense now in the worst possible way. They're relics. Remains. Every item preserved like an insect trapped in amber.
Ghost notices where your attention goes because men like him miss nothing. "You ask everyone this many questions?" he murmurs.
One corner of his mouth twitches. "Smartest thing you've said since opening that door."
Heat crawls up the back of your neck. Embarrassment. Shame. Both tangled together so tightly you can't separate them anymore. You take half a step backward. "I should go."
But he doesn't tell you to leave, and if Ghost didn't want to be found, you would've never made it this far.
You glance at the walls again. "Do you keep all these to remember them? Why?"
Why keep pain? Why keep so much of it? Why hoard grief like a magpie with its sharpest baubles?
It's silent. Then: "Someone should."
You crouch carefully beside the shelves. Up close, the objects feel even worse somehow. They're gruesome in their normality.
A bent keyring with a faded supermarket rewards tag still attached. A cheap pen chewed along the cap. A cracked pair of sunglasses wrapped in cloth to keep the lenses from scratching further. Tiny pieces of lives, stripped of context, reduced to artifacts by time and violence.
Your eyes catch on a wristwatch stopped permanently at 2:17.
You imagine someone lending out that pen and asking for it back. Someone tugging on those sunglasses under summer heat. Someone flicking ash from cigarettes with living hands.
Now all that's left of them fits on a shelf.
A shiver crawls beneath your skin.
Ghost watches you from the crate without moving. Without the mask, there's nowhere for your eyes to hide from the damage time has done to him. His skin is weathered, roughened, uneven in tone;
patches of old bruising that never quite faded and tiny, pitted marks from shrapnel or gravel or god knows what else. He has a scar that runs along the corner of his mouth, tugging it into a half‑sneer even when he's expressionless.
He is not handsome. And you don't think he's meant to be.
"Most people disappear twice," he says after a while. His voice is low enough that the pipes overhead nearly swallow it. "First time's when their heart stops."
"The second's when nobody says their name anymore."
You look at the silver ring again. "Were you close?"
It washes over you again— that awful sensation of standing too close to something built to kill. Predators tend to go still before they decide whether you're a threat or a meal.
The room seems to contract around the weight of his attention. Then his eyes drift away again; a mercy.
"He talked too bloody much," Ghost mutters.
You blink. It's so unexpectedly human an answer that it nearly knocks the breath from you. A faint scrape sounds as he leans back slightly against the wall behind the crate.
" 'ated tea." His thumb drags once more across the lighter wheel. "Burned every meal he touched. Thought he could sing."
Another click of the lighter.
"Couldn't." A laugh nearly escapes you before you catch it. It still curls warm in your chest anyway, small and startled and terribly out of place down here among the ghosts.
Your gaze catches briefly on the bare skin of his face again before darting away almost painfully fast. You know, distantly, that you should be afraid of being caught staring. But there's another feeling underneath it too. Something terrible and magnetic.
Ghost's hand closes suddenly around the lighter, swallowing it entirely inside his fist. "Seen enough?"
You nod too quickly. "I won't tell anyone."
"I know." Your skin goes cold before your mind even parses the meaning. The weight of his stare nearly locks your knees. Then his eyes flick once toward the doorway behind you.
"Generator room's two corridors east," he says. "Take the left staircase. Panel sticks sometimes. Kick it before you flip the switch."
Your mouth parts slightly. He knew why you were down here. Maybe he'd known from the second you opened the door.
"Right," you manage softly. "Thanks."
You stand slowly, pins and needles stabbing through your legs, and reach for the door. The concrete floor feels uneven beneath your feet. Damp cold curls around your ankles.
Your hand finds the handle... and then you stop. You don't know why. You don't know what you're waiting for. Permission? Forgiveness? A warning?
Ghost doesn't give you any of those. He just says, "Close the door behind you."
After that night, Ghost, who used to vanish the second a room got too full, who could slip between shadows like he was made of them, starts turning up everywhere. And for a man his size, it's wrong how no one else notices. Men twice as jumpy as you walk straight past him like he's not even there.
You're hunched over late‑night paperwork in medical, and the letters start to blur together until your eyes burn. You look up to blink the sting away and he's there.
(In the harsh light, he looks less like a man and more like the idea of one. Or maybe you're just tired.)
You take the stairwell because the elevator's been temperamental all week. Halfway down, thinking only of coffee and sleep, you round the landing and nearly collide with him. You mutter something, an apology, maybe. He says nothing.
You're outside, late, the air cold enough to sting your lungs. You step out to breathe, to be alone for thirty seconds. You're alone for three.
A shape detaches from the dark behind the storage crates.
