#python333

06:24

“God… damn it―” 

Leon’s cursing under his breath again, fiddling with the gear shift in the center console of the shitty car the two of you are in. You’re trying your best not to laugh at his frustration, but it’s getting harder to bite down on your cheek without drawing blood from your efforts. You know it’ll only make Leon more frustrated, but you really can’t help the small, quick exhale that comes from you that would barely count as a laugh if you were around anyone else. Leon, though, lets his gaze flit over to you for a second, eyes narrowed. 

“Oh, is this funny to you?” Leon asks you accusingly, his eyes going back to the road and not even bothering to use his turn signal as he takes a left, “Because if you’d like to try and drive this thing…” 

“No, I’m― I’m good,” your smile, as much as you try to bite it back, is too evident in your voice for Leon not to notice, “you’re doing great, actually. Only about ten more minutes and we’ll be there.” 

Leon grumbles under his breath, much to your amusement, but doesn’t bother to form some sort of rebuttal against your clear lying. 

The facility the two of you are headed towards isn’t exactly the most secretive. It’s a large, white building with Umbrella’s logo slapped on one of the topmost corners, their logo below it written in Danish script and a vast parking lot covering the space behind it that tapers off into a small forest area. The community around it is the more curious part. A small neighborhood of very few homes, with almost no cars in sight. No people, either, and a few bicycles left abandoned on either the sidewalk or driveways. The best word you could use to describe it would be barren; you don’t even know if there’s any life left in this neighborhood, and the implications that an Umbrella lab being so close to an area like this brings is enough to unsettle you. 

As you approach the facility, more things become apparent. The small notepad in your hand is scribbled on by the pen you keep in the other hand as you observe and jot down the various instances of roadkill littering the sides of the street, noting that from what you can see, these seem to be mainly dead squirrels. Fairly large, gray, with short, rounded ears and bushy tails, similar to what you might see lingering in the trees on the way to work. Not native to Europe, you make sure to note, turning away from the road to focus on your writing, possibly bigger than the invasive ones, but unsure from where I can see them. Brought in by Umbrella?

It wouldn’t surprise you. The first real mission you ever went on, you found a lab―not necessarily Umbrella, but speculated to be some sort of connected company―that brought in their own samples to avoid the suspicion that would come with the animal population in the local area dwindling. You suspect that Umbrella might be trying to do the same, and write that down as well. It’s only a few more minutes until Leon sighs in relief, parking the car in one of the many vacant spots available and not caring about how he managed to take up two parking spots. Your notepad and pen are stuffed in the lower pocket of your coat. 

“Did you see the entrance at all?” you ask, frowning as you look over at the facility for a moment before directing your attention to the glovebox. You open it, and as Leon shakes his head to indicate that he didn’t, you hand him his gun and knife. He holsters both of them, maneuvering himself into a slightly awkward position while sitting to do so, before fishing his earpiece out of his side pocket and settling again. 

“No. I’m guessing there’s a door around the back or some kind of hatch they left unlocked,” Leon tells you as he slots the earpiece into his ear, wincing at the small squeal it gives at the pressure before settling back down to a quiet hum. You already put your own in before getting into the car, waiting for Hunnigan to start guiding the two of you through the facility. 

“Pretty shitty design, isn’t it?” you comment. Leon hums in agreement. 

“Well, they’re not exactly known for their architecture,” Leon dryly responds, waiting for you to unbuckle your seatbelt before opening his door. You snort at that and open your own door, getting out of the car in sync with him and shutting the door behind you. Walking around to his side of the car, Leon waits for you to reach him before walking closer to the building.

The gray sky doesn’t contrast much with the slight off-white of the building. Clouds loom overhead, and there’s the slightest breeze that just barely rustles the dying leaves among the trees surrounding the area and taking up the rear end of the building. It’s not so cold that visual evidence of your breaths form in the air as white puffs of frozen condensation, but still cold enough to make you grateful that you’re wearing a trench coat. 

The building isn’t the biggest you’ve seen, but it’s definitely up there as far as Umbrella facilities go. As you look up at the white building towering over you and your pseudo-partner, you can’t help but wonder how employees on their first day would get inside. There’s no obvious doors, no windows, and no directions guiding you to any sort of entrance. 

“I’m really, really hoping there’s not some bullshit puzzle we have to do in order to get in there,” you sigh, and Leon clearly shares the sentiment, clicking his tongue and trying to find any evidence of entry he can.

“Yeah…” Leon frowns as he looks up at the building, readjusting his gloves as he does so. Your gaze falls to the fingerless leather pieces adorning his hands, and your eyes linger there for a few more seconds until Leon speaks again and you look back at his face. “Didn’t the report say the lab was under―” 

“Hej!” 

You and Leon both startle and turn around at the sudden sound of someone else’s voice, the foreign noise cutting through the solemn quiet environment like a guillotine. There’s a man running towards the two of you―late forties or early fifties, balding, maybe two hundred and fifty-something pounds from what you can see, eyes red-rimmed and crow’s feet crinkling the skin beside either of his eyes, liver spots visible on his cheeks and neck―in ragged clothes, and Leon immediately reaches for his holstered gun. You catch the movement and put a hand on his forearm before he can pull out the handgun, and his movements falter before stopping. 

“You―” the man gasps for air once he reaches the two of you, putting his hands on his knees and looking down for a moment before looking back up at the two of you. He’s shorter than both of you, standing at maybe five-foot-five or -six, and his pants bunch awkwardly around one of his legs as he stands back up straight. “You should not be here. There’s, uh, um… it’s a hazard, to be this close to the facility.”

“... Okay,” you slowly respond, eyebrows furrowing at the sight before you, “did you work here?” 

The man is about to speak before he decides to just shake his head negatively, eyes closing for a moment as he does, before he finally catches his breath and responds, “Nej, but, there’s news going around, saying not to go near here. There is… waste. It’s not safe to be so close to it. Unless… are you investigating what happened?” 

You take your eyes off of him for just a second to look at Leon, who looks back at you, and some silent, mutual understanding is met; both of you know that this man is lying. How Leon knows, you’re not sure, but you can see the way he deliberately looks away from you. How his gaze flits around, trying not to meet yours, and how he pants and feigns catching his breath to distract both you and himself from the fact that he’s trying to make something up. The fact that he assumed the two of you were investigating, too, as if that would be something obvious by the way the two of you are dressed. The black trench coat you’re in might seem a little typical for an as-seen-on-TV detective, but the skin tight―and when you say skin tight, you mean skin tight―compression shirt Leon’s wearing along with his dark cargo pants and tactical belt tells a different story. 

“We are,” Leon says before you can reply, which you can’t tell if you’re grateful for or not, “if you know anything, now would be a good time to share it with us.” 

“Oh, I don’t―” the man laughs too loud to sound innocent, his chortles eventually tapering off into coughs, where he puts a finger up to let you both know he needs a second, before continuing, “I just live here. There, I mean, right over there.” 

He points at a house some ways away from where you’re all standing. You tilt your head to look around him and get your eyes on it, seeing the small, dark blue house he’s referring to. Leon raises an eyebrow as he looks at the worn-down house, the door left slightly ajar as if someone had attempted to close it behind them in a hurry. It would make his behavior and his story make more sense if he didn’t exaggerate himself to the point of suspicion. 

“So you wouldn’t happen to know how to get inside of this place, would you?” you ask, pointing a thumb back at the building. The man’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly, but you catch the slight movement of his eyelids before he can mask his facial expressions once again with something more neutral. Something you assume he thinks is more welcoming. 

“Oh, I wouldn’t go in there at all,” the man says, almost like a warning, before his voice dips into a lower tone that one might use to tell a scary story or an urban myth, “from what I hear, they’re doing a lot more than just making medicine in there. Det er farligt arbejde, siger jeg.”

It’s dangerous work, I say. You tilt your head to the side slightly at the words, but Leon isn’t so privy to look into what the man is saying beyond the vague manner in which he speaks. 

“Thanks for the tip,” he says blankly. You both look at each other for a moment, debating what to do, before turning back to where the man is. “What’s your―” 

Where the man was, you should say instead, seeing as where he once stood is now nothing but air. There’s no traces of his existence beyond the crumpled leaves that he stepped on in his haste to reach the two of you. You both look around, and when you see no sign of him, you both give each other a concerned expression. 

“Probably should’ve gotten his name at the start, huh?” 

“Yeah, probably.” 

“Whose name?” You jump slightly at the sound of Hunnigan’s voice, much to Leon’s amusement, seeing as he’s more used to Hunnigan interrupting his conversations than you are. 

“Strange guy right outside of the lab,” Leon supplies helpfully, “tried to convince us not to go in.” 

“A scientist?”

“He said he wasn’t, but I don’t believe him,” you reply for Leon, who nods in agreement. 

“Is he still there?”

“He actually, uh, ran away just before you talked.”

“Did you get his name, at least?”

“... No.” 

You and Leon both hear Hunnigan sigh over comms. “Unbelievable.”

“Sorry, but ‘Condor-1’ was a little busy brooding at him to ask anything important.” Leon looks at you, offended, and you promptly ignore the objectively funny look on his face to continue talking to Hunnigan, “If we find him again, we’ll let you know.” 

“Of course you will,” if Hunnigan ever rolled her eyes at either of you, you’d think that she just did so, but as much as the two of you test her limits, she remains professional, “you can enter the lab through the back entrance, there should be a door leading to the ground floor. I can’t see where the basement entrance is, but if you both find anything important on the ground floor, you probably won’t have to go down there at all.”

“Isn’t the basement where the lab is?” Leon asks, walking alongside you towards the back of the entrance. The barren nature of the parking lot makes it almost uncanny, walking through it in order to round the back corner of the building, and the overgrown vegetation closing in only adds to the apocalyptic nature of the environment. 

“Where part of it is, yes. We can always send in another team to scope it out if needed. Just focus on the floors you can get to for now.”

You both reach the back entrance of the facility, and Leon goes to open the door. The rectangular knob turns easily, albeit with a slight creak due to the rust littering the metal handle, and he pushes open the door. Strangely, as you both walk in, you’re immediately met with the cafeteria, and all the people who were once in there to eat lunch.

06:51

A group of five undead, or a hoard as you’ve deemed them, stands together and stares at you and Leon. The noises they make grow more different as more of them surround the two of you, like hums of agreement in the form of zombified groans, as if agreeing to put aside their need to eat each other in favor of eating the new food source they see in front of them. The fact that they eat each other at all is mystery enough, but to see them seemingly communicate with each other in order to unionize and work together to focus on you and Leon is all the more fascinating. Morbidly, of course; you hate these creatures as much as the next person, but you can’t deny your curiosity. 

Leon raises his gun, and you don’t stop him, not when he’s the only one with a weapon good enough to use against the zombies. When they drop, one by one, they let out screams that are unusual, even for them. Loud enough to echo off the abandoned walls of the cafeteria, and at the sound, the other zombies’ heads will seemingly subconsciously whip around to find the source of the sound, before turning back to Leon. The process repeats, and as those disgusting bodies hit the floor, you mentally note how each one seems to let out an ear-piercing scream that acts as a warning to the others that there’s a threat in the area. It’s the only thing that would make sense, you think, considering how each scream is what catches the attention of the zombies, not the shots themselves.

You and Leon keep moving wordlessly. The smell of rotting food slowly dissipates as you make your way to a long hallway, a few doors on either side of each wall, with one large double-door situation at the end of the hall. You’re already on the left, so your gaze goes to the door closest to you, which has a plate on the side of it deeming it the blood analysis lab. It’s an unspoken agreement between the two of you that formed before getting here that you’ll handle the sample collecting and Leon will handle the fighting; it’s not that you can’t fight, it was made sure of that you and everyone else the government grabbed had some sort of training, but you weren’t trained to the same degree as Leon. You thank whoever’s watching over you for that, because you don’t know if you could survive much of what Krauser had all his little mentees doing. 

“I’ll take this side?” you offer, Leon already nodding in agreement before you finish your sentence, anticipating what you were going to ask. 

“Let me know if you need help,” Leon reminds you, tapping his ear to point out the communication system you two share. 

“Got it.” Both of you part ways, with Leon stepping into the room closest to him and you doing the same with the lab. The door automatically closes behind you, and the lights come on the moment you enter the room. 

It’s not a very large room by any means, but content-wise, it’s full of things to sample. You gravitate towards the station in the back of the room first, finding a row of supplies used for blood staining. There’s flasks of methylene blue on magnetic stir plates, small white rods settled in the bottom of each one, and a few labeled containers behind the plates containing the components used to make the blue solution. As you pull out your notepad to write everything down, your eyes flit across the long table everything is set down on, taking note of what it’s being used for. 

You jot down the obvious blank space on the table, noting that the leftover slides left slanted against the wall suggest that this was an area for them to dry after smearing blood on, and the well-kept nature of the environment suggests that nobody left here in a hurry. Not this area, at least; you write down that this means whatever caused the abandonment of the lab didn’t start in this room. There’s a decently sized glass bottle of liquid labeled as Wright plet in the corner, along with racks of different sized micropipettes and several reagent bottles filled with varying amounts of distilled water scattered about the area. As you look away from the station, you see shelves with boxes of different sized gloves lining them, with a disproportionately large amount of L-sized gloves to the small amount of M- and S-sized gloves. There’s an eyewash station just below the shelving. 

Walking around, you spot more stations with different purposes. There’s a sink next to a long table of slides with a pinkish-red hue staining them, as opposed to the blue colored slides still drying against the wall in the other station. Next to these slides are a similarly sized glass bottle to the one containing the Wright stain, except this one now reads Giemsa plet. 

Both used for staining blood, you note, one for differentiating between cells, one for identifying diseases and parasites. You can’t see any actual blood in the area, unfortunately, even as you go through various refrigerators and find solutions like acetic acid and methanol stashed on several shelves. You jot this down too, and just as you’re about to leave and move on to the next room, your eyes catch sight of a microscope. One singular microscope on a table large enough to fit five, suspiciously enough, and already loaded with a slide under the glass. 

Curiously, you approach the microscope, and adjust the slide. It’s just barely off-center, which you fix, and you change the lens until it’s at 10X before observing. You have to adjust the focus on the slide for a minute, struggling to get the microscope to actually focus on the details of what’s on it, but you eventually get it. Your eyebrows furrow at the sight of the slide. This lab, from what you were told, has been abandoned for at least three years, judging by what Intel told both you and Leon in that briefing. 

Yet, the bacteria on the slide are still moving. They shouldn’t be moving even if the slide were freshly stained, and yet they’re just barely wiggling around the glass surface of it, and as you magnify the lens more to view the bacteria more clearly, their movements become more obvious. You note your observations in your notepad, your pencil scribbling furiously at the paper as you try and jot down everything you see. You pull your face away from the oculars, and your attention is redirected to a small paper packet laying on the table beside the microscope.

You find out quickly that it’s a field report, titled PLUTO: 1 - 9 with minimal details on the cover page. Visible details are the date the report was made, which is dated 15/9/96, the name of the reporter, Dr. Sveistrup, and the company’s logo at the bottom of the page. Any other details are redacted. As you go through the field report, you find that Dr. Sveistrup is studying a virus called the “t-Pluto virus”, somehow making out a few details through the black redacted lines covering up what you assume to be text too important for any prying eyes to see. The redactions are splotchy, though, you note. Too splotchy. They don’t look neat enough to have been done with any care or concern for who may have found the report, so whoever did it must’ve not anticipated that you’d find it. You separate the first page of the report from the others and use both hands to hold the packet up to the bright, flickering fluorescent light above you, lining up the blacked-out lines with the white light and squinting your eyes. 

It’s not concentrated enough to make out any of the redacted words. You purse your lips and bring the paper back to yourself, thumb tapping mindlessly at the flat surface of it before pausing. You reach for your flashlight and turn it on as you bring it up to the paper, slotting the flat illuminated end of it underneath the blacked out words and leaning in to try and read them. It’s hard to tell the black letters from the black ink covering them, but it’s possible, and you walk over to the light switch controlling the overhead lights to turn them off in order to read the words better.

You try your best to make out the carelessly-hidden-away lines of text, and re-read the observations.

Fase 1 - 9/9, 14/9/96. Dr. Sveistrup, Hansen og Andersen.

Brug methylenblåt til at løse iltproblemet efter transformationen; »methemoglobinæmi« opstår kort efter injektionen af t-Pluto på trods af alle forsøg på at forhindre det. Årsagen er ukendt.

Klikkertræning er blevet anvendt til at måle de overlevendes auditive sanser efter behandlingen med methylenblåt.

Hver behandlet person udviser en lignende reaktion, når de placeres tæt på en anden person: først vil de forsøge at undgå hinanden, men vil snart forsøge at kannibalisere hinanden. Yderligere forskning er nødvendig for at forstå, hvor trangen til kannibalisme stammer fra. Dr. Andersen foreslår, at hver person ikke kan skelne hinanden fra en ubehandlet menneskelig person.

Uanset hvad er dette forsøg det første, hvor der er udvist kannibalisme på trods af minimale ændringer i virussen. Dr. Sveistrup har til hensigt at finde denne uønskede ændring, mens Dr. Hansen fortsætter med at forske i de allerede forvandlede individer.

Blodprøver fra de forvandlede vil blive undersøgt i lokale 111.

Just as you finish reading the last bullet point, Hunnigan’s voice comes through the radio, the quality crackling slightly due to disuse. Still, her voice is easily decipherable.

“Leon, I found two people working there listed under ‘Jeppe Andersen’. One lab manager, one head of research for Project Pluto. I’d say the latter is who you’re looking for.” 

“Project Pluto…” Leon considers, voice slightly hushed as he speaks. “Any chance we know anything about that?”

You respond before Hunnigan can say ‘no’, your finger going to your earpiece and pressing down on it to speak, “Think I just found out. There’s a ‘Dr. Andersen’ working on a ‘t-Pluto virus’ with two other researchers, Dr. Sveistrup and Dr. Hansen.” 

You can practically hear Leon’s grimace over the radio as you move back to the table and write down everything you can translate from the report. Reports of cannibalism from the infected, usage of clicker-training to gauge how well they can hear and what noises they respond to, the methylene blue being used to treat the MetHb they develop shortly after receiving the t-Pluto, you write down quickly, having little trouble writing clearly in the dark, having gotten used to doing so over the years, Dr. Andersen suggests that the infected can’t tell each other apart from non-infected individuals, Dr. Hansen is studying the transformed individuals while Dr. Sveistrup finds the change in the virus that caused the cannibalism.

“Another variant?” Hunnigan inquires, her typing audible through her radio. You nod even though she can’t see you, and your finger goes back to your earpiece.

“Think so. I found a field report on the different phases of it, and they did a sloppy job of redacting it,” you inform her, skimming through the rest of the pages of the report and jotting down any other important details as you go along flashing your flashlight underneath the poorly redacted text, “it’s from ‘96, so they’ve been doing this for almost a decade. I’ll get it back to you once we’re out of here.” 

“I’ll try to find those doctors for you, I think there’s a good chance they’re the ones who abandoned post,” Hunnigan easily replies, “keep up the good work, Dr.”

“And me?” Leon prompts Hunnigan with a hope-filled voice, the sound of it making a small smile tug at your lips. 

“I don’t know, have you done anything?” Hunnigan asks, though it’s clear in her voice what she expected Leon to respond with. He sighs over comms. 

“Just say you have favorites next time,” Leon mutters, as if actually disappointed. 

“Oh, is someone mad they haven’t found anything yet?”

“I found a whole bunch’a dead bodies,” Leon deadpans, “is that good enough for you?”

“I’d like it if you could ID any of those bodies, Leon,” Hunnigan reminds Leon.

“Yeah, Leon. Go ID the dead bodies.” 

“If you insist…” Leon sighs exaggeratedly, making you snicker after you take your finger off your earpiece. You put your notepad and pencil back into your pocket and flick the lights back on, the illuminated bars above you flickering for a moment before humming and staying on. Moving to the shelves of gloves, you find your size and slide them on, the medical blue covering your hands down to just under where your wrists end. Carefully, you grab a small plastic evidence bag from your pocket and move to take the slide from the microscope, slipping the glass rectangle into the bag and sealing it firmly. 

You slip the bag into your pocket and take off your gloves, pinching the area above your wrist and sliding it up to your mid-hand before doing the same for your other hand, except you slide the glove all the way off this time, and use it to remove the rest of the other one. You toss both items in the red trash labeled as being used for biohazardous items, and quickly exit the room, folding the report up and stuffing it in your pocket as you do.

“I’m moving to room 112, there’s two left on my side,” you let Leon know, pressing on the earpiece as you enter the next room. 

“Copy that. I’m not seeing any identification on any of the bodies, but they’re all scientists from the looks of it. I’m moving on in a minute.”

“No identification?” You furrow your eyebrows, flicking on the lights in the new room you’re in and walking around, seeing a similar set up to the last room with different equipment and one additional fridge. “What, no name tags or anything?”

“No, just lab coats,” Leon confirms, and you hear a door across the hall open and click closed as he speaks, the sound echoing through his communication device, “moving to room 115, right across from you.”

“What was in the room besides bodies?” Hunnigan inquires, still typing at her computer, the occasional mouse click heard as well, “I just got the names of the scientists in that report, too. Gitte Sveistrup and Mikkel Hansen are the two unknowns.”

“It was a room that had a thing in the back, like a table but with glass kind of encasing it,” Leon describes, “forgot what it’s called, but that was the only notable thing in the room.”

“Oh, a fume hood?” 

“Sure.”

“And there was nothing in it?”

“No, I didn’t see anything in it. There was a spray bottle with something in it next to it―”

“Probably ethanol.”

“―and some paper towels, but nothing else.”

You frown at the information. With your own fume hood, you usually keep pipette tips and plastic tubes inside of it, knowing that they need to be kept sterile before being put into the hood and it’s a pain to constantly be bringing in new ones. 

“Clearly they knew that they were leaving and cleaned some stuff up, considering that the report I found was partially redacted, but they weren’t in a hurry,” you mutter to yourself, though you keep your finger pressed against your earpiece, “they could’ve just been done working for a day, but why would the fume hood be empty? And why would they just leave blood smears out to dry if staining them barely takes more than ten minutes?”

“The room you were in didn’t have any bodies, right?” You nod at Leon's question even though he can’t see it, and he continues with a suggestion, “Maybe they left that room to go into another one and didn’t think they wouldn’t come back to it.”

You mull over his suggestion, pulling your notepad back out to write down the environment of the new room you’re in. “I could see that, yeah. There’s nobody in this room, either.” 

“Weird. I’m seeing more bodies.”

“Look out for those nametags, okay? I’m really hoping to confirm the deaths of those three doctors.”

“Copy that, Doc.” 

There’s more blood samples in this new room, you notice. There’s plenty scattered about different tables, all labeled with different numbers―numbers, you note, not names, just numbers, all generated in a way that makes me think that the numbers are determined by how many people these researchers experimented on―and what blood type is kept inside each plastic vial. You count five type O positive vials, three type AB positive, and two type B positive vials. Conveniently, there’s a microscope on the table next to this one, so you grab one of the vials and two of the various glass slides messily spread on the table. 

You mentally note the more rushed nature of this table, though you remind yourself that it could just be due to the employees here being less organized than those in the previous room. You brush both thoughts off, instead looking around for another pair of gloves and finding your size on a nearby shelf. You’re quick to slide gloves over your hands, these ones a powdery black color, and you set up one of the slides to lay on the table while holding the other one pinched between your index finger and thumb. 

You grab a small plastic straw, about the circumference of a toothpick, and gently unscrew the cap of the vial containing the blood sample. Using the straw, you dip into the dark red liquid and get maybe a tenth of a milliliter on the plastic. You dot the blood on the slide laying on the table as you set down the vial carefully, and you toss the straw across the table mindlessly before using the other slide you grabbed to smear the blood. You line up the very edge of the slide with the dot of red and wait for it to spread across that edge before quickly swiping the slide across the other, creating a thin but decent layer of blood across the slide. 

You toss the other one and go back to the refrigerator, searching for some kind of stain to use, but you don’t find any. Frowning, you swiftly exit the room and go back into the other one, grabbing the two glass bottles of stain from the backmost station and dipping into the fridge to grab the distilled water and diluted acetic acid solution. You’re quick to go back into the other room, laser-focused on staining the blood smear you just created. 

Slowly, you follow the steps to stain the blood the best you can. You use different solutions back at the office, opting for a specially made technique that’s generally more effective than what one might find in the average lab, but staining like this works just as well. In between the times needed to allow the slide to dry and let the stain set in, you decide to pass the few minutes by talking to Leon. 

“Anything interesting happening over there, Kennedy?” 

“Wish I could say so, but no,” Leon replies quickly, “I found one nametag for a ‘Søren Kjær’. Sound familiar?”

“Wish I could say so,” you parrot his words back to him. You hear the sound of clothing rustling, and Leon’s grin is evident in his next sentence. 

“What are you up to over there?” 

“I found some blood samples and I’m trying to see if they’re any similar to the one I found in the other room,” you tell him, the topic reminding you that you should dip the slide into the next stain. You didn’t bother to pour the stains into a separate container like you usually would, instead opting to dip the slide straight into the bottle and rinse off the stain with the distilled water that you also chose to not separate from the original container. 

“Sounds pretty interesting to me.”

“Do this every day for half a decade and see how interesting it is then.” 

“You’ve seen me almost every day for eight years. Is this your way of telling me I’m not interesting anymore?” 

“Well, I didn’t want to say it, but…”

“Asshole.” You snicker, and seeing as the slide with the blood smear is now dry, you prepare it to be observed before setting it under the lens of the microscope. You adjust the focus, letting the bacteria settled on the slide become more clear, before switching the lens to a more magnified one. At 40X, you adjust the light underneath the sample to increase how visible the smaller details of the smear are. You view the blood for a few seconds. It looks nearly identical to the other sample.

“Sorry. You know I didn’t mean it, right?”

“Sure, but that still hurts to hear,” Leon sighs, and you can hear the smirk in his voice as he offers, “what do you think about coming over here and making it up to me?”

You can’t help the snort that leaves you at the forced suggestive tone he uses, even if some part of you thinks that if he sounded even just a smidge more genuine, you’d be running across the hall and barreling into him as fast as possible. But, because he’s joking and you know he’s joking, you teasingly warn him, “Careful there… you know big brother’s watching.” 

He chuckles quietly at your conspiratorial tone. Hunnigan’s quiet at your comment, seemingly ignoring the two of you until you provide some intelligent words she can respond to.

You adjust the objective lens to 100X, and just as you’re about to voice your findings to Hunnigan, something slams into the door. 

You flinch at the noise, and you assume that it’s Leon, about to scold him for being so loud when the zombies around here are attracted solely to noise, but the weight against the door slams against it again. 

And this time, as it puts all of its dead weight against the door, the wooden panel splinters open to reveal two pale bodies leaning against each other.

The quiet seems louder now, especially with you having just barely held back from letting out a startled noise at the sight before you. 

You hold your breath. There’s this awful sense of dread that settles in your stomach, and each reverberating step against tiled floors echoes in your chest like the bass of a drum. Infected groans surround you, their voices shifting tones. Searching. You hate that you can hear the curiosity in their tones, how they sound almost life-like, as if these not-people haven’t been taken over by some virus. Each shaky breath that leaves and enters you has them twitching, their muscles itching to stretch and turn in your direction, to turn their attention to you. 

From what you can see, they can’t. The cataracts covering their eyes, as the doctors observed in the field report you read, are less of cataracts and more of a result of corneal clouding. It still impairs their ability to see, though, and for this, you’re grateful. However, this only means that they rely more on their other senses, and unluckily for you, they’ve settled on hearing. With every slight hitch in your breath, their attention is drawn to your direction, though not directly to you. Slowly, with the least shaky movements you can manage, you reach up to mute the small device in your ear, and the scratchy noise it makes nearly makes you flinch. Not necessarily from the volume or squeakiness of the noise, but because of the way it only serves to add more tension to your already tense environment. 

You grab one of the glass bottles of stain. You spare one glance at the label. With a silent ‘rest-in-peace’ to the perfectly fine bottle of Giemsa stain you’ve grabbed, you quietly wind back your arm and toss the bottle against the furthest wall away from you that you can. Once it hits that parallel wall, the zombies immediately screech and walk towards it, and as their screeches fill the room, you make a break for the door and run out. 

A relieved breath leaves you the moment the door closes, but your relief doesn’t last for long, as you only see more of the same creatures coming from the hall leading to the cafeteria, all slowly ambling forward in your direction.

08:22

Leon takes his time with searching the room he’s in for more nametags, strangely calm for once while on a mission. He always prefers recon missions to his usual ones, where he goes in with the goal of saving someone or taking down someone and ends up with a whole lot more than that on his plate. Hell, he can’t even remember the last time he went on a reconnaissance mission where his one and only goal was to scope out the area and then leave. 

He whistles quietly as he goes through the room, and absentmindedly gives a wolf-whistle once he finds another body with an actual name tag. He really didn’t expect to find any at all, but to find two? Shit, today might just be his lucky day. He walks the short distance over to the body, ignoring the blood and guts littering the floor beside it, too desensitized to the gore to be too bothering by putting his hands near it. As he pinches the metal clasp of the name tag, he reads the name Mikkel Hansen and all he can think about is how you’re going to react to him proudly handing you the name tag of one of the head researchers of the Big Bad™ the both of you are trying to get to the bottom of.

Leon hears the sound of glass shattering in the room across from the hall and his eyebrows furrow, his movements in trying to get the name tag off the new body pausing. He’s about to speak and ask you what’s wrong, but you beat him to it. Your end of the radio crackles because of the sheer quiet of your whispers, but he can hear the distant groaning of a second party near you as you speak. 

“Leon, there’s a group of five of them down the hall.” He swallows and quickly pockets the name tag he just pulled off Dr. Mikkel Hansen’s body, his middle finger going to press on the earpiece lodged in his ear. 

“Don’t move, I’m right here,” Leon tries to make his voice as reassuring as possible to keep you calm as he responds to you, his own voice a low murmur to keep any unwanted attention from being drawn to him. He’s quick to get to the door, though he reminds himself to stay quiet and not hurry, knowing that things would only get worse if he ended up being too loud in his attempt to help you. 

He reminds himself to tell his higher-ups that you need a gun for these missions too, even if you’re not taking on the brunt of the fight. Storing that thought in the back of his mind for later, Leon carefully opens the door and sees you standing in the middle of the hallway while staring at the creatures making their way up the stairs. Your eyes flit to his figure once he exits the room, and the attention of the undead goes to him as well. And for a moment, it’s quiet, the creatures pausing their mindless noises, before continuing with a familiar noise Leon recalls them making while the two of you were in the cafeteria.

Among the groaning creatures, all unable to be told apart from each other except for the clothes desperately clinging to their figures, is some kind of agreement. These ones won’t eat each other, not when they see fresh meat within reach; it’s this fact that drives Leon to draw his gun, safety off and finger on the trigger, the handle of it sliding into proper position in his hand like he’s practiced over the years. Cold metal meets leather gloves, weathered by his work, and his eyes may as well act as barrels with how his gaze locks onto his targets and his shots land exactly as he intends them to. The creatures all drop with every few bullets he spares on them, hitting the floor with loud thumps and meaningless screeches, withering away just as they should’ve all those years ago.

“Quick!” Leon grabs onto you without so much as thinking about it and tugs you along with him, quick to run down the hall and push through the double doors the two of you were avoiding. The stairs behind the door are steep, and both of you nearly trip on them several times, especially with Leon going two at a time and dragging you behind him with a grip so firm that if he weren’t so focused, his mind would go wandering to places outside of the facility, but you both eventually reach the second floor without him lingering too much on his grip on your wrist could be utilized in a different setting.

From there, you’re quick to reach a new room, though he soon realizes that his ability to open the door so easily and barge in extends to the zombies you’re both trying to hide from. Thankfully for him, though, you spot an old closet in the corner of the room, and both of you barely think about the size of it before dragging Leon with you towards it. 

You both manage to get inside and close the doors the best you can, though the rotting wood doesn’t make it too easy for you. The deteriorated state of the wood makes the doors feel almost fragile, as if one wrong tug could have either panel collapsing in a matter of seconds. Still, you both manage to get the doors closed just in time before the zombies manage to hear the doors closing and your heavy breathing. Both of you are laying against either side of the closet, not so close that your chests are pressed together, but close enough that there’s barely three inches between the two of you. 

It takes a few moments before you both catch your breath, your heavy breathing slowing and quieting down.

—

“Well, this is awkward, huh?”

“You’re making it worse.” 

The cramped space of the closet has both of your voices sounding louder than they probably are, even the smallest breaths sounding like panting within the confines of the old wood. Deteriorating dark wood that feels strangely damp against the palms of your hands where they splay out against the wall in an effort to give Leon space, the feeling of it making your eyebrows furrow slightly. You can physically feel splinters sliding underneath the pads of your exposed fingers, though you suppose you can take the time to dig those out later, as staying as far from Leon as possible is the priority right now. That, and staying away from the infected lingering outside of the closet. 

Leon’s quiet huff of laughter from your complaint sends a rush of heat to your cheeks. You can feel the warmth of his breath on your skin, cold from the low temperatures of the building, and you can’t help but slightly relax your rigid posture at the feeling. 

“I get that often,” Leon murmurs, before lightly puffing air at the hair getting in front of his eye. You have no idea why he bothers, considering there’s not much to see inside the cramped space with how dark it is, and he can just hear the groaning of the zombies outside, but you don’t comment on this and instead hum quietly in understanding. 

“From me?” 

“Mostly.” You can hear the grin in his voice, and you want to take your hands to his face to mold his lips into something of a straight line, just so that you don’t have to imagine the smirk probably tugging at his lips as he speaks to you. Though, that’s assuming that you wouldn’t just give into every urge you have and cradle his face in your hands, thumbs rubbing just under his eyes at the dark spots that seem to be permanently stuck there, gently tilting his face down just slightly so you can more comfortably tilt your own upwards and―

“How long ‘til they leave?” your eyes flit to the small crack in the space between the two closet doors, your voice coming out in a much quieter whisper than Leon’s. He peeks out the door and tries to observe the infected individuals, though not much can be seen beyond the small crack where the doors of the closet don’t quite meet, simply a distorted view of the bed and the wall opposite of the closet. Shrugging, Leon looks back at you―or, at least, his eyes rest where the vague outline of your face is―and replies in a slightly louder voice. 

“Don’t know. We gotta wait them out,” he unhelpfully replies, making you sigh quietly. It’s far from ideal to be trapped in here with him, especially following your crisis just a few days ago, but you don’t need him to know that you’ve been dreading the inevitable moment when the two of you would be trapped together with no escape. Still, Leon notices your disappointment, and frowns at it. 

“You comfortable?” Leon asks, assuming that that’s the issue. You’re sure he can see the wall behind you, much more broken than his side, and decide to nod in response instead of giving a real answer. It’s not comfortable by any means, but it’s not the real reason that you’re uncomfortable―that reason he doesn’t have to know, not now. Though, as if recognizing the slight hesitation you had before nodding even with the darkness of the closet, Leon gently ghosts one of his hands over your shoulder. 

“Are you sure?” Leon asks again, and dear God his voice, you think you might die and go straight to hell for every scenario you imagine in the split second you have before he speaks again, “We can switch. My side’s pretty smooth.” 

“It’s fine,” you shake your head, taking his hand away from your shoulder and giving it a squeeze before releasing it and letting it fall back to Leon’s side. He frowns, but doesn’t protest, simply looking back out the small sliver of leeway the doors give you. 

“We won’t be here for too much longer,” Leon murmurs, still hearing distant groans from the infected, not willing to risk getting out even with little zombies left. They’re dissipating quickly, having lost both you and Leon since your footsteps and gunshots are no longer giving the two of you away, “... why the hell is there a bedroom in an Umbrella facility?” 

You were just wondering the same thing, funnily enough. As the fog clouding your mind cleared, it became more confusing as to why there’s a bedroom in the upstairs floor of a facility, just above rooms used to test hazardous materials. You wouldn’t feel safe sleeping in here, personally, considering all of the risks that come with a vent connected to a room storing biohazards being in the room you sleep in, but you can’t say that Umbrella scientists are the most rule-following when it comes to safety risks. 

“A bedroom that clearly nobody’s used in a very long time,” you mutter, bending one of your knees to put a foot behind you, gently pushing a few centimeters off of the wall. The discomfort is genuinely starting to affect your back, and while you aren’t really old by any means, all the bullshit you’ve put up with over the years has done a number on your back and a few other parts of your body. 