You mention during lunch— not even to him, you don't think he'd been anywhere nearby— that the mess stopped stocking honey packets again. Mostly, you complain because the tea tastes like boiled dishwater without it.
That evening, there are six honey packets lined up neatly beside your med bag.
Your field knife vanishes from your kit a few days later. You spend an entire shift irritated and muttering under your breath about theft until it reappears tucked back where it belongs, cleaner and so sharp it glides through gauze as if it were water.
At first, you convince yourself it's just Ghost's version of care. It's stilted. Awkward. A little unsettling, maybe, but harmless enough.
But then the others start helping.
You mention offhand that your bunk heater's been malfunctioning for weeks. The next day, Gaz appears in your doorway carrying an entirely new unit under one arm. "Simon said yours sounded dodgy," he says casually, crouching to install it before you can even answer.
You stare. "Ghost told you?"
Gaz glances up briefly, screwdriver between his teeth. "Mm." Like that explains literally anything. And maybe to them, it does.
A week later, you find a thermos sitting on your desk. It's not new, nor standard issue. It's an old, battered steel thing with a dent in the side and a bit of black tape wrapped around the lid to keep it from rattling. It's warm when you touch it.
You unscrew the top. Inside it is tea. It's not good tea. Not even close. It's strong enough to strip paint and smells faintly like someone boiled it in a canteen over a camp stove.
But there's honey in it. Your throat goes tight.
You carry the thermos with you to the rec room, still not sure what to do with it. Soap spots it instantly. "Och, ye found it then?" he says, eyebrows lifting.
You stop dead. "You know whose it is?"
He looks baffled by the question. "Aye?"
"And... you knew someone went into my office?" Your voice pitches higher than you mean it to. There's personal information in there. Medical files. Notes. pieces of people's lives sealed under law and ethics. HIPAA would have you by the hair.
Soap snorts into his coffee. "Someone?" he repeats. "Bonnie, that's Simon."
You stare at him, Soap stares back, and that's the end of the conversation, apparently.
Then, it's Price. One evening during a lull between briefings, you're standing in the doorway of his office with a mug of tea you don't remember making. The steam curls weakly in the dim light, and Price glances at it, at you, before returning to the report in front of him. "Simon tell you to drink more water too?"
He flips another page, pen tapping at the margin. "Been on me for weeks about it." There's a faint twitch at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, but close enough to count. Like this is funny to him.
"Sir," you say carefully, "are you aware Ghost has been—"
You trail off because suddenly you don't know what word fits. Watching sounds paranoid. Following sounds worse. Collecting feels somehow closest, which is an insane thought to have about another human being.
Price supplies it for you without looking up. "Hoverin'."
Somewhere down the corridor Soap bursts into loud laughter before being shushed by Gaz. Price takes a slow sip from his mug before adding, almost absently, "Has Simon ever made you feel unsafe?"
The answer should be yes. Every metric of common sense says yes.
Objectively speaking, Simon Riley is terrifying. He moves like something built for violence first and humanity second. He appears soundlessly in doorways. Watches you with unnerving intensity. Notices things.
The things he does are strange. Undeniably strange. But for all the watching, Simon Riley is almost painfully careful with you. He doesn't corner you, doesn't demand your attention. Half the time he leaves before you can even thank him for whatever odd little act of care he's committed this week.
Your silence answers for you.
Price looks at you and nods once, satisfied. "There y'are then."
He returns to his report. Matter settled, then.
The mission in Moldova goes to shit fast. Too fast. The intel is compromised, the extraction blown, and gunfire erupts before anyone can reposition behind cover.
You aren't supposed to be at the front line to begin with. You're support: field medical, stabilization, trauma response. You're the medic they bring when intelligence suggests possible civilian casualties or prolonged extraction windows. Your job is to keep people alive long enough to make it home, not trade fire in the middle of kill zones.
And the safehouse was supposed to be clear.
You remember shouting, smoke, your ears ringing. Simon's voice in your comms suddenly turning sharp— Medic, move. Now— and then pain. A bullet tears through your shoulder and the world folds sideways. You hit the ground hard enough to black out for a second or two at a time. Shapes blur around you. Someone is screaming. Maybe you.
One second you're alone on the ground. The next Ghost's on his knees in front of you, his gloves slick red as he presses them against your wound. Pain detonates white-hot behind your eyes.
You've heard him interrogate men in a softer voice.
Gunfire erupts again somewhere behind him. Ghost doesn't even look back. His body shields yours automatically, broad enough to blot out everything— light, movement, danger— while bullets punch splinters from the wall nearby.