You’re a fraction of an inch closer to Leon now. This fact does not go unnoticed by you. 

Leon, though, ignores this new development in your proximity, and in a low whisper says, “Yeah. I don’t think this kind of deterioration happens after less than five years. This feels more like decade-territory.” 

“Mhm,” you hum, not taking your eyes off of Leon, all while he continues looking out the closet. 

“You think it was one of the scientists living here?” 

“I would be the least surprised if it was one of the head researchers for whatever fucked up t-Virus variant they were making downstairs.”

Leon nods in agreement, and finally looks back at you. It’s now that he seems to notice the decrease in the proximity between the two of you, and instead of teasing you about it like you thought he would, he freezes up. Even though it’s just for a second and he forcibly relaxes himself just moments later, you still find yourself getting nervous over his reaction.

“Sorry, it’s just―” you gesture to the closet wall behind you the best you can, and Leon quickly nods again in understanding. 

“You’re fine,” he assures you, though his words come out just slightly too quickly. The inflection of his voice―and you notice this quickly, because you search for this constantly, hoping to hear it more because you know this is who Leon really is―sounds more like what it might come out as if he were just seven years younger, stumbling into you back at camp and trying to start up a small yet awkward conversation with you.

You try not to smile at his tone, simply replying, “Okay.”

It’s quiet for a little bit. The groans of the zombies are nearly entirely gone now, more of a memory than anything else, but you both remain in the closet. Despite yourself, you’re slowly gravitating towards Leon, though not by much more than fractions of centimeters at a time. Still, you’re getting closer to him, and it feels like the room is gradually getting warmer the longer you stay in the close confines of the closet. There’s levels of tension sealed into the closet as the mere seconds tick by, absorbed by the rotting wood surrounding the both of you and surrounding you two like a weighted blanket.

Leon’s noticing that you’re slowly getting closer to him. He doesn’t point it out, he doesn’t tease you, and he doesn’t even do so much as push you away or lean away from you. No, he does something much worse. 

Leon leans in closer, his cool breath ghosting over your lips. You can smell the mint of his gum with every exhale. Like a key to a lock, the very smell of it has the seam of your lips parting subconsciously, and even in the dark of the closet you can see Leon’s eyes dart down to the slight movement. It’s subtle, and your mouth doesn’t open with the action, but it means something. Something that you hate to put your finger on because you know that you can, you know this feeling intimately, like knowing the cause of death of yet another body that’s been presented to you. It’s the opposite of the cold, sterile feeling you get when you fill out another chart, reporting the clinical details of a body’s state; it feels like looking at art. Like seeing a body and seeing the soul inside of it, not just the gore living in it. 

That gore is what you see every day, in every one, except for Leon. He’s more than just the organs trapped inside the home of his skin. He’s the sound of a heart drumming against your ribcage after completing a marathon, and the sense of accomplishment that has dopamine flooding your brain; he’s the adrenaline that has your muscles stretching beyond their limits, and the sweat that you only feel after the fact. There’s very little things you can appreciate in the world now, with a mind trained to see nothing but flesh and bone, but you can appreciate him, him and his body painted with scars and imperfections, each light line on his skin like the light hitting a raised streak of paint just perfectly enough to give it depth. 

And this is dangerous, now, thinking this while Leon’s so close to you. While he’s, for God knows what reason, getting closer. 

You can feel your heart thumping in your chest. It’s rapid and loud, your heart working overtime to compensate for all the heavy feelings that settle in it, pumping liquid love and desire through your pulmonary veins to your aorta and spreading hot emotion throughout your body until your nerves feel like they’re on fire. It almost feels like you’re dying, being burned alive, and yet you find yourself leaning in closer, closing the inches turning into centimeters of distance between you and Leon, until―

“I just found a way into the basement for both of you.” Hunnigan’s voice startles you and Leon, cutting through the thick tension in the closet immediately. The way that you jump slightly has you subsequently leaning back away from Leon, which for whatever reason makes another disappointed expression cross his face, but he quickly recovers and lightly kicks open the closet doors. 

The zombies have been gone for a while, and you barely noticed. In all fairness, you were being distracted by Leon leaning into you, and it seems that he was distracted by the same thing. 

“Perfect timing.” You can’t tell if Leon’s being sarcastic or not here, but you don’t ask and you’re not sure if you want to find out. “How do we get in?”

“There’s a set of four elevators in the West wing of the building, any of them work, just scan any name tags you picked up when you’re in the elevator and head down to the basement,” Hunnigan explains. 

You swallow and you’re about to apologize to Leon before he seems to pause and remember something. He looks at you, and for a moment you think he’s going to ask you what the hell the two of you were just about to do, before he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a name tag, waving it at you. You catch the name on the paper encased in plastic, and you blink in surprise before grabbing it from Leon before he can lift it out of your reach. 

“Dr. Hansen?” you ask, and Leon nods, almost proudly. It seems the moment has brushed over for now, and for that you’re forever grateful. You can’t imagine this coming back to bite you in the ass later.

“Mikkel Hansen, confirmed dead in room 115,” Leon says over comms, though he’s looking at you the entire time, seeming expectant. Your lips quirk upwards into a small grin at the confirmation, a little more relieved now that you know where one of the three researchers are. 

“That leaves Gitte Sveistrup and Søren Andersen, then.”

“Hey, good job, buddy,” you lightly punch his upper arm, which he doesn’t even go to hold dramatically as he usually would, a bigger grin spreading across his face instead at your playful praise of his work, “thanks for contributing to the mission.” 

“Oh, well, you know me,” Leon starts walking towards the door as he sighs, “I try.” 

You give a small laugh at his words, and the tension between the two of you dissolves. It’s quick, how you both fall back into your normal routine of teasing each other, having gotten used to lightening up intense moments like this. Usually, the intense moments are more of near-death experiences in a physical sense than an emotional one, but it doesn’t make much of a difference. Not when you’ve both developed using humor as a coping mechanism for nearly everything. 

The walk back downstairs is quiet. There’s no telling where those zombies are now, seeing as you don’t run into them again while walking down the stairs and through the double doors at the bottom of them, and you manage to get down the hallway and across the cafeteria without seeing any zombies except for the dead bodies of the ones Leon shot earlier. 

Getting into the West wing is the easiest part of the mission so far. Leon presses a button for the elevator and taps his foot on the ground as you both wait for it to rise to your floor, waiting only a minute before the elevator dings and the doors open. He scans Dr. Hansen’s name tag on the black sensor bar under the buttons engraved with different levels, and selects the ‘LG’ option before leaning back against the elevator wall next to you. Over the speakers, there’s some static crackling, before calm music fills the metal box you’re both in. 

Leon whistles along to the music. You ride the elevator in silence.

Or, mostly silence. 

“What do you think we’re gonna find?” you ask, referring to the basement. Leon’s whistling pauses and he looks over at you, mulling over your question, before settling on shrugging. 

“Hopefully two dead researchers and a preserved tube of t-Pluto,” Leon responds. There must be some kind of concerned look on your face, or something that would be a cause for concern for himself, because his eyebrows draw together for a split second at the sight of you before his hand goes to your shoulder. You don’t need to be comforted right now, but you would never correct Leon on something like this, not when the warmth of his hand is seeping into your skin through your coat and there’s this reassuring look on his face that has you thinking yeah, you know what, I can pretend to be nervous for a few seconds if he’ll look at me like this. 

“Don’t worry, okay? I got you. If there’s anything down there, I’ll get it, even if it’s just a spider or something.” And wow, you can’t count on both hands how many times you’ve dreamed of him talking like that, saying he’s got you and sounding like he’ll take care of anything out to get you. 

You swallow and nod, “Thanks, Leon.”

He nods, and seems to hesitate for a moment―you can’t tell if it’s your mind play tricks on you or if he really is hesitating to take his hand off of you―before sliding his hand off your shoulder, his fingers brushing against your upper arm as he lets his hand fall back to his side. Just as he looks back to the elevator door, the speaker dings again, signifying that you’re both now in the basement. 

You look out the door into the dimmed room, and back to Leon, who's looking at you again. 

“Guess this is it.” Leon unholsters his gun, and you wait for him to check it and make sure it’s loaded and ready before gesturing to the door. 

“You first?” you prompt him, and Leon sighs, before nodding wistfully, as if being forced to go out first. 

“Anything for you, Doc.” 

09:00

Drip. Drip. Drip.

There’s some kind of clear liquid dripping from the ceiling. You want to assume that it’s water, but with Umbrella, you never know. 

As you and Leon walk further into the basement, it becomes more and more clear what it’s been used for. Not necessarily as a lab, but still as a unit for research, judging by the various zombies you’ve come across and the bodies they’ve already eaten and left nothing of but bone laying against walls and on the floor. Some are chained, as if left there on purpose, and some aren’t, as if cannibalized or escaped. 

For some strange reason, you can feel your anxiety rising more as the two of you venture deeper into the dark room, your notepad and the samples you collected earlier weighing heavy in your pocket. Maybe it’s the fact that you and Leon both need to use your flashlights to see at all in here, or the fact that there’s gore everywhere you step, but no matter what it is, something has you feeling uneasy. 

It’s that sense of impending doom that comes before a heart attack. There’s a rush that goes through you, whether it’s adrenaline or not you don’t know, but it travels through your body quickly and makes you lean closer to Leon. You don’t know if it’s because he’s feeling that same unnerving feeling, but he’s very slightly leaning close to you too, making you a little less nervous. It doesn’t help that your radios don’t seem to work at all down here, with Hunnigan’s voice having been absent ever since you began traversing through the dark basement, and a few test runs proving that nothing but static can be heard through either of your ear pieces. 

The mission can’t stop, even if the conditions are less than optimal. They usually are, anyway. As much as you’d love to keep having Leon’s voice in your ear, either guiding you through the dimmed hallways or making jokes to lighten the mood both for yourself and him, you figure you can live without it for a few minutes if the two of you ever split up. Knowing how these missions typically go, it’s likely that you will. 

“Ah, shit.” 

The curse leaves you as you see a split in the road, conveniently coming into view just as you were thinking about it. Leon sighs quietly at the sight of the two branching off hallways, both blocked by double doors with one having flickering lights illuminating a dark hallway seen through the thin strip of glass in the door, and the other nothing but pitch black. You both know, as you see the two doors, that you’ll have to part ways for a little bit, as much as you both hate it. Not just because you’ll be away from each other, which is a nightmare on its own―maybe there’s some layers of less-than-healthy codependency between the two of you, but that never hurt anyone―but also because you’ll have no way of immediately contacting each other. 

Still, you have work to do. As you turn to Leon, about to ask which door either of you should go through, you catch sight of a black metal object being offered to you. Your gaze lowers and you see the handgun Leon usually keeps holstered on his hip, opposite of the revolver kept on the other side of him. It's then that you realize you don’t really have a proper weapon, which, sure, that’s probably something you should be given considering the situation you’re in, but as a part of the forensics team and an acting field medic on occasion, you never really questioned its absence from your person.

“Are you sure?” you frown, looking at the gun Leon tries to hand to you, the muzzle facing his feet and the grip facing you. He nods, clearly not taking ‘no’ for an answer. You’ve seen his work with a knife before, you know that he’s more than capable of taking care of himself without a melee weapon, but you still get nervous at the thought of him being without a gun. 

“Positive,” Leon replies without hesitation, shaking the gun lightly in his grip to try and prompt you to take it. You’re confident in your abilities with a gun, that’s a fact that you’ve never questioned, having been trained in combat after being picked up from Seattle just like every other poor soul involved in some Raccoon City-type incident. Still, you hate to leave Leon with nothing much more than a hunting knife. 

“Don’t die on me,” you warn him, taking the gun gingerly and holding it in your hand to make up for your lack of a holster, “it’ll be on my conscience forever.” 

Leon’s too-serious expression melts into something else at your words, and there’s a small smile left on his face instead. “I’ll try my best, Doc.”

You both look back at the set of doors, and Leon points to the pitch black one, asserting, “I’ll take that one, you go through the other one. Meet up back here in ten minutes or less if you don’t find anything.” 

“If I don’t see you…?” 

“Then go through my door.” 

“And vice versa.” 

“Exactly,” Leon nods, not moving from his spot even as you begin walking towards your door, the flickering lights promising you some sort of safety, “be careful.” 

You scoff, “I’m always careful.” 

Leon raises an eyebrow at you but doesn’t argue, leaving you to push through the doors and walk into your designated hallway. As the doors close behind you, Leon’s expression fades into something more neutral, and with nothing else to do, he finally makes his way to his own double doors and pushes through.

—

Leon can’t stop thinking about it. There’s usually a million thoughts going through his head, ranging from what he’s going to eat for dinner to if he can spare the bullets on the enemy in front of him, but right now he can only think about the ten minutes he was in that closet with you. Well, it’s closer to eleven, at around ten minutes and forty seconds, but damn it, he’ll minimize it as much as he can just to get the entire situation out of his head. Every step he takes echoes off the metal walls around him and his frustration is stomped out with it, ricocheting off the walls and swirling around him like the heat in an incubator. 

He keeps walking, and he keeps feeling that heat beating against his back, hard enough that if it really were any hotter than fifty degrees in here, he’d be sweating. Shit, he might actually be sweating, just thinking about it. About you. About that disgusting closet, rotted with mold and termites, with a scent like the deepest pits of hell and tension like the lava lakes within it. Thick with heat and melting the shame off of his skin, wax wings making candle rivers down his back and bleached white feathers making a breadcrumb trail behind him. His very own River Styx flows behind him as he walks further into the basement, and dread floods his very soul, thinking about the instant that you flinched away from him as Hunnigan interrupted the two of you. The flying feeling he had when you leaned in just as he did, the wind under his wings carrying him above the old closet and inches turning into centimeters away from the sun, and yet―

That heat, that beautiful heat that peppers his skin like kisses betrays him and takes those same kisses away from him. And Jesus, if he wasn’t so used to Hunnigan, he’d be mad at her. Selfishly, so mad at her, for no reason other than she ripped the wax off his back and slapped him with a half-melted slab of it. No more mad at himself, though; not as mad as he was with himself a few days ago when he was in your lab, sitting right next to you, not wanting to leave. When he was two steps from the door and halted the moment you spoke, barely listening to what you said, just wanting to hear you. 

And that look on your face, hesitant and nervous and about to say something important―he knows it was important, it had to be, his perception’s too good to fail him at a moment like that―when suddenly your apprentice barged into the room, still looking sick and spit still slick at the corners of his mouth. He looked at you then, and that hesitancy faded into nothingness, soon replaced by exasperation and a tired shake of your head. His stupid, stupid decision to just walk out and not kick out your apprentice to get another five minutes with you and just hear you makes him so unbelievably mad at himself. 

Maybe that’s what’s really wrong with him. His inability to push for what he wants, to just accept everything he’s given and never push back. Not that he’s not assertive, but he sure as hell isn’t demanding. Not while he’s sober, anyway. Shit, maybe he does need to go get a drink after all of this is over. Whether or not he should invite you requires an entire pros and cons list, consisting of well, if he invites you, he’ll be able to drink with a friend and won’t look like a miserable asshole at the bar, and on the opposite end, if he invites you, he might drink more than he intended to, and spill either alcohol or every moment he’s thought about how you’d look sleeping next to him with nothing but his shirt on, with one burning significantly more than the other. And, spoiler alert, it’s not the alcohol. 

Or maybe he just needs to get it all out. Maybe he just needs a shot or two, and then he can safely tell you that hey, I’ve been been thinking about you for the past seven years now, and you’re the only one who makes me feel like I actually have more to live for than being a tool for the government to use every time they encounter a B.O.W. in a foreign country. You’re not the type to think he’d be disingenuous if he was a little tipsy while he told you, right? God, he hopes not. He can’t remember the last time he was home by himself and didn’t have a few glasses of whiskey before heading off to bed, hoping that the last nightmare he lived through won’t invade his dreams through the gentle haze of alcohol flooding his mind.

Leon frowns as he reaches the concrete wall signalling the end of his journey. There’s nowhere to go but back, it seems, the gray walls crowding him into a hallway with an underwhelming end. With nothing else to do―the doors are all either gateways to empty rooms or locked with no way of opening them, no matter how much weight Leon puts into his feet as they make contact with the doors―Leon finds himself turning around and starting to head back. He assumes that you’ve either found something or ran into a similar issue, and imagines that he’ll just regroup with you once he makes his way out of his corridor. 

It’s times like these that he wishes the connection between your earpieces weren’t so fickle, and that he could just contact you and ask if you’re okay, but the basement’s disruption of your signal prevents him from doing so. Leon isn’t even thinking about Hunnigan anymore despite the fact that he should be worried about updating her on his findings, or lack thereof. It’s perfectly normal to be worrying about your partner, but he was taught that the mission will always come first, no matter your connection to who you’re working with. And it’s those moments that he remembers his role in the grand scheme of the government’s attempts at minimizing Umbrella’s damage; he’s not their pawn, but their knight, just as easily sacrificed as he is praised for his work.

Leon shakes away his thoughts, and starts to walk back faster.

—

The flickering lights don’t do much to make you feel safer. You can see more than Leon probably can, but the annoying buzz of the yellow-white lights aren’t comforting at all, and neither is the occasional moment where the hallway goes almost entirely dark only to be lit up once again, leaving you with incremental moments of heightened anxiety thinking about if something will suddenly spawn from the shadows in front of you. Your grip on the gun Leon lended you is tight, and every time you feel the metal start to feel a little too warm, you remind yourself to loosen your grip. 

Your mind is relatively empty as you walk through the hallway. Partially out of ignoring what’s been happening the past few days, and also out of fear that you’ll distract yourself with said thoughts about what’s been happening and end up dying in a cold, dark basement, alone. It’s hard to purposefully ignore everything, especially as every now and then, a too prolonged bout of silence will prompt your mind to start replaying the short length of time you’d been stuck in that closet, and what would’ve happened had Hunnigan’s voice not interrupted the two of you. You can’t tell if you’re grateful for it or not, considering that when you really think about it, you don’t know if Leon was actually leaning in too or not. 

It could’ve just been your imagination. Maybe your mind was just trying to see something that wasn’t there, with the dark contributing to your delusions, making you think that Leon was getting closer but in reality was staying perfectly still. You were so caught up in yourself that, honestly, you might’ve just been imagining all that tension. If you had leaned in just a little too close, and your lips brushed against Leon’s, and he ended up pulling away, or getting offended, or―

Shit. Stop thinking about it. This isn’t helping at all. You need to keep walking forward, faster, try to get to the end of this hallway as quickly as possible and just hope to whoever’s listening that you don’t find anything of importance. You’d rather just find a wall of nothing so that you can head back and go up that elevator again, catch a flight back home, and try to just move past everything that’s happened so far. 

You get further down the hall, and the lights slowly get more stable. They flicker less, leaving more light for you, guiding you down an exponentially expanding corridor. As you look at the walls on either side of you, concrete begins to be separated by glass walls, six small holes at the top of each one providing oxygen to the creatures held inside each cell. They barely react to your presence, with most of them either standing still or roaming aimlessly within their small, glass-concrete prisons. 

They all hold different deformities, you notice. Some are just rotting human bodies with glassy eyes and not much else, but others have longer limbs with rippling muscles that move underneath their skin like water, or larger, satellite-like ears that twitch with every step you take. You reach for your notepad mindlessly, your writing utensil coming out of your pocket with it, and you note every mutation you see as you linger by each cell. It helps keep your mind busy with anything but Leon, instead focusing solely on the disgusting creatures in front of you. 

And to think that, at some point, they were human. Your eyebrows draw together for a split second at the thought, and you promptly ignore it as you keep writing, eyes moving continuously between your paper and the deformed zombie you’re currently standing in front of. It’s staring at you, but its foggy eyes look through you, unable to see you but still able to hear the sound of your pencil gliding across the thin paper of your notepad. 

You’re so engrossed in your writing, determined to keep your mind on it for as long as possible, that you don’t even notice the fingers deftly slipping into the collar of your coat until you’re suddenly pulled back and thrown to the ground. 

It nearly knocks the wind out of you with the force of it, but you manage to gasp in enough air to keep you from losing too much of it. As you look above you, you see a blonde woman standing over you, her face coming more into view as she kneels down to get closer to you. Her knees crack with the effort, and there’s a small wince that crosses her face before she schools her expression into something more neutral. There’s the natural upwards curve of her lips that almost makes her look like she’s smiling, but her eyes tell you that she’s not. 

You attempt to roll over and at least get onto your knees so that you can fight her, your gun still in your hand but your position making it nearly impossible to accurately shoot at her, but the woman stops you before you can. Her hand is firm against your throat, holding you down with strength you didn’t expect from her, seeing her deep wrinkles and thin arms, but she manages to keep you down. Your legs instinctively fold up so that you can push yourself upwards with more leverage, but the tiny prick and weird pressure you feel in your neck makes you hesitate, stupid as the reaction is, and it’s barely a few seconds later until your knees give out and your legs fall limp against the concrete floor you now fully lay on. 

Your breathing takes a little more effort now. Your lungs constantly feel like they’re being compressed, your skin starting to feel a little tighter, and your muscles locking up to the point where you don’t think you can move them at all. 

“There we go,” the woman coos above you, standing back up and slowly walking around you until she’s facing you, “no running now, skatte. I need you to stay still for this.” 

She moves to straddle you as she comes down, getting as close to you as possible. Her body is uncomfortably cold and almost rock solid, feeling like a human-sized boulder sitting on top of you. From this angle, you can better read the tag on her dirtied lab coat, seeing the name Gitte Sveistrup in bold letters staring at you. The syringe she pulled from your neck rolls away from your head now, the sound of the plastic tube slowly growing fainter, and a small knife replaces it in her hand. 

“I didn’t realize we would meet so soon,” Sveistrup murmurs against your ear as she presses down against you, her thighs bracketing yours and the sharp edge of her knife dangerously close to slicing a red line across your throat as she holds it against you, “I apologize for giving such an awful first impression of me. I wish we met differently.” 

You can’t respond to her verbally or even with the movement of your head, unable to do anything but lay under her. You don’t hyperventilate like you might if your chest didn’t feel like there was a heavy weight pressing down against it, but a chill still runs up your spine at the sheer helplessness of your position.

Sveistrup breathes raggedly against you, and the cadence of her voice slows before dipping down into an almost intimate tone, “I’m dying faster than I thought I would. This sickness… I thought I created a vaccine, but I was ambushed by Pluto barely a week ago. I can feel it changing me, and it’s so… so painful.” 

Her lips are touching the shell of your ear and you wince at the contact, but she doesn’t react to your clear discomfort, only continuing on, “Have you felt it, lille lam? This… reminder of your mortality, after forgetting that you, too, have life, and therefore can be punished by God?” 

The knife drags against your skin, just barely nicking the top-most layer of it but still stinging. The slow drag makes you bite your lip, refusing to make any noises that may alert Sveistrup of her success in harming you. She can see through the hardened expression on your face, though; her lips form a smile against your ear, wide enough for the skin to crack and cold blood to smear against your skin. The feeling makes you shiver. 

“What’s your goal?” Your voice comes out in a croak from disuse, your lips moving just enough to properly form words, though you have no luck moving any other part of your body. “To take me down with you?” 

Sveistrup hums in consideration, pulling her face away from your ear to look down at you. Her knife is pulled away from your throat, and you hate that she feels safe enough to do so, because that means that she knows you’re unable to do anything against the threat she poses. 

“No,” Sveistrup admits, setting her knife to the side, right above your head and in the center of your two now pinned down arms. Taunting you. “I need your help.” 

“For Pluto?” you assume, thinking that Sveistrup needs help developing the virus.

Sveistrup’s eyes narrow at you. “Virussen? No. I underestimated Pluto, I understand that now. I know this infection like I know myself now, and I know that there’s nothing more to find from it. But…” 

Sveistrup’s gaze moves away from you, as if lost in thought for a moment, before she comes back to herself and continues, “... I need to make sure that my cure works. It was built purely from a hypothetical, never tested on myself for fear that it would have the opposite effect or no effect at all, but now that you’re here… you understand what I’m saying, don’t you?” 

Unfortunately, you do. You caught on the moment she said she needed to make sure that the cure worked before she used it on herself, knowing that she meant to use it on you first, since you’re the most viable test subject she has―not yet deformed by the virus, ready to be injected with it and subsequently “cured” assuming that the cure does work―and the most convenient. You don’t voice any of this, though, because you can see on her face that she already knows that you do. 

“Of course you do. You’re very smart, clearly.” Sveistrup nods in agreement with herself, and stands up, looming over you. You can just barely move your head to track her movements, seeing her walking away from you and a little further into the hall. You keep thinking about what she’s going to do to you, what’s going to happen if the cure doesn’t work but the virus does, if Leon will ever get here in order to stop her―

“Don’t think too hard, it makes it worse,” Sveistrup calls out over her shoulder, before coming back with two syringes in either of her hands. One holds a pink-tinted liquid with a light red strand of aggregated material inside of it, fleshy and holding together despite its frayed edges. The other is a clear liquid, clearly thick, telling by the way the air bubbles trapped inside of the syringe move slowly through the liquid. She kneels beside you now rather than straddling you, which you’re eternally grateful for, and sets down the clear liquid-filled needle without much regard for how much bacteria is on the floor. 

She looks away for just a moment, fiddling with the syringe to ensure that no air bubbles escape into your bloodstream, and you try your best to move your arms as she does. Her eyebrows are furrowing now, and foreign curses are whispered under her breath as the plunger refuses to move. Your dominant arm, though still heavy and feeling sluggish, manages to move down slightly. You pause your moving, checking to see if she noticed, but she didn’t. 

As quickly as you can, you move your arm further down, shifting your hand so that it’s facing your abandoned gun. You would get the knife closer to you, but you don’t trust yourself to move at Sveistrup with enough force in order to actually do any lethal damage. The handgun is cold now as your fingers brush against the grip of it, and you swallow quietly as you try your best to actually get your fingers to wrap around it. Sveistrup finally got the plunger to move, and her expression goes back to something less frustrated, and your hand is moving faster, trying so hard to just get your hand to properly grip the gun and angle it upwards just enough to get her. 

“I wish I had better utensils for such―” Sveistrup is just about to turn back to you, functioning syringe in hand, when you manage to steady your gun on the ground and turn the muzzle upwards just enough so that when you pull the trigger, a loud bang sounds out and a large, red hole is suddenly present in her shoulder. 

A half-surprised-half-pained noise escapes Sveistrup, and she reaches for her knife with her non-injured side, while you deliver another quick shot to her arm. She’s quick to pivot and half-plunge her knife into the bottom left of your abdomen, making an involuntary inward hiss escape you and a sharp groan follow it soon after. The shock leaves you a little more mobile, fortunately for you, making it easier for you to maneuver yourself into a more comfortable position. She’s practically leaning over you now, so you knock down her injured shoulder and move so that you’re half-straddling her and half-planking on the ground. In this position, you can ease yourself up into a sitting position, and point your gun directly at her forehead.

Even just the sight of the muzzle facing her has a cry pre-emptively leaving her, and even now as she’s laying down, there’s a small, pained whimper that comes with each of her exhales. A similar noise is leaving you as you breathe heavily, practically panting now, but you know that you need to get out quickly to treat your own wound. Still, you have Sveistrup right here, and you won’t pass up the opportunity to question her a little more.

“Where’s Dr. Andersen?” you pant, your voice coming out a little hoarse but still understandable. Sveistrup stares at you, eyes narrowing minutely for a split second before she scoffs. 

“Why does it matter?” Sveistrup spits, about to attempt to get up with her good arm but stopping once she realizes that you’re still pointing the gun at her. You give her a look, ignoring how you’re getting a little dizzy standing for so long, and Sveistrup sighs, “He’s gone. That’s all that I can tell you, is that he’s― he’s gone.”

You raise an eyebrow at her. Assuming she’s telling the truth, which you’d like to think that she is to make this whole ordeal a whole lot simpler, you should just kill her now and head back out. There’s no point in leaving her alive or taking her, there’s nothing that you could get out of her that you don’t already know. 

Seeing that you’re not moving from your position above her, Sveistrup looks around, looking almost nervous. You track her eyes, but she’s just looking around herself, most likely searching for an exit of some sort. Her eyes flit back to you, and she stays quiet for a few more seconds, before seemingly breaking. 

“Fuck! Fine, he’s―” Sveistrup swallows, before her head jerks in a nodding movement towards one of the cells in the wall further behind her, “he’s there.” 

Your gaze shifts from her face to the cell, but you don’t have to look to know what you’d find. Or, at least, you didn’t think you did. You don’t get the best view of the interior of the cell from here, instead looking in it from a weird angle, but you can see the standing, rotting body that you expected to find in there. What you didn’t expect to see, though, is ragged plaid covering the five-foot-five or -six zombie’s body, with his pants not fitting him properly and liver spots dotting his cheeks and neck. 

“I found him this morning.” Sveistrup sounds almost proud of herself for a moment, “This is his punishment for leaving me to do this on my own.” 

“How did he get like that so fast?” you have to ask, eyebrows furrowing as you better observe the man, tilting your head to get a better angle of him. Sveistrup gives a small smile at your curiosity. 

“Magic,” she whispers conspiratorially, making your gaze snap back to her with an unimpressed look. You guess you’ll just have to find out how exactly that happened from the report, then. 

You feel a little light-headed after looking back at her so fast, and you figure that you should probably be moving faster to get back to the safehouse as fast as possible. Taking a few deep breaths, you bring your gun back up, not having realized that you let it drop to your side at some point, and Sveistrup’s eyes immediately widen. 

“Wait, wait―” 

You don’t wait for her to plead her case to you. A quick shot to the head has her quiet in a second, and you deem her dead the moment you see the faint twitching of her muscles and hear the air in her lungs begin to escape her. You step back away from her, and you stumble into the wall in your attempt to try and walk properly. It’s almost entirely adrenaline that gets you moving, pushing yourself off of the wall and walking as fast as you can down the hallway. You’re just glad the walk isn’t too far, with your limp slowing you down significantly and not allowing you to walk more than a few steps before having to stop for a moment and catch your breath. 

The flickering lights are starting to make you feel sick, between whatever chemical agent Sveistrup injected you with―which, it must be more than a paralyzer, you now realize, considering that your vision blurs every now and then and you see double when you walk for too long without a break―and the wound in your abdomen. It’s not big by any means, or at least not big for a stab wound, but it’s still deep enough to make you want to lay back down and wait until the throbbing sensation dulls down to something more bearable. 

You reach the doors in a little less than ten minutes, with your walking gradually getting faster as the chemicals flowing through you had slowly dissipated and allowed you a little more movement, and you push through them by putting all of your weight on one of the doors. And as you push through with a grunt, still holding your side to slow the bleeding as much as you can, you swear you think you’re hallucinating when you catch sight of a familiar blonde standing in front of you. 

You figure out quickly, though, that you’re not hallucinating, as said “hallucination” begins to speak.

Leon says your name worriedly, and when you don’t immediately respond to him, he rushes towards you and grabs you by the shoulders to help you stand up straighter. You groan quietly at the effort, and shift your hand slightly off of your wound to show Leon the bloody mess beneath your palm before putting pressure back onto it the best you can. 

“Hey,” you put your free hand on his shoulder to cease his imminent concern, and his gaze flits from your wound to go up to your face, the small grin on your face making his brows furrow together, “you’re never gonna guess who I just ran into.”  

10:03

The ride back to the safe house is, in Leon’s personal opinion, maybe one of the most stressful car rides he’s ever had the displeasure of being involved in.

He’s speeding down the road with you in the passenger seat, still holding a hand over your wound and biting back small noises at the dull throbbing in your abdomen. He knows, somewhere in the back of his mind, that because you’re still conscious and able to speak, the wound can’t be too bad. Not too bad in terms of what “too bad” is defined as in your line of work, he means, reconsidering his thoughts as he realizes that he just called a stab wound not too bad. 

The car ride is relatively quiet, the silence only broken up by Leon asking if you’re still alive and you replying that you won’t be if he doesn’t drive faster, and each time he obliges by speeding up a little bit. He doesn’t need to switch gears anymore, not stopping at lights and not slowing down for turns, the car nearly tipping over a few times with his reckless driving. You can barely tell anyway, from what he can see every time he spares a glance at you, everything from a small bump in the road to a dangerous turn feeling just as stomach-turning for you. 

You’re back at the safehouse in a significantly shorter amount of time than it took you to leave it and reach that facility. The trip from the car to the inside of the house is a blur, with Leon quickly picking you up from the passenger’s seat and moving you inside of the house as fast as he can, grabbing the back of a wooden chair with his free hand as his other hand keeps you held against him, chest pressed against his and hand wedged between both of your abdomens to apply pressure to your own.

Leon’s quick to set you down on one of the kitchen chairs he dragged into the makeshift living room, trying to ignore your shallow breathing for his own sake. Your hand is still over your wound but not applying enough pressure, so he quickly yanks his shirt up and over his head, bundling it up into a ball and wedging it between your hand and the still bleeding wound, the small noise you let out at the feeling making him wince. He’s usually better with this, better at separating his feelings from his actions, but he can’t bring himself to do so now. Not when it’s you. 

“You have to hold this here, okay?” Leon’s voice comes out as more pleading than he wished it would, but he was stupid to think that he could keep even a fraction of the concern he holds for you from lacing his tone, “Okay?”

You nod the best you can, giving a small up-down movement with your head that Leon decides is good enough. He’s quick to search the safe house for a medical kit to patch you up with, finding one of yours that you kept in your makeshift-bedroom in case of emergencies, and he figures that it’ll have to do the trick until you can get proper medical attention. He hurries back to you, unzipping the hard case of the kit as he gets back to you, still sitting on that kitchen chair and leaning back while you keep Leon’s bundled shirt pressed against you the best you can. 

Leon looks between you and the kit, trying to think. His mind is both going too fast and not fast enough to figure out what to do, and he’s about to just say fuck it and start stitching you up here before you speak up. 

“Couch,” you remind Leon the best you can with the raspy quality that your voice has taken on. Leon nods quickly, realizing that this should’ve been the first step, but tries not to beat himself up over not just immediately laying you down against a flat surface. He gathers you in his arms and is swift in his transfer of you from the chair to the couch a few paces away. You nod towards the medical kit once he sets you down, and he opens it, finding a few different useful items. 

He doesn’t pick up the suture needle and nylon thread yet, now figuring that he’ll have to stitch you up after disinfecting your wound. He catches you prying his balled up shirt off of your wound from his peripheral vision, but he doesn’t stop you, assuming that you know what you’re doing. Leon grabs a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide from the kit, but the moment his fingers properly grasp it, you make an urgent warning sound in the back of your throat. 

“Not that―” you cough a little from the quickness with which you speak, and Leon almost immediately puts the bottle back, “use the saline next to it.” 

Leon looks to the left of the hydrogen peroxide and finds a small bottle of sterile saline with a spray attachment on top of it, picking that up instead and making his way back to you. You squint at the bottle in his hand and sigh, relieved, before gesturing towards your wound, implicating that Leon should spray the solution over it. He obliges easily, following your lead, and even as you hiss at the stinging feeling of the wash flooding your wound, he carries through with it until he sees you motion for him to stop. The can is topped and tossed to the side quickly, and Leon moves to grab the suture material from the kit. 

He sees the look you give him at the sight of him with the curved needle and the blue thread that comes with it, and he tries to give you the most comforting look that he can. The wound seems to have slowed its bleeding significantly, with it not being so deep that it’s fatal, but deep enough to cause worrying amounts of blood loss if not dealt with accordingly. 

“Don’t worry, I’ve done this before,” Leon tries to reassure you, attempting to firmly grasp the small needle between his fingers. 

“Needle holders,” you stress, genuinely sounding concerned for your own safety with your life in Leon’s hands. He pauses his fumbling with the suture needle for a moment, and looks down at the medkit, seeing the tools you’re referring to and realizing now why they felt so familiar when he first saw them. Leon reaches down and grabs one of the scissor-like tools, and spots a pair of forceps next to it, grabbing that as well and coming back up, holding the two tools up and waiting for your approval. 

You nod at the sight, relaxing once again and wincing at the pressure in your abdomen, and Leon realizes at the sight of you that he should probably be moving a little bit faster. He looks down at your wound and thinks. He remembers one stitch pattern from his emergency training, but he barely remembers how he did it, just knowing that it was the simplest one he could learn and the easiest one to do. He barely stitches himself up during missions, never getting any practice in, usually relying on the cans of magical first-aid spray he’s provided with and whatever strange herbs he finds while he’s wandering around. 