Until all you can see is the skull on his mask and the rise and fall of his chest.
Recovery takes weeks. Simon becomes unbearable during them. He sleeps outside medical twice before Price threatens disciplinary action. You wake one night to find him standing motionless in the doorway at 04:13, just watching your chest rise and fall.
He doesn't even pretend he wasn't caught. Just leaves.
You return to the hidden room alone six weeks later. The light is still a sickly yellow. Lines reduced to residue still line the shelves. But something's changed.
There's space now, a section cleared carefully among the clutter. And sitting there is a little polaroid you'd forgotten existed entirely.
Soap had taken it weeks ago in the mess after somebody smuggled in terrible instant film cartridges that developed blotchy and grainy. Youd forgotten the picture existed almost immediately afterward. In it, you're laughing, head turned halfway away from the lens, grin wide enough to make your eyes crinkle, shoulders blurred slightly from movement because you must've been laughing hard enough not to stay still.
Your stomach bottoms out. It feels like you're looking at a grave that's waiting for a body. The door opens behind you with a low groan. Heavy boots scrape once. The silence that follows is thick enough to chew on.
You swallow hard. "Why do you have this?" Your fingers hover near the photo but don't touch it. Beneath the white border, written in messy black marker, is a date. The date you were shot.
Did he think—? You turn to look at him. Ghost stands in the doorway, shoulders filling the frame, the skull of his mask gleaming pale.
"Did you put this up because you thought I was dying?"
For the first time since you met him, Ghost looks faintly offended, like you've questioned his competence. "No," he says immediately. "It was only a flesh wound."
Simon shifts his weight from one foot to the other, massive arms folding across his chest. "You were alert during extraction," he continues, matter-of-fact. "Bleeding slowed after pressure was applied. Entry and exit wound. Missed anything important by a fair margin."
Then, dry enough to almost sound irritated: "Not everyone falls apart after getting shot."
You stare at him. At the utter sincerity of it. At the absurdity of hearing only a flesh wound, as if bullet holes were only inconvenient weather. "Then why put it here?"
Simon's eyes settle on the Polaroid. "I put it because you looked happy."
It's sweet. Awkward. Deeply concerning. But sweet.
And then, Prague. Prague is wet and fast and mean. It's the kind of violence that happens in cramped stairwells where gunfire deafens instantly and men die choking around blood that steams in winter air.
Ghost kills three people in under thirty seconds. A throat crushed wetly by one gloved hand. A knife disappearing under a jawline. A gunshot so close the spray hits the concrete hot.
You spend extraction with blood soaking through your gloves while stabilizing a wound in the extraction van. Diesel fumes. Rain hammering the roof. Soap swearing through a morphine haze. By the time, you get back to the safehouse, your head feels packed with cotton.
The med bay lights buzz softly overhead in soft white strips while rain rattles against the windows outside. Soap's already been discharged with stitches and complaints. Gaz disappeared an hour ago. Price is somewhere, buried in paperwork and classified reports.
Ghost is the last patient left. He sits on the edge of the examination table in silence while you cut through the ruined compression sleeve on his arm.
Blood slicks your fingers dark and tacky. "Hold still," you mutter.
You peel fabric carefully away from the gouge carved along his bicep. It's not deep. Ugly, though. Angry. Your fingers brush the straps at his shoulders.
"Need the vest off." Ghost doesn't move. You glance up.
The black paint around the eyes of his mask makes his stare look excavated. Watching you with that unnerving, absolute focus he always has. (Soap would call it a sniper's focus.)
Finally, he gives a single, heavy nod. You start emptying it out first, because the vest is heavier than it looks.
Knife. Radio. Extra mags. Another knife. Another.
Everything comes out piece by piece beneath your hands, heavy with rainwater and gunpowder and the metallic stink of blood. And then something small slips free from an inner pocket and lands soundlessly on the floor.
Black fabric. Tiny. Folded.
Your stomach drops before your brain catches up. You know those. You know them because they're yours.
For a second, neither of you move. The room becomes hideously quiet. Your pulse pounds thickly at your throat. Ghost looks down at the underwear. Then slowly up at you.
There's no embarrassment in his eyes. No panic. Not even surprise.
"Simon." Your voice barely works.
His eyes cut briefly toward the door like he's checking whether anyone else saw. Then back to you. You wait for a joke. An excuse. Anything.
Instead, Ghost reaches down calmly, picks them up off the floor with two fingers, folds it once between his huge hands, and slides it back into the inner pocket of his vest.
"Your hands are cold. Stitch me up, and we'll get out of here, get you something dry to wear."
(And no. You can't wear those.)