“Okay,” Leon breathes, swallowing before leaning over you and closer to your wound, steadying the needle he’s holding with the needle holder and gently prodding at the skin surrounding the puncture site with the forceps. He can see you trying to slow your breathing to make it easier for him, less movement jostling the tools in his hands around, and he finds himself grateful for your efforts even if he wishes you didn’t have to do that for him. He carefully pinches the skin at the edge of one side of the wound with the forceps, and with a deep breath, begins stitching you up. 

Pulling the skin apart and pushing it back together with every stitch and hearing each pained breath that comes from you as he does makes Leon’s stomach turn, but he doesn’t stop. He pushes through the awful feeling the sounds of your struggling bring him, and ignores each small grunt that escapes you, instead focusing on his stitching. He knows that he must be messing up a little bit, must be sloppy with his work, but he figures that if it’s good enough, he can call for medical attention to be on the helicopter coming your way as soon as he finds his backup radio. 

Tying the knots after each small suture is surprisingly easy, and gets easier as Leon gets used to effectively using scissors for hands. You get quieter as he continues, and he thinks it's you also getting used to the feeling of a needle and string sliding in and out of you, though he knows that the feeling is weird enough that it still gets bothersome even after a few minutes of it happening. 

It’s not a large wound by any means, so it doesn’t take him too long to stitch. Albeit, he is rushing himself a little bit, wanting to call in a helicopter to get the two of you out of here as fast as possible, but he’s trying to go just the perfect speed where he isn’t going too slow but isn’t going so fast as to hurt you too much or make the stitching ineffective. In maybe fifteen minutes, he’s managed to carefully stitch your wound together, and ties off the last knot before searching around him for a pair of scissors. The medical kit contains a small pair, and he leans down to grab it, carefully handling the small blades and cutting off the excess thread left on the needle. 

“Jesus,” Leon huffs out under his breath, finally allowing himself to actually breathe as he pulls away from you, tossing the suture needle and leftover thread onto the coffee table behind him. He looks at the bundled up shirt lying beside your head, and manages to joke poorly, “if you wanted my shirt off that bad, you could’ve just asked.” 

“Nobody asked you to take your shirt off, Leon,” you immediately reply, voice still a little raspy but sounding better. You try to push yourself up onto your elbows to see Leon better, but he quickly moves to push you back down by the area just under your collarbone until you’re flat against the couch again. He gives you a warning look at your efforts. 

“You’re staying here until we get picked up,” Leon orders you, trying to sound as serious as he can while you give him an offended look at his clear distrust in your ability to sit up a little bit, “shit, I need to tell Hunnigan what happened.” 

“Can’t believe I’m getting kicked out to the couch…” Leon ignores your wistful muttering in favor of searching for his backup radio, walking back to your temporary bedroom and looking through his bag. He finds a small, black device with a light green screen and a few buttons indicating whether he wants to call someone or hang up. 

As he walks back to you, Leon presses the button that automatically connects him to Hunnigan’s line, and brings the device up to his ear. It takes a few seconds, but eventually Hunnigan’s voice is heard through the small, low-quality speakers. 

“Leon?”

“We can’t get to the extraction point.” Leon sits down next to your legs, switching the device in his hand to his nondominant one so that he can rest his right hand on your knee, “And we need a medical team.” 

“I’ll send a team down to you,” Hunnigan replies easily, typing sounds heard from her end, “what happened over there?”

“You also did not have to carry me, at all,” Leon hears you say from his right, though he pointedly ignores you, even as you continue, “I could’ve walked.” 

“They got hurt?”

“Badly. Stab wound.” 

“Are you being serious?”

“I’ll let the team know, I have some people already deployed in Sweden. They’ll be over to you in an hour or two. Can you wait that long?” 

Leon looks over at you, looking at the sutures holding your skin together, and decides on replying, “I think so.” 

“Good. We’ll get you to a private airport with a plane ready as soon as we can. Just hang in there for now, okay?” 

“Copy that.” 

00:27

The bench outside of your apartment has a really, really shitty view of the city. Still, you sit there, right beside Leon. You lean back against the bench, and your head naturally leans to the side, not entirely on Leon’s shoulder but almost there. It’s quiet out here, and it smells like freshly cut grass and familiar cologne on worn leather. You feel like, if you stay here too long, your feet will become rooted to the ground and you’ll stay sitting here forever. You don’t think you’d mind that too much, as long as Leon’s still sitting here beside you. 

You’re both usually quiet when you come out here. Not necessarily silent, more like shared quiet conversations held under pale moonlight, illuminating the both of you in ways that have your eyes lingering on each other when you think it won’t be noticed. Leon’s hair looks silvery under the moon, you’ve noticed, with the blonde ends of his hair looking more white than pale yellow and the brunette roots looking light a lighter, mousier chestnut-like color than usual. Dark shadows are cast over the skin by his nose, and his cheeks give the impression that they dip deeper than they actually do. You know that they aren’t contoured how the moon makes them out to be because you’ve held them before in your hands, your thumbs digging into that same skin as if it could suck you in and keep you trapped there with him forever. 

You don’t realize you’re staring at him until he looks back at you, catching you, and you look away instinctively. Leon snorts at how you immediately avert your gaze, but he doesn’t comment on it. 

Instead, Leon continues to look at you, for so long that it turns into staring. When you look back at him, his pupils are dilated. They look like two black holes staring right at you, the icy blue of his irises distorting around the horizon of his pupils, two singularities burning holes through your own two eyes. Distantly, you remind yourself that the sun is setting and therefore his eyes are searching for more light, but the forefront of your mind wants so desperately for you to believe that article you read some months ago stating that it could be due to attraction. It’s nothing more than a pseudo-science, just as real as your blood being blue, or prayer curing disease, or―

“Thinking about something?” Leon’s voice interrupts you. There’s a smirk on his face that you can’t tell if you want to slap it off or kiss it off. 

“Not you.” 

“Didn’t say you were.” He’s insufferable. Too smug for his own good. Arrogant bastard who thinks he can just get whatever he wants whenever he wants, all because he’s the president’s number-one cocksucker, prancing around with his daughter and some stupid scientist from Spain that you don’t think about on the daily. Annoying and not anywhere near qualified to just barge into your lab whenever he wants to, that stupid grin on his face and a new vial of whatever for you to play with, always acting as if he’s so great for bringing it to you. 

To you, specifically, some traitorous voice in the back of your mind tries to speak up, but you shut it down easily. 

“Y’know, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you actually are thinking about me,” Leon insists, some level of curiosity dipping into his tone despite that teasing lilt he still keeps in his voice, “penny for your thoughts?”

“You’ll need a whole lot more than a penny for those.” He huffs out a laugh and your heart beats a little faster. Asshole. 

“I can match your salary if you want,” Leon offers. You’d think he’s serious if not for the look on his face, so knowing, as if he knows every little thing about you. You’re starting to think he might.

—

Leon can’t tell if you want to kiss him or kill him. He’ll take either one, as long as it’s you, but he much prefers the former. 

You’re silent for a bit, and he feels something like a buzzing along his veins, humming under his skin and damn near making him vibrate with the intensity of it. Forget anything from a gun or a glass, this feeling is worse than any shot he’s taken. Your eyes are flitting all over his face and it’s killing him, whether you intend for it to or not, and he’s so close to just leaning in and kissing that frown right off your face. It seems to always be present, only ever going away when Leon manages to make you laugh or smile, and damn it if it doesn’t make his ego that much bigger just knowing that he’s only ever witnessed himself wipe that frown off your face. 

“Your pupils are dilated. It’s making me worry,” you speak, finally, and all Leon hears is that you were looking at his eyes. 

“... Is that really all you’re thinking about?” Leon has to ask, needing some confirmation that you’re interested in him beyond the size of his pupils. 

“What else should I be thinking about?” you respond with your own question, all the more frustrating and making that buzzing a little stronger, his pinky twitching and his hand gently pulling together into a fist to stop it. Leon doesn’t dare look away despite having the strong urge to do so, just to get away from your intense stare, and instead remains looking unblinkingly at your face. 

His eyes flit down to your lips. They’re slightly chapped, but so are his, so he can’t judge. A hand comes up to the side of your face without either of you realizing it, him only noticing that his body has moved on its own once his palm comes into contact with your cold skin. He can feel the weight of your face just barely drop into his hand and it makes both his heart and breath stutter, hitching and going out of rhythm for the quickest moment before Leon makes his decision. 

He’s waited long enough. There’s been too many interrupted moments for him not to seize this one, just in case Hunnigan manages to come out of nowhere and pull the two of you apart again, or in case your apprentice comes by and distracts you enough for the moment to pass.

So, instead of answering your question―which, let’s be honest, both of you have known since the beginning of this conversation that nothing asked here has really mattered―he slightly tilts your face upwards and leans in. 

Your lips meet his and he swears you’ve killed him. Your lips are all cold but he doesn’t mind, it balances out his own warm ones, and something in his mind clicks into place. Every question centered around you swimming around in his mind is drowned out, sinking from his brain to his lips and leaking into your mouth as it parts slightly. His thumb swipes back and forth over your cheek on its own accord, as natural as his rapidly beating heart, and with every swipe he feels sugar. 

You’re leaning in, too, and he’s eternally grateful to feel the weight of you leaning into him a little more. Almost bitterly, he thinks to himself that he could’ve had this so much sooner, that he could’ve had you so much sooner had he not allowed so many distractions to come between the two of you, but he doesn’t dwell on all the missed opportunities. Not when he just took advantage of this one. 

Leon mourns the loss of your lips as you slowly pull away. He’s tempted to chase after you, but seeing as you need some time to actually breathe, he lets you find some space from his lips. 

“I’ve wanted to do that,” Leon breathes out, his tongue darting out to quickly wet his lips before continuing, “for years.”

You stare at him, and for a moment Leon wonders if that was too much, but you reply after a few seconds with, “... Years?” 

“Years,” Leon confirms, leaning back in to press a chaste kiss to your lips, then another one on your cheek, “ever since you stitched me up after that sparring match back in―” 

“Leon,” you interrupt him, pulling back slightly so that you can look at his face better, your own eyes wide as your gaze flits over Leon’s face. “That was seven years ago.”

Leon nods mindlessly, trying to lean back in to press his lips against yours again, but your hand on his forehead stops him. 

“You waited seven years?”

“You mad at me or something?” Leon asks, a grin tugging at his lips at your reaction. You blink at him, giving him the impression for a few seconds that you might actually be a little mad at him. 

“We could’ve been doing this―” Leon doesn’t let your hand stop him from leaning in this time, cutting you off by stealing another kiss from you and keeping his lips pressed against yours until he can feel you stop trying to talk. He pulls away just enough so that your lips are no longer touching, but you can still feel his breath on your lips and vice versa. 

“Seven years ago, I know,” Leon finishes your sentence for you, “I was… playing the long game.” 

He doesn’t let you reply, utilizing the little space between your lips to lean back in and keep your mouth shut before you can open it again, leaving no room to argue with him. 

It’s only a few seconds later, when you’ve accepted your fate and have decided to card your fingers through the hair at the back of Leon’s head while you relax into him, that a few loud bangs cause the two of you to abruptly part. You’re both surprised by the sudden noise, even if it’s a normal occurrence near your apartment, and your eyebrows furrow at the sound. Leon, however, tries to just ignore it. 

“You think those are gunshots?” you ask, looking around for a moment, though Leon just turns your face back to his.

“... I think that they’re fireworks,” Leon settles on after a second of deliberating what to say to continue what you were both doing before hearing the very obvious gunshots. He’s already leaning back in, not willing to let this moment go interrupted because of a few gunshots some ways away from the two of you.

“No, I’m― I’m pretty sure those are gunshots―” Leon interrupts you once again, lips pressed against yours, breathing his beating heart into you to help you understand just how badly he needs this.

“Shhh,” he murmurs against your lips, “fireworks.” 

Your photography room has never looked worse.

There’s several polaroids scattered across the floor. A few tubs of water have been thrown across the room, the spillage reaching the photos and damaging them beyond repair. The red light flickers. It casts dramatic shadows across your face and highlights the wrinkles in your clothes though it hides the dark spots beneath your eyes, and it especially illuminates the immediate condensation that takes place every time you exhale. The room is usually kept at medium temperatures, since you’re too scared of damaging the pictures, but during your tantrum, one of the water tubs you threw must’ve hit a button on the thermostat that lowered the temperature. 

The cold is supposed to make the ink in the pictures expand and eventually leak from the plastic confines of the film itself. It’s only a matter of time until your photos are ruined. The photos that date back all the way to last summer, all of Simon, who, shockingly, triggered your tantrum. Just thinking of him makes your eye twitch. You find it hard not to get mad at him, especially after how frustrating he’s made your observing, as if it’s just some kind of game to him. Your harsh breaths create a harsh contrast to the quiet thumping of your heart that’s loud enough to reach your ears, and the gentle trembling of your limbs forces you to lean against the wall. You’d rather he just be mad and not want anything to do with you at this point. It’d be so much easier for you if that was the case. 

Ever since Simon confronted you about your “stalking”, he’s been coming more frequently. Just about every week now, usually requesting bacon and some kind of fish. He gets more talkative every time. More willing to share his personal life, his past, what he hopes for in the future, what he plans to make with each item he buys, hell, sometimes even jokes around with you―it’s torture. It’s torture because you don’t know how to react to it. You’ve spent so long treating him like a hobby, something you can choose to focus on or stray from, but all of a sudden, he’s decided to share so much of himself that you feel like it’s all you can focus on. You can’t handle so much information about your subject. 

It’s caused a few meltdowns over the past few weeks. 

Every so often, whether it be at work while sharpening knives, at home trying to sleep, or even walking down the street with your headphones on playing the sweet sounds of ocean waves and rain to calm you, you’ll remember that he knows. He’s known. It disturbs you and makes that knife slip in your hands, scares your circadian rhythm into deviance, and forces those waves to crash into rocks as the rain turns to thunder. Everything feels out of order, the puzzle pieces of your mind scattered and a few missing, with you unable to solve why or how exactly everything went so wrong. Why you feel so wrong. Why, out of everything, the thing that bothers you the most is that unsettling feeling of the ever-so present fact that Simon is painfully aware of your tendency to follow. 

You lean against the wall and slide down into a sitting position, your knees reaching your chest and your arms automatically wrapping around yourself in lieu of a hug. You wish it was him. For the quickest moment, you wish it were his arms around you instead, his calloused fingers stretched over your back and his rough palms rubbing circles into your lats. The thought makes your hands tremble and your gaze shifts to the ruined film strewn across the room, the flickering red light overhead reflecting off of each polaroid, the faint sound of water dripping from the counters crossing with the buzzing of the lightbulb. You let out a shaky breath and hold yourself a little tighter, allowing your head to fall limp ahead of you, your forehead resting on your knees. 

It’s ridiculous how much this affects you. How much he affects you. 

— 

Simon considered that maybe you stayed home today, the idea of you falling ill worrying him, but after checking your flat, he found nothing but your keys missing and your lack of presence. Therefore, you must be in your shop. However, your shop is currently closed. 

He could break in. He’s done it before, after closing once you’d gone home, and snooped around your little photography room curiously. He was, admittedly, mildly impressed with some of the photos―a few of them he didn’t even notice, though many of them he can recall seeing you out of the corner of his eye or hearing a faint click behind him―but otherwise indifferent to each one. He hadn’t taken any but was tempted, just to maybe let you know that he’d been there long enough to steal something, but decided against it; he’d tortured you enough with his much-too-dramatic confrontation. You don’t need any more stress. Even he knows that, despite not being the best at showing it. 

There’s no lights on in the shop. Nothing that hints at your presence, nor anything that invites his own in, but the feeling in his gut tells him to just go in through the back door and hope to God nobody sees him. Simon sighs and looks around haphazardly, not seeing anyone out in the open, and walks as casually as he can around the back of the butchery. There’s a door the same color as the wall, with a small handle rusting at the edges and a lock that barely functions. I would remind you to fix it, but it would give me away, he thinks, I’ll just replace it myself one of these days. 

He easily opens the door without a key, the rusting lock giving into the slightest force worryingly quick. It turns inwards, and Simon walks into the room, closing the door behind him and reaching for the string on the side of the wall. He pulls on it and the overhead bulb flickers before turning on, an orange-yellow glow casting the room in a decent amount of light, making the cleaning tools and chemicals visible. Simon ignores all of this and instead reaches for the door, opening it before walking out into the dimly lit kitchen. It’s freezing, and the white lights cast an even glow onto the counter, reflecting off of the metal surface and illuminating the clean table. Simon looks around, and to his disappointment, you’re nowhere to be seen. Despite this, he moves on and searches for the next door, eventually finding the one that leads out into the main shop. He soon finds himself clicking the door shut behind him whilst being behind the counter you typically are. The role reversal feels strange, the new view of looking outside the shop rather than gazing inside as he usually would.

Simon makes his way towards the end of the counter and finds yet another door, though it’s locked with a slightly better lock than the last. It looks newer rather than an old lock that’s simply held up well over the time you’ve had it, so he assumes it’s been changed recently. It would make sense, considering it's the lock that guards your oh-so-precious photography room—or, at least, the stairs down to it. He hesitates, his hand hovering over the door, balled up into a fist with his knuckled readied in front of the door, about to knock. 

He can hear something. It’s shuffling. Maybe some soft breaths, the tell-tale hitch of them a sign of your distress―something Simon’s not particularly proud to know of―and a tell-tale sign that maybe Simon should leave you alone. He’s not a sadist; he doesn’t enjoy seeing you upset. It’s satisfying at most, knowing your remorse for your stalking, knowing that you’re guilty enough to be so upset over it. Assuming that that’s the reason you’re so upset, of course. He thinks it’s a good show of character, or a nice way of knowing that you don’t have the worst intentions. And maybe, going by that logic, Simon isn’t the best person―but he’s willing to go without remorse if it means that he feels no guilt keeping you safe. 

Simon steps back from the room, his hand dropping to his side. He sighs and walks around the counter, heads towards the front door, and flips the misleading ‘open’ sign to ‘closed’ before he walks out. Even if you’re not closed, he can’t imagine you’d want any customers while you’re in the middle of whatever you’re doing. Your photography room is important to you, or so he assumes; he can’t imagine there’s many things that would draw you away from the room besides him. The room is so clean it almost annoys him. The organized nature of it all, the pictures of him strung up and strewn across the room so perfectly, the drawers filled with camera film and different camera lenses―the sight of it seems so wrong, knowing the less-than-perfect hobbies the room provides sanctuary for. 

He can’t imagine you breaking down in there. It’s aphantasic, how little he can visualize any sort of mess taking place in the room. He wonders if you break down often in that room. If you find it safer than your house. If, sometimes, when your store is closed for no apparent reason on an average, festiveless day, the true reason behind its closure is the fact that you’re too busy crying over lost potential photos and an unpredictable tomorrow in your little safe room in the same place meant to be your workspace to open up shop. He, quite frankly, can’t imagine something more pathetic than being so swept up in your own sorrow created by your own mistakes that you could’ve so easily avoided had you not done an objectively disgusting act.

And, for whatever reason, that patheticism is the exact reason Simon finds himself heading towards the local hardware store, a new lock and some WD-40 on his mind. 

— 

It’s been two days. You wake up in your photography room. The floor is wet and your clothes are wet and you hate the feeling of your clothes sticking to your skin. You slept here last night, after going home the previous night to sleep in an actual bed, then came back here in the morning to spend another day mourning the pictures you ruined and the potential friendship you threw away by acting so recklessly. By being so obvious. You’re about one more mistake away from hopping off the nearest bridge with a ball and chain wrapped around your ankle.

You push yourself up by your elbows, and eventually the palms of your hands make contact with the ground, then you’re sitting up with your legs outstretched at awkward angles. Your knees hurt when you bend them, and as you try to push yourself up, you have to stop and breathe for a bit to get a handle on your pain. It’s not the worst you’ve felt. Far from it, honestly. But for some reason, this little thing keeps making you stumble, keeps making you hesitate in pushing yourself up, your knees feeling as unstable as a fawn and your frame as shaky as a leaf in the wind. When you finally manage to completely push yourself up, your femur feels as though it’s barely attached to your tibia; the two bones are balanced so unevenly that it feels like you’re standing on stilts. 

The doorbell rings and you curse out loud. Rather loud, in fact, for the small room you’re in. You already sense who it is. You’re not in the mood for this, already knowing what’s bound to happen, and despite this, you make your way out of the ruined room and up the stairs. Lo and behold, 

Simon stands at the counter, waiting for you to get behind the other end of the counter to take his order. You do so, putting on a pair of latex gloves before speaking.

“What are you looking for today?” you ask politely, slipping on the black gloves, leaning forward against the counter as you wait for an answer.

“It’s been a while since we last had a chat,” Simon hums, opting to stay standing straight, “and, for some strange reason, I haven’t heard any camera noises recently.”

Your mind pauses for a moment before you sigh and stand up straight, taking a step back from the counter, “I don’t want to do this with you today.”

“Why not?”

“Please. Not today.”

“I don’t remember having a say in when you’d follow me around and take pictures of me minding my business.”

You purse your lips at his valid point and look away for a moment, “Did you not just say you haven’t noticed me take any pictures of you recently?”

Simon is silent for a moment, before taking a step closer to the counter, voice a little quieter, almost gentler, “So I can’t complain a little about you stalking me, then? Because you’ve stopped for a month or two?”

“But that’s not―” you choke up, despite mentally begging yourself not to, your voice cracking. You sigh defeatedly, tiredly, and lean against the counter as if it can offer any more than physical support. You stare down at the grimy-clear surface. You need to clean it.

“Not…?” Simon presses on, though his voice is gentle, softly coaching you through your emotions.

“It’s not stalking,” you have to defend yourself with a broken voice while quiet, labored breaths leave you and force you to breathe manually. You already did horrible the first time Simon decided to interrogate you about your observing―you don’t know why he’d think it was a good idea to try and do it again. He already knows that you “stalk” him, or however he wants to classify it, so why does he have to keep bringing it up?

“Then what am I supposed to call it, huh?” he asks, the gravel leaving his voice gradually, exposing something soft and fuzzy in its leave. Something smoother, something that makes the hairs on the back of your neck shoot up. 

I don’t have an answer for him, you realize. You can try to explain yourself however you like. You can tell him that you’ve been following him―or, had been following him before being confronted―and taking candid pictures of him, leaving them to hang in the dingy room below your shop, with dates and locations attached to each photo to ensure that you remember each one. You can explain the thought that goes into every photo, and how each one is selected from the many taken from that day. You don’t do any of that, however; instead, you stare at him and hiccup again, hot embarrassment rushing to your face as you let out another shuddering breath and dare to draw another one back in.

“Hey, listen,” Simon reaches a hand across the counter and puts his palm over the back of your latex-covered hand, making you look at him with glassy eyes, sniffling, “I’m not doing this to make you upset. I don’t want you to cry, or feel guilty, or think that I’m in any way mad at you. Because I’m not.”

It’s barely reassuring. You’re just glad that you have the shop hours posted outside so that nobody thinks to come in right now, since you’re sure it's at least an hour beyond closing by now. Simon’s thumb rubs circles against the back of your hand as he continues, “You stalked me for at least a few months. I don’t know why, I don’t know who else you’ve stalked, I just know that you’ve been following me around for a while. I would like to know why you’ve chosen me.”

It’s an awful question, really. You don’t think he could’ve chosen a worse one. You would honestly take prison over answering this, because truthfully, you don’t know―Simon was there, and for whatever reason you felt inexplicably attached to him. It could’ve been something he said the day you two met, something he did, or just the way he acted, but whatever it was, it elicited a strong enough feeling from you to cause you to start following him. You sniffle again, and Simon must sense that something’s not right, because he squeezes your hand and leans in a little further. 

“I think I should at least know why, right?” he asks, before pausing, and offering, “Maybe we could trade information?”

You furrow your eyebrows at this. “Huh?” You wince at the way your voice cracks.

Simon doesn’t mention it. “I’ll tell you something I think you’d like to know, in exchange for you telling me why you decided to stalk me.”

You don’t answer him, partially because you’re not sure what he could possibly tell you, partially because you don’t know what you could possibly tell him. After a few moments of silence, though, you nod your head and a nearly unintelligible “okay” leaves your mouth. Simon takes this as an invitation to share his information, and so he does.

“I knew for a month before I told you,” he tells you in a low voice, “and for that month, and the month after that, I watched you.”

You swear your heart stops for a moment. What? “... what?”

“I watched you close your shop every day,” Simon hums, “and I made sure you got home safely. The area you live in is dangerous. Plenty of roadmen just waiting for someone as… unaware as you to come by them.”

Your heart starts beating again, faster and faster, and you think you can feel your pupils dilating. Simon’s words reach your hypothalamus and you can physically feel the dopamine multiply, hell, you can feel it lighting up your nerves and flooding your veins. It feels like lightning coursing all throughout your body. You’re nearly positive the blacks of your pupils have consumed the majority of your iris, leaving just a ring of color in your eyes.

“Is that why you watched me?” Simon asks, a hand coming up to brush his thumb over the tears that’ve trickled just below your eyes, “Did you think I was unsafe? That I couldn’t take care of myself?” You shake your head, and a breathy “no” leaves you, making you take a deep breath, stuttering as you exhale. Simon keeps his hand on your cheek and pauses, a curious look on his face. 

— 

No? 

Simon tries to think. He considered the―frankly horrifying―possibility of you fancying him, but that idea went as soon as it came, both out of lack of evidence and because he truly can’t stand the idea. It would only mean he’d been playing into it, and that’s the last thing he wants to do. He watches your pupils grow uncannily big and only gets more concerned. He forgets what it means when the pupils get bigger outside of being under the influence, and since he doesn’t recall seeing you take anything while talking to him, he can only assume that that’s not the case. 

“Do you know me from somewhere?” Simon asks, bringing his hand down from your cheek to your own, squeezing it gently, “Should I recognize you?”

You shake your head negatively, “No.” 

Simon thinks for a few beats, each feeling a little longer than the last, before speaking up again, “Did I seem particularly interesting?”

Despite what he hoped the answer would be, you shake your head again wordlessly, a “no” never escaping you verbally but your body language more than enough to tell Simon that he wouldn’t be able to guess why exactly you stalked him. He supposes it can’t be too easy to tell your victim why exactly you stalked them, but he told you what he did, so he thinks it’s only fair if you return the favor and grace him with the answer to the question, “Then why did you do it?”

You take shaky breaths, still hunched over the counter, staring down at the dirtied glass so as to not make eye contact with Simon, “You’re new.”

He stays silent. You continue after swallowing, “You were right there. Everyone else― they don’t come here as often. If they do, they make too much conversation. They give too much of themselves to me. I don’t want them. You’ve never… been so open, not as much as them. I didn’t find you any more interesting than them, I just― I just thought that you were better. You’re so rare. I needed you, like… like a―”

“Like a toy?” Simon tries to interrupt, only for you to shake your head negatively, looking up at him and finding his eyes.

“Like an artifact.”

Simon tries to think. An artifact? As if you were a museum curator, looking for new items to add to your displays, a collector of sorts looking for something new. Something special. And he had the luck to be the one you found different, to be the one that you need, for God know’s what reason. 

“You needed me?” Simon asks, thumb swiping over the back of your hand, “Nobody else?”

“Only you,” you confirm, turning your hand over so that your gloved palm is in contact with Simon’s bare one, “it was so strange. I didn’t think for a second that I was stalking you. I just wanted to know you.”

“… Do you know me now?”

“Not as well as I want to.”

So you still want to. Simon’s conflicted. He’s not sure how he feels about being some kind of collectible. He’s sure you didn’t mean to equate him to an item―or at the very least, something inhuman―but he can’t help but feel that you’re doing just that. The lock in his back pocket feels heavier. Like these conflicted feelings weren’t weighing Simon down enough, he just needed the extra weight of the steel lock to remind him of where he is. How close to the ground he is. How close to you he is. Who he bought the lock for. How much better is he than you? You stalked him first, but he stalked you back. You broke into his flat, he broke into yours. You observe him, he watches you. Same difference.

“I bought you a new lock,” Simon comments after a few beats of silence, amusement poking through his conflicted feelings at the sight of your suddenly confused expression, clarifying quickly at the look, “for your photography room.”

Your expression hardens and you sigh, “I’m not using that room anymore.”

“No?” Simon tilts his head, “lost your interest in photography, all of a sudden?”

“The room’s not in the best condition right now,” you admit, watching as Simon pulls a lock out of his back pocket with his free hand, sliding the metal across the counter to your end. He’s surprised by the admission―just a few days ago, he couldn’t imagine your room being any less clean than a research clinic. You take the lock regardless, flipping it over in your hand and smiling at Simon, “Thank you, though.”

He nods and you hesitantly slide your hand away from his, walking back towards the stairs, with Simon following behind you closely as soon as he rounds the corner of the counter. It’s a quick walk down the stairs to your locked-up room, and Simon steps ahead unprompted to grab the rusted lock, not missing your look of appreciation as he yanks off the decayed hunk of metal. Orange dust flies into the air in the lock’s unexpected departure and the particles soon melt into the surrounding air. You fit the bar of the lock through the uneven hole in the bar of metal attached to the door, and open the door before the bar can go all the way through. 

When Simon sees the state of your photography room, he can hardly believe his eyes. There’s splattered dye everywhere, all various shades of blue and purple―from your polaroid film, he guesses, seeing all the tattered plastic-paper pictures strewn across the floor, all having the same colored clumps attached to the interior plastic. There’s tubs of water knocked over, accompanied by puddles of the same water gathered on the floor, desecrating any originally-decent pictures. The red overhead light bulb is flickering and the room is darker than light. There’s several camera lenses shattered to bits across the floor. Cameras follow the shattered glass, several models from the same brand of each camera broken, either the lithium batteries leaking or the lens broken or the camera itself looking like it’d been run over. 

The room is a mess. This pleases Simon greatly.

He stays silent as you kick a few shards of glass out of the way, though he keeps an eye on you to make sure you don’t get hurt doing so, watching as you walk across the room and open up a drawer underneath the only intact table in the room, the others greatly dented or a hole worn in them. You put a single picture out of it, though not before brushing small shards of glass off of the polaroid, making Simon take a step forward and hold out a hand as if to take yours and inspect it for cuts. The red light makes it nearly impossible to tell, but the way that you don’t react to the glass makes him think that it hadn’t punctured your skin at all. When you walk back over to him, he sees what’s in your hand; a picture of him.

“This is my favorite one,” you hum, holding the picture out for him to take. Gently, he takes the film into his hand and reads the caption. 24/06/23, Mosley St. It’s a picture of him walking towards the camera, but looking off to the side, watching a car speed by. He can’t remember the moment, but judging by the look he sees on his face, he imagines he was wondering who in their right mind decided to go so fast in whatever speed zone that street is. 

“It’s very nice,” Simon replies, something warm settling in his chest, “I don’t believe I saw you take this one.”

He knows it’s a lie. Not because he remembers seeing them, but because it would be ridiculous if he didn’t see them. Despite this, he feels no guilt lying to your face, not when you get this proud look on your face that coincides with the disbelief appearing upon it at the same time, the two creating a look Simon can only respond to with the smallest bit of adoration.

“Really?” you ask, and Simon doesn’t hesitate to nod.

“Really.” 

He doesn’t mind it, really. Not when you seem so happy, letting him follow you back out of the room and up the stairs, an invisible tail wagging behind you in excitement, goosebumps erupted across the skin of your arms and the back of your neck. He thinks it’s worth it. 

Of course, for you, most things are worth it, if not everything.

Ghost was sitting at his desk―in his own sleeping quarters, since it’s technically past curfew and he doesn’t need any trouble from recruits about him being in his office after hours, the annoying little shits―typing away at his computer, trying to get a report on his latest assignment done before going to bed.

He’s had a little bit of trouble sleeping lately. Not to say that it’s your fault, but it’s definitely your fault. He doesn’t necessarily need you around to go to sleep, but since you volunteered for a mission a week ago, he’s been a little on edge. Originally, it would’ve been Soap and a few other sergeants heading out to a small town in some country down in Central America, but you took the place of Soap after Price had explained the mission. 

It could technically be done by one person, he’d said in short, but it’s quicker to send out a squadron than a single soldier.

You weren’t the best sniper they had, but you had enough experience with it for Price to approve of you going with one other person to keep watch of you. The long duration of the mission was really to be blamed on how often your target had been moving, leaving you with little room to take any shots. It wasn’t too important of a mission, however―as long as you didn’t miss your target in the end―so Ghost is sure Price is glad that he only had to send out one soldier instead of around six or seven.

Still, despite how there was little to no chance of you coming out of this mission in multiple pieces, Ghost found himself worried; something he, admittedly, feels for a lot of the soldiers here. His worry for you is different, though. Maybe it’s an age thing. Maybe it has something to do with how he’s seen you grow over the years that you’ve been here, and how close you’ve gotten to going from a Private to a Lance Corporal. It’s a relatively low rank for someone in the 141, which only makes him―dare he admit it―prouder. A weird feeling lingers in his mind when the word proud comes to mind as he thinks of you, but he ignores that feeling, instead opting to focus on the report he so desperately wanted to finish.

Despite his usual sleep aversion, he finds himself wanting to sleep for once.

Just as he gets to the middle of his report, he hears a knock at the door. Before Ghost can even say anything, he hears the door open, and his head whips around to see who would decide that it’s a good idea to enter his room without his permission. Though, all of his confusion and building anger dissipates the moment he sees that it’s you. Fresh from medical, he can safely assume, seeing the various bandages and bruises on you, and that odd too-clean smell that’s sticking to you. You look so exhausted, it’s almost funny. Almost. 

You close the door behind you and Ghost turns his head back to his laptop. It’s not that he doesn’t want to look at you, but it’s a little harder to when you look so disheveled. He hears a few footsteps, then the squeaking of bed springs, and a sigh before the rustling of bed sheets. In the faint reflection of his computer screen, Ghost can just barely see you getting comfortable under the covers of his bed, seeming to fully disregard his presence. He doesn’t mind, though. He gets it; that feeling after being on guard for so long, not sure how much of it you can let down even though you’re back on base, and that strange structureless feeling where you wish you had bones but only feel like flesh. 

It’s odd, put simply. When Ghost thinks of the feeling, he thinks of the age-old question, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The feeling is like a constant questioning of what you’re experiencing, the wonderance of whether or not you can feel safe if the safest you’ve ever felt is a feeling lost somewhere beyond you. If you lose a feeling, was it ever felt? If you lost safety, were you ever safe, or, as Maslow would put it, were you always missing that basic need? Ghost knows plenty about missing safety. He knows that his mind blanks when he tries to think about the last time he felt safe before the 141. 

He knows that you know plenty about missing safety, too. Not a lot, because you never say enough to clue him in on just how much you’re missing, but he has his suspicions. Some are confirmed, others mere theories, but still―he knows you well enough. That’s why you’re in his room, not saying a word, just breathing heavily into his pillow and trying to garner warmth from his blanket. He can see you staring at him from the bed. He’s sure you want him to say something, and because it’s you that’s looking at him, he does.

“Back already?” Ghost asks dryly, drawing a small huff out of you. 

“Soap said y’missed me,” you reply, making Ghost scoff, “when he visited me in the infirmary.” 

“Too big of a mouth on ‘im,” Ghost saves the draft of his report, deciding to just save writing it for another time, instead closing out of the program and hovering his finger over the power button on his keyboard, “don’t know how y’managed to understand him.” 

You hum and sit up in Ghost’s bed, the blankets rustling again, and as Ghost’s screen goes black, he turns around to see you sitting up with the blankets wrapped around you like a jacket. He blinks at you, before raising an eyebrow at your position.

“Ruinin’ my blankets?” he asks, though sounding barely offended, “After walking in unannounced besides that little knock?”

“Ruin’s a pretty strong word,” you argue, “and it wasn’t a little knock. It was loud. Practically echoed off the walls.”

Ghost can sense your sarcasm from a mile away, but continues to play along, leaning back in his chair. You look a little more tired covered in blankets, he thinks, those dark circles under your eyes are a little more pronounced. He sees them a lot. Those darkened semi-circles that he used to think were just a part of you, some kind of skin condition, but later realized they were a product of your sleep deprivation. It would’ve been his first thought had he not always seen you with the bags under your eyes, but after going on leave with you―a few months ago, back to his small house, after you had admitted that you preferred staying with him to going back to your dingy apartment―and witnessing you getting proper rest, seeing those circles get a little lighter, he knew that it was more of a sleep issue. 

He’s gone through his fair share of sleeping problems. He still goes through them; everyone in the military does, he’s sure. Ghost used to think that he took the brunt of it, compared to the rest of the task force, not because of the missions but because of what came before the missions. He’s changed his way of thinking since then, has opened up his mind a little more beyond the idea of suffering more than someone else in a specific sense, but he still had that feeling that he took on the majority of nightmares. The word “nightmare” feels a little juvenile for him, but until someone creates a better word for the repulsive things he sees after closing his eyes and just barely drifting asleep, that’s what he’s stuck with. 

“You better hope y’didn’t wake anyone up with it, then,” Ghost hums, “I doubt anyone wants to be awake right now.” 

He sees a small smile grow on your face and small spots of blood arise from beneath the cracked skin of your lips. 

“Everyone here sleeps like a rock as far as I know,” you reply, before pausing, considering, “maybe except for the guys who came in a few weeks ago.”

“I’m sure they’ll be gone by next month,” Ghost tells you, his tone almost reassuring, “I don’t think they can handle any of… this.” 

“You don’t think they can handle your bullying?” you scoff, making Ghost huff out a small laugh, “Weak.” 

“Not everyone’s as strong as you, unfortunately,” Ghost hums sarcastically, getting up from his chair and walking the short distance over to his bed where you’re sitting. Automatically, you move so that Ghost can sit down next to you.

You’re both silent for a little bit. Ghost can see the few healing bruises on your face a little clearer here. Small dark yellows and reds on the sharper points of your face, the parts where the bone is a little closer to the skin, particularly your cheeks and a few over your jawline and near your chin. They’re a bad look on you, not because Ghost doesn’t think you can handle yourself, but because he knows that you can handle yourself, so the only way you could’ve gotten those bruises is if you were forced into a corner. He would consider that they were an accident, somehow self-inflicted, but he knows better than that. 

“Are you tired?” Ghost asks, even though he knows the answer.

“I haven’t slept in a few days.” There it is.

“And for the few days that you did sleep?” He thinks he knows the answer to this too.

“I don’t know if you can really call it that.” Bingo.

It’s not surprising to him. Not only has he been on enough missions with you to know how hard it is for you to sleep outside of the base, but he’s managed to get you to actually tell him about your sleeping struggles. He knows. He watches you subtly kick off your boots, letting them fall over onto their sides, as if you could read his mind and know what he’s going to request next.

“Lay down,” Ghost puts a bare hand on your clothed shoulder and lightly pushes at it, prompting you to lean back onto your side, settling into the bed with the blankets still wrapped around you.

Ghost doesn’t mind the lack of blankets he’s getting. As long as you’re the one hogging them, he finds it easier to go without them, strangely enough. He lays down onto the bed next to you, his head naturally above yours, and neither of you bother to change positions. He doesn’t attempt to pull the blankets from you, and you don’t try to move away from him, the both of you simply existing together in one small space with nothing interrupting you two. A thin layer of air, similar to the blanket covering you, seems to cover the both of you, not trapping you together but instead comforting the both of you. The air feels woven from Ghost’s thoughts, yarn strewn from his cerebral cortex, emotions run through an invisible loom to create the beautiful quilt that covers the both of you. 

Ghost’s hand comes up to thumb at the edge of his balaclava, and he pulls it up the tiniest bit, but then pauses to think.

He knows that if you just turn your head up the tiniest bit, you’ll see his face. The blonde stubble peeking out from under his skin, the small dent forming in the middle of his nose from the constant wearing of his balaclava, and possibly the most embarrassing of all, that small smile he wears that pulls at his already cracking lips that draws blood on occasion. Despite all of this, he pulls his face covering all the way off, and tosses it onto his desk. Your face doesn’t move an inch despite how obvious it is that some kind of fabric has hit the desk. 

He considers saying thank you, but Ghost doesn’t deem it necessary. You’re so close to sleeping that he doesn’t want to risk ruining your chances by talking to you. So, instead, he just brings his arm over your side and lets his hand reach up into the nape of your neck to toy with the small hairs tapering off there. They’re short enough that he’s essentially just brushing his fingers against the skin of your neck, but he assumes you don’t mind, considering how you continue to not move. You stay still peacefully, soft breaths leaving you as your body starts to actually relax.

So you weren’t lying about your lack of sleep, he thinks, his own eyes slowly closing, not that I thought you were, anyway.

Your breathing creates the perfect white noise to him. The vibrations emitting from your larynx that escape your mouth reach his ear canals, where they bounce off of his eardrums, and move down from his middle ears to his inner ears where the nerve endings that live there turn the vibrations into electrical impulses and are translated by his brain into actual sound. The translation sounds like more than just a simple sound, though; it’s like your breathing is translated into actual words rather than breathing, words like safe and guarded. Those small vibrations bounce around in his ears and turn into syllables, then eventually whispers, then firm speech. 

Those words are like music to his ears, as cliché as it is, and he cherishes every word he hears―more than he’ll ever let you know.

“Having fun there?” 

You turn in your seat and find Ghost leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed and one eye slightly wider than the other—an indication that his eyebrow is raised. 

“Not really,” You answer, setting down your gun. You’d been disassembling it, trying to take your mind off of the slowly growing headache that’s been building up for the past few hours. You don’t think it’s a migraine or anything, but it still bothers you greatly. 

“Yeah, no, I can tell,” Ghost chuckles, pushing himself off of the door frame and walking over to you. He eyes your gun for a moment, the magazine already removed as well as any live rounds left in the rifle ejected, and the bolt locked to the rear. You were only maybe a quarter of the way through your disassembly, even though you started around thirty minutes ago. 

For some reason, you woke up upset today. You were too tired, you felt awfully sluggish, and there was a throbbing pain clustered in the back of your eyebrows. So, in short—you were reasonably very upset. It showed visibly in the way your eyes twitched every so often, and in the way you felt the need to pinch the bridge of your nose to distract you from the pain that was still building up behind your brows. 

“What’s going on?” He asks, leaning on the table. 

“I have this headache that won’t go away,” You respond, sighing as you move your gaze from your gun to Ghost. You can barely see it, but from his eyes you can tell that his face scrunches up beneath his mask. He knows a thing or two about bad headaches, being someone who frequently gets migraines himself. 

“Have you taken any meds for it?” You shake your head ‘no’. Ghost holds up a single finger in a ‘one moment’ motion and rummages through the pockets on his tactical vest for a moment, before he pulls out a small bottle of ibuprofen no bigger than his palm. He hands it to you. 

“Here.” You blink at it for a moment. 

“Thanks,” You take the bottle gingerly and Ghost nods, watching you as you struggle with the child-proof lid for a second before getting it open. You shake out a small tablet, one the size of a low-dosage aspirin, and pop it into your mouth. You don’t have much of an issue dry-swallowing it, and it only takes one attempt before you successfully swallow the tablet.

“You’ve been feeling pretty bad this whole week, haven’t you?” Ghost frowns underneath his mask. 

You think for a moment before nodding, “Yeah, I guess. I think it’s mostly just stress.” 

You know it’s not just stress. 

For a while now, you’ve used something called ‘age regression’ as a form of stress relief. You don’t know exactly when it started, but you do know that it was before you were recruited for the 141. And originally, you made a promise to yourself that you wouldn’t regress while on base, and you kept that promise for maybe a month before you broke it. 

You think it was Ghost that was the trigger, actually. You can vividly remember the first time you regressed while on base; you had just finished talking to Ghost, and he called you something—you think he called you something similar to ‘kid’—that made a flip in your mind switch immediately. You can remember excusing yourself from the conversation quickly, leaving your lieutenant slightly confused but otherwise unbothered by the strange action. 

And, worst of all, you can remember being in your quarters and practically burrowing under your blankets. You were curled up into a fetal position, trying to fight the urge to suck on your thumb or at least chew on something, but ultimately lost the fight and succumbed to your urges. You spent maybe a few hours like that, wide awake when you just wanted to try and sleep it away, thinking about that interaction you had with Ghost over and over again. 

You’re not stupid. You know that Ghost has some sort of soft spot for you—albeit, you don’t know exactly how soft that soft spot is, but it’s definitely soft. Soft enough that he goes the tiniest bit easier on you compared to other recruits, soft enough that he spares you more time than he does for others, and the most obvious of all—he initiates most of your conversations. 

Contrary to popular belief, he’s not the scary super-soldier most people think of him as. Sure, maybe he is kind of scary, and maybe his mask does jumpscare you when you’re doing missions in particularly dark spaces sometimes, but other than that he’s not scary in the slightest. If anything, he’s awkward. Awkward enough that he’s almost never the first person to talk to someone—except for you, of course. You don’t know why he acts so differently around you, but you don’t complain about it. 

“That’s rough,” Ghost looks down at you with concerned, empathetic eyes, “Sorry you’re so stressed. Mind me askin’ why?” 

“I don’t, but I also don’t know why I’m so stressed,” You huff out, even though you know the answer completely. You stand up, “I think it’s just me being sleep deprived. I’ve been having the tiniest bit of trouble falling asleep lately.” 

“You should’ve told me earlier,” Ghost tuts, “I have melatonin.” 

You give him a confused look. “You do?” 

“‘Course I do.” 

You blink at him for a moment before sighing, “Could I have some then?” 

“What’s the magic word?” You give him an unimpressed look, ignoring the way the words make your stomach twist, and his eyes crinkle in a way that lets you know that he’s grinning under his mask. 

“Could I please have some melatonin?” 

“The magic word was lotion, but I’ll let it slide,” Ghost hums, “There’s some in my office. I’ll grab it for you later.” 

“M’kay,” You look over at the door, unintentionally zoning out as you do. Your vision goes unfocused as the throbbing pain behind your eyebrows grows and something else grows inside of you. 

Jesus. Why can’t you choose any other time to get the urge to slip into a younger mentality? Why does your headache have to make everything worse for you? Why does Ghost have to be so nice and helpful? 

“Hey,” Ghost frowns, tapping a finger on your shoulder to snap you out of whatever trance you’re in, “[c/n]?” 

Oh God. 

Your eyes—that you try desperately to keep neutral—meet Ghost’s, his eyes soft and his eyebrows dipped downwards in a confused manner. His eyes are searching, flitting over you, trying to find something. The way he looks at you makes you want to squirm, and you can’t help but just slightly shuffle in place. 

“Are you sure you’re okay?” He asks, voice as concerned as his look. That should be the breaking point for you, but you remain as big as you can be, and nod affirmatively. 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” You try to assure him, hoping you don’t sound as nervous as you feel, “I think I’m just a little tired.” 

Ghost doesn’t look convinced. 

He puts a hand on your shoulder, the act like a hammer putting another dent in the wall you had put up. The leather of his glove is warm even through the thick material of your shirt, and it feels like hot metal against your cold skin, the clothing covering your shoulder be damned. 

“You can tell me if you’re not okay,” He tells you—what is he doing? Does he know something I don’t?—while his thumb starts rubbing circles into your shoulder, “I feel like you’re more than a little tired.” 

You stay silent for a little bit. You don’t know how to explain yourself, the words seeming to liquify and leak right out of you, making you speechless. He seems to notice this, sighing and letting his hand slip down to your hand, holding it and giving it a quick squeeze. 

“I think,” He looks around for a moment before turning back to you, “that we should head to my office so that nobody can bother us, and then you can tell me all about how you’re feeling right now. Does that sound okay?” 

You nod wordlessly, not trusting yourself to talk with how heavy your tongue feels, and you let Ghost lead you back to his office. It’s only a hallway away, but that’s still enough time to overthink everything that could possibly happen. How does he know something’s wrong? What gave it away? Did I do something bad? What did I do? Wh—

The creak of his office door opening snaps you out of your thoughts, and Ghost steps aside to let you enter his office first. Hesitantly, you take a few steps inside, and you hear the door click shut behind you as Ghost walks in. He takes your hand again, making you look at him as he guides you to a chair. 

You sit in the chair that’s in front of his desk, and he quickly drags out the chair that’s behind it so that it’s right next to yours. He sits down. 

He’s looking at you expectantly. 

“Uh.” You’re not sure what to say. He’s looking at you so reassuringly, it’s hard to keep yourself sitting upright. 

“I know something’s wrong,” Ghost says, leaning forward the tiniest bit, “I need you to tell me what’s wrong so I can help you.” 

He’s got to have at least some idea of what you’re experiencing, You think, trying to form some sort of explanation, He’s being so… weird? 

You swear there’s some other word you could use, but your vocabulary feels so limited, and you would mentally curse if you could because you know that now your explanation is gonna sound weird. You can’t use the words you want, you’re gonna be forced to use simple words, ones that can’t convey exactly how you feel. Words that—and it physically pained you to admit this—were childish. 

You can explain your situation. Just, now it would be more… blunt. And short. And also you’d feel like killing yourself afterwards. You won’t, obviously, but you can predict that you’ll come very close to doing so.

Okay, I have to say something because Ghost is looking more and more worried the longer I stay silent. 

“I feel…” You trail off for a moment, trying to get your thoughts in order for the next two seconds to actually say something that makes sense, before continuing in a far less confident tone, “… small.” 

The moment the words leave your mouth, you regret it. Ew. Ew. Ew. What. Why? Why that word? It leaves a sour taste on your tongue and yet you can’t think of any other word that would better suit how you feel. Still. Ew. 

Your thoughts are a jumbled mess ranging from fleeting thoughts of disgust to thoughts lodged in the back of your mind begging you to go anywhere else just so that you can stop having to have this conversation. This conversation requires words bigger than you have access to, and a sort of control over yourself that you can’t grasp. You can feel your hands twitching, wanting something to hold onto, anything to keep you distracted from the overwhelming urge to just regress. 

Ghost blinks. He didn’t expect that answer. 

“Small?” He repeats in a questioning tone, eyebrows furrowed, “I mean, compared to me, I guess you’re kind of short—” 

“No, no, not like short small,” You try to clarify, feeling just slightly discouraged by Ghost’s confused words, “Like…” 

You struggle to find the words that properly describe how you feel, only finding words like small and little in your current vocabulary. Your findings are making you increasingly upset, and you can feel your face start to grow hot with frustration and embarrassment. 

Oh my God. 

“Like…?” Ghost nudges your knee with his, trying to encourage you to talk, “I’m not leaving until you tell me.” 

There’s still a level of care in his words, no matter how confused he seems, and that adds all the more struggle to your predicament. Not only do you not want to tell him, but you can’t describe how you feel in a way that’s acceptable for someone your age to describe anything. At least, not in a way that you deem acceptable for yourself to describe anything. 

You’re far too old to be describing yourself as small. 

“[c/n]?” Ghost nudges you again, and you blink at him. Your eyes are flickering all over his mask, going anywhere but his eyes, since eye contact with anyone would make everything significantly worse for you right now. 

“It’s just—” You try to take a deep breath but your breath hitches. Everything is starting to make you feel so frustrated, and you’re starting to think that you might just throw a tantrum if you can’t do at least one thing right. You try to find the words you want to use but your throat is disobediently closing on you. Your mind feels like straight mush, and the quickly softening look that Ghost is giving you isn’t helping you at all. 

To your horror, in your inexplicable inability to talk in the way you normally do, you let out a small whine. It sounds obnoxious to your ears, and worst of all, sounds like something a little kid would do. 

You put your head in your hands, the quickly reddening skin of your cheeks getting cooled by the cold of your palms as you try and hide your face from Ghost. You can picture how he looks right now—somehow more confused than earlier, possibly annoyed, weirded out—and all those mental images make you bite your tongue to prevent another noise. 

“What was that?” You don’t answer him. 

To your non-answer, Ghost sighs, and you think, This is it, this is where he kicks me out of his office, oh my God I’m gonna get dishonorably discharged and he’s gonna give me a really mean look on my way out—

“Look at me.” You shake your head negatively. 

“Why not?” He sounds so confused, it makes you want to cry. There’s still a level of worry in his voice, and it adds to the fog that builds up in your brain. 

You move your face just slightly up so that your eyes peek out from above your fingertips, your hands covering the rest of your face. Ghost reaches out both of his hands, and ever so gently removes your hands from your face, uncovering your red cheeks and your lips—the lower of which quivers, like you’re about to cry. He notices this quickly, and you can practically feel the level of his worry shoot up. 

He doesn’t say anything, instead just holding your hands in his for a moment, before he sets them down into your lap. He looks at you, concerned, and asks, “Is it hard to talk right now?” 

You nod. His gaze shifts to his computer, and then back to you. 

“I’m gonna go look a few things up really quick, okay? I’ll just be right over there,” He nods over to the space behind his computer, “and I’ll be right back here in a few seconds.” 

You reluctantly nod again, and Ghost gets up from his seat. He grabs the back of the chair and drags it back around behind his desk, sitting down in it and powering on his monitor. It turns on almost immediately, much to his relief, and he goes to his browser and searches up a few things. You can’t tell what he’s searching up, only hearing the clacking of keys and the occasional final click that indicates that he’s hit the enter button. 

He stays there for maybe a minute or two. It’s a long few minutes, and you can feel yourself slipping more and more the longer he stays at his computer. And the more you feel yourself slipping into that younger mindset, the more you start to crave Ghost’s attention. 

The way his eyes are glued to his computer starts to irritate you. You’re aware that he’s doing something important, he must be, because why would he be so intent on looking something up otherwise, but still—you manage to feel the tiniest bit jealous of the computer. You know you’re too far gone when you can’t find it within yourself to realize that you’re jealous of a computer. 

Your eyes linger on him and he must notice this because he looks up from the screen of his monitor and looks over at you. As if he can read your mind, he reassures you, “Just a few more seconds.” 

But you said you were gonna be back in a few seconds a few minutes ago. 

You don’t voice your thoughts. Instead, you nod, because God forbid you annoy Ghost with your need for attention now when he’s being so patient with you. He looks at you for another moment before going back to his computer and looking something else up, this time with a little more fervor. 

Another few seconds pass and, true to his word this time, Ghost stops and gets up from his chair. He walks over to you, and your eyes follow him intently. He kneels down in front of you.

He looks hesitant to say something to you. That’s a first. That adds to the exponentially growing blob of fear that lives inside your mind, one of the only things that’s still prominent in the fog that conquers your brain. 

“Are you…” You feel like you know what he’s gonna ask you. You’re bracing yourself for the question, and he looks like he’s bracing himself just to ask it. 

“How, uh,” He’s trying to find the right wording, and you’ve never been able to relate to him harder than you do in this moment, “How… do you feel right now? How old?” 

How old? You don’t really like that question. As much as you like that you’re now getting attention, you’re starting to remember how little you actually enjoy this type of attention. The question is pretty vague, but at the same time so specific, and you’re almost ashamed to know exactly what the answer is. Or, at least, you would feel ashamed if there was room in your mind to feel so. 

“You said you feel small, right? Not like short small, just small?” He sounds more unsure of himself now, and you don’t think you like seeing him so reluctant to say something, “I looked up what it means to feel like that. Took some time, but I got to some person’s… website, and the person who wrote it was talkin’ about feeling like that. Something about regression, feeling a little bit younger than usual?” 

He’s being so awkward about it, and while you typically find his awkwardness funny, now it’s anything but that. 

“Uhm,” Your voice comes out as a mumble and you see Ghost perk up at it. You don’t know what to say. For a moment, you’re silent again, before you get over your embarrassment for a quick two seconds and force yourself to say, “Four.” 

“Four?” Ghost asks, before quickly realizing, “Right. Four. You feel four?” 

You nod, and your hands instinctively start moving back up to cover your face. Ghost swiftly grabs them, keeping his grip gentle as he keeps them from reaching your face. 

“Hey, don’t try to hide again,” He says, tone softening as he holds your hands, “everything’s fine, okay? Do you— what, uh— do you need me to do anything? Do you want me to leave you alo—”

“No!” You quickly answer, a little surprised by your own volume, before you clear your throat and answer in a much more quiet voice, “Don’t leave me alone.” 

“Okay, okay,” Ghost’s thumbs rub across the back of your hands, a soothing gesture that makes you the tiniest bit more relaxed, “what do you need?” 

You sniffle, and you can see an immediate look of panic cross Ghost’s eyes. You don’t know how well he is with crying children, and don’t want to impose such a situation on him, but you also can’t stop the tears that begin to well up in the corners of your eyes. 

“Hey, don’t cry,” He borderline begs, “everything’s gonna be okay, okay? Please do not cry. Take a deep breath.” 

You try to take a deep breath, you really do, but your breath just hitches and gets caught in your throat. It only makes you more distressed, adding to the urge you have to just disappear. Ghost notices your failed deep breathing and lets go of one of your hands, before taking the other and holding it to his chest.

You can just barely feel his heartbeat, his thick tactical vest and gear in the way of it, but you can still feel it. Ghost takes a deep breath, holding it for a second or two before slowly exhaling. 

“You copy me, okay?” He tells you, his words an order but his tone suggesting otherwise. He takes another deep breath, this time hoping you’ll follow his lead, and you do. 

You try to breathe with him, your hand on his chest helping, but your breath keeps getting caught in your throat. Ghost notices this, but continues his breathing anyway, hoping you’ll catch on soon. You do, thankfully—after a few more attempted breaths, you finally manage one almost identical to Ghost’s. The next few after that go similarly, and that’s when Ghost decides you’re alright to take your hand off of his chest. 

“I need you to tell me what to do,” He says, keeping your hand in his hold, “or at least tell me how all of this works. I want to help you.”

 You really don’t want to tell him what you need right now, but you also don’t think you have a choice. 

Wordlessly, you stand up from your seat, balance just slightly off-center before you quickly get your footing right. Ghost watches you, not moving, before you tug on his hand to try and urge him to get up as well. He obliges, getting up. 

“What—” You interrupt him by taking another step forward and letting your head thump right into his chest, ignoring the itchy uncomfortable feeling of his vest against your face. You don’t bother to wrap your arms around him to at least try and form some sort of hug, preferring to just smush yourself into him and hope for the best. 

After a moment of stunned silence, he wraps his arms around you. 

“You mind if we move behind my desk so I can look up some more stuff on all of this?” He asks, voice quiet, “Unless you want to just tell me?” 

“Desk,” You simply mumble into his vest, making him nod. 

“Alright, but you’re gonna have to stop hugging me for a second,” Ghost warns you. You reluctantly step away, and Ghost smiles softly down at you, bringing his hands away from your back and instead holding one of yours. 

He leads you behind his desk, and lets go of your hand before sitting down in his chair. Pausing, he quickly realizes you have nowhere to sit, and thinks for a moment before getting back up. He drags his chair just slightly to the side and looks back at you. 

“Sit down,” He nods to the chair, “It’s only gonna be a minute or two, alright?” 

You nod, hesitantly moving to sit in the chair, not really liking how far away from Ghost it is. It's not that far, You try to rationalize, I’m gonna be fine. 

Ghost can see your hesitation and tries to work as quickly as he can, grateful that he didn’t turn his computer off earlier, typing away on his keyboard. You don’t care to see what he’s looking up, more focused on looking at the time on his monitor. 21:44. 21:45. The time ticks by and even though it’s only been a few seconds you already want Ghost’s attention again. His attention has actually turned into good attention, and that’s the type of attention you’ve been craving for the past week. 

The clock reads 21:47 once Ghost is done, and he powers his monitor off this time, the small whirring the device makes dying down to a low hum before going completely silent. He turns to you, and somehow can sense that you need more attention. 

“Am I not paying enough attention to you?” He teases you, making you conflicted on whether you should be annoyed by the teasing or happy you’re finally getting attention. As if he can read your mind, he chuckles, and kneels down to your level. 

“I’m gonna give you as much attention as you need, alright?” He promises, “I just need you to stay in this room.” 

— 

Ghost watches you nod non-verbally, and it only adds to his softening expression. 

He’s always had a soft spot for kids. He knows that you aren’t technically a kid, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still see you as one. You’re young for someone in the military, much less someone in this 141, and now that he’s found out that you’re an age regressor, that you’re a little—well, that doesn’t help how he sees you at all. 

He thinks that maybe the reason he has such a soft spot for kids is a few encounters he’s had with them in the past. He’s seen far too many in compromising positions while on missions; positions like being held hostage, being held as prisoner, or just generally being mistreated or even just living in bad conditions. 

He looks at you, and he just sees another one of those kids. 

He sees how you act around him. He’s not stupid. When he talks to you, you’re actually engaged in the conversation, compared to when anyone else tries to talk to you—maybe excluding Price, or Soap, or Gaz, heavy on that maybe—you’re more likely than not brushing them off every chance you get. You’re standoffish with everyone else, but with him, you’ll always accept any conversation he initiates. 

He can also see the way you look at him. It’s like you’re looking at your idol, or your savior, the way you look up at him. He can see that curious glint in your eyes when he tells you about a recent mission, or when he tells you anything, really. He can see when you try to mimic how he holds his weapons, and when you try to copy his techniques. 

He remembers catching you one day in the shooting range trying to mimic how he aims at the targets—looking through your scope with one eye closed, the other focused only on the dot centered on the scope, taking a deep breath in and out before shooting, and keeping the gun exactly like that even seconds after the shot’s been fired. 

In fact, the copying has gone from guns to melee weapons recently. Ghost swings only his forearm when he uses a knife, thumb resting on the very end of the knife’s handle, and entire arm stiff as he does. He does a slow windup when behind someone, a fast one on the off-chance that he’s in front, and buries the weapon to the hilt in whoever’s flesh he’s penetrated. He’s already seen you do the same on a recent mission. Not only that, but he caught you using a knife almost identical to his. 

And now, you’re still looking at him like that—except, different. Sort of like how a kid might look up to their parents. 

“What do you feel like doing, kiddo?” He asks, hoping the pet name isn’t too much. 

From the way your eyes light up, he suspects it isn't. 

“Mmm…” You hum, thinking for a moment, before requesting, “Coloring?” 

“Coloring, huh?” Ghost looks around for some blank paper and some sort of marker or pen thick enough to act as one, but can only find some highlighters. He turns to you, frowning, “Sorry, but I don’t think I have any paper, kid. Anything else you wanna do?”

You shake your head, and Ghost is just about ready to jump off of a bridge before you point to his arm and repeat, “Coloring.” 

He looks at his arm for a second, confused, before he remembers a conversation the two of you had a month or so ago. 

“If you ever wanna get tattoos, I know a guy in Brighton,” Ghost said, reclining his chair back so that he can lay down in it. You were sitting across from him in front of his desk, fiddling with one of his pens. 

“Good to know,” You hummed, “You have any tattoos?” 

“Yeah,” You perked up at his admission, and he sat up for a second to roll up the sleeve of his shirt. He wasn’t wearing his usual gear, only one of those standard issue army-green shirts. 

“Here,” He pointed to a large tattoo covering his whole arm like a sleeve, a few designs you could point out to yourself being a skull, a few Roman numerals, and some kind of scythe. 

“Very emo,” You commented, making Ghost snort, “I like it.” 

“I’m glad,” He rolled his sleeve back down. 

There’s a lot of blank space in the tattoo, despite it being a sleeve, and he can already tell that you mean you want to color in that space. He thinks about it for a moment, a fleeting thought of is that even safe? crossing his mind before he ultimately decides that he doesn’t care and would rather kill himself than see you disappointed because he denied your request, his own health be damned. 

“Alright,” He hums, grabbing a few highlighters from a mesh cup on his desk in the colors pink, yellow, and blue, “Go for it.” 

You give him a small smile and if he cared about if he’d get ink poisoning two seconds ago, he sure as hell doesn’t care now. You gingerly grab the highlighters from his hand, your grabbing not too secure and sort of clumsy but secure enough that the markers stay in your hand.

You hold them with both hands, and it makes Ghost realize how small your hands are—sure, you could hold the highlighters with one hand, but he’s glad you aren’t because now he can admire just how small you are as a whole. 

You set the yellow and blue down on his desk, making sure they don’t roll off for a moment before uncapping the pink and hesitantly holding out a hand for Ghost’s arm. He rolls up his sleeve and obediently holds out his arm for you, watching curiously as you press the cold tip of the highlighter to his skin. You’re starting by coloring in the skull a neon pink, much to his amusement, and you’re starting in the dead center of its forehead. 

You’re so much more quiet than you usually are when you’re little, and you’re so much more hesitant, it makes Ghost want to just wrap you in a blanket and keep you safe and in his sight forever. 

Your tongue slightly pokes out from between your lips as you concentrate on coloring in Ghost’s tattoo, making him grin beneath his mask. The ink of the highlighter doesn’t stay within the black bounds of his tattoos at all, but he doesn’t care one bit, and he doesn’t think you care either. You finish up the skull quickly, and move onto the scythe that’s right next to it, this time capping the pink highlighter and grabbing the yellow. 

Ghost is pretty sure this is gonna stain his skin for a day or two, but he couldn’t care less.

He can’t help but notice how much more relaxed you look in your regressed state. More at peace, he should say. There’s no longer a hunch in your shoulders, your eyes aren’t twitching from your headache, and you’re not bouncing your leg like you usually do when you’re sitting down somewhere. It’s like any anxieties you had pre-regression had evaporated, like slipping into a younger mentality had taken away most of your worries, if not all of them. 

He also can’t help but wish he could see you like this more often. Not necessarily the regressed part, but the relaxed part. Well, maybe the regressed part too. You’re being such a sweetheart right now, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to live through this experience. 

“You having fun there, darling?” Ghost asks, his grin evident in his voice. The corners of your lips quirk up at the pet name and you nod silently, and now Ghost is starting to think you’re actually trying to kill him. You’re being so uncharacteristically shy, and you’re being so quiet, and you’re just being so sweet. 

It seems you’ve moved onto the blue highlighter now, coloring in the last bit of his tattoo. He doesn’t think he’ll ever wash it off—or, at least, he wouldn’t if he had a choice. He knows that he has to shower sometime soon, but surely he can put that off for a bit, right?

Once you’re finished with your coloring, you cap the highlighter, and set it down next to the others you’ve discarded. You turn Ghost’s arm the tiniest bit towards him so that he can see your work better. 

“‘s it good?” You ask quietly, watching intently for Ghost’s reaction. He looks over your coloring job and hums approvingly. 

“It’s amazing, I love it,” He assures you, smiling down softly at you, “You did great.” 

You seem to preen at the praise, and you take your hand off of Ghost’s arm, moving to put in your lap. You’re keeping yourself very contained, Ghost notices, Why? 

He’s snapped out of his thoughts when he hears you yawn, and you quickly move to cover your mouth as you do. He’s reminded that it’s almost twenty-two hundred, and while that usually wouldn’t be an issue for him, it’s an issue for you. You originally came to the 141 as someone who had a sleep schedule almost as fucked up at Ghost’s, but soon developed a habit of going to sleep somewhat early considering the training you had in the morning. So, now you get tired anywhere from eighteen-hundred to twenty-one hundred. After that, your only goal is to find somewhere to sleep. 

“Sleepy?” You nod tiredly, making Ghost coo, Ghost, the man who quite literally haunts some people’s nightmares, coos at you, “Aw, of course you are, sweetheart. Pretty sure it’s way past your bedtime by now.” 

“Nuh uh,” You deny, making Ghost chuckle. 

“‘Nuh uh’?” He asks, amused, “What d’you mean ‘nuh uh’?” 

“No b’dtime,” You shortly elaborate. 

“Ohhh, okay,” Ghost feigns realization, “You think you’re too big for a bedtime, huh?” 

“Mhm. Way too big.”

“I dunno about ‘way’ too big,” Ghost hums, checking to see if the highlighter on his arm has dried before he pulls his sleeve back down. “You seem pretty little to me.” 

“No,” You whine, dragging out the ‘o’, “Not lil’.” 

“Hmm… you sure, kiddo?” Ghost asks, “So if I ask you if you need to go to bed, you’re gonna say ‘no’?” 

That makes you hesitate, and Ghost almost thinks he’s won, before your own pettiness wins and you nod affirmatively. He raises an eyebrow at you. 

“Alright, well, you’ve gotta sleep at some point,” He says, crossing his arms as he leans back in his chair. 

You think this over for a second, and he watches as you look over him for a moment before looking down at his lap, then looking back up at him. He can already tell there’s some sort of plan forming in your mind.  Wordlessly, you get up, and Ghost does nothing to stop you as you decide to just plop yourself down into his lap. You straddle his thighs, moving until you’re sitting comfortably on him, and then let yourself slump forward so that your face is resting in the crook of his neck. It takes him a moment to process what just happened, before he laughs lightly and wraps both of his arms around you to keep you in place. 

“Oh, okay,” He grins, resting his chin on your shoulder, “you just wanna cuddle with me until you fall asleep? Is that what this is?” 

He feels you nod against his neck, and his grin grows as he rubs one hand against your back, trying to soothe you to sleep. He doesn’t say anything else, not wanting to distract you from your attempts to sleep anymore, simply letting you stay slumped against him. Your breathing wasn’t too fast-paced to begin with, but as you relax even more in his arms, he can feel your breathing even out. 

You’re falling asleep fairly quickly, and the only complaint he has is that he didn’t get to spend nearly as much time as he wanted to with you while you were awake and regressed. 

Once he’s sure you’re barely awake, he murmurs, “You’re such a sweetheart, you know that?” 

— 

You don’t know how long it’s been since you fell asleep, but you’re woken up by the slight rustling of clothes, and then you feel yourself moving up. 

Your mind still feels foggy and you can tell you’re still somewhat in that younger mindset of yours, but now you’re significantly less bothered by it than you were before. You’re awake enough to be aware of what’s happening, always having been a light-sleeper, but not awake enough to know exactly what’s happening. You don’t dare open your eyes, and try to keep your breathing even—though that isn’t much of a challenge. 

That headache that had been building up earlier has fully disappeared, thank God, and you no longer feel the tension in your shoulder that you’d been unconsciously carrying. 

You can sort of feel someone’s arms snaked under your back, and you know that you’re being moved somewhere. Quickly, you remember that it’s Ghost carrying you, and that you had fallen asleep on him, much to your embarrassment. Or, at least, it would be much to your embarrassment if you had the mental capacity to feel embarrassed about that right now. But you feel so comfy and so safe that it really doesn’t matter to you right now. 

You can hear the clicking of Ghost’s boots against the concrete floors of the hallway, and he’s carrying you off somewhere; you imagine that somewhere to be your sleeping quarters. He’s walking pretty fast, not hurriedly but still at a somewhat fast pace. 

Soon, he reaches a stopping point where he has to awkwardly put one leg up to support your back on his thigh as he quickly reaches one arm out to turn the knob of the door to your sleeping quarters and pulls that arm right back to support your back again. He sighs as he puts his foot back down, kicking open the door and walking in. 

He’s quick to reach your bed, and he pauses as he considers what to do. You can practically hear him thinking, wondering how he’s gonna get you under the covers while he’s still carrying you, and for a second you think about showing him you’re awake so that things are easier for him before he sets you down on the bed. 

He pulls the covers up and stops when he reaches the part your body covers, and picks you back up, before dropping you right back off where the blankets have been pulled away. He pulls the covers back over you. 

After a few moments, you think he’s left the room, before you hear the rustling of fabric and feel him leaning down. He gently presses his lips to your forehead and pulls away after a second or two, before quietly mumbling, “Night, kiddo.”

He stays there for a moment before you hear his footsteps leave the room, and then the door clicking shut behind him as he leaves the room entirely. 

You’re quick to fall asleep after that.

You’re very troubled.

Bright red lights dull to a darker, velvety color as they reach a stark black flooring. They illuminate beige twine that’s strung over clean counters and square plates of clear water, twine that carries several photographs held up by clothespins. It’s very monochromatic, the color schemes in the room. The more vibrant, more lively colors are contained in developed polaroid film, labeled with dates, names, and locations. Your most recent one, labeled as 10/30, Riley, Heaton Park, was taken on the very date, in the very place, and of the very person you’ve labeled it with. Organization has always been very important to you.

It’s a weird contrast, your organization against your troubledness. On one hand, you like to keep everything in check, finding joy in having all of your belongings put together through some sort of connection they have―color, size, name―but on the other hand, something about that cleanliness throws you off sometimes. An unsettling ripple will center itself in your chest and create a circular wave that leaves the tips of your fingers tingling and your head a mess, your brain barely in control of your actions anymore, your hands somehow moving on their own and ruining everything you’ve organized. There’s been moments where your pictures have been ripped from the pins and thrown across the room, landing in water or on the floor or in the large vent in the corner of the room.

You’ve been able to keep it under control for a while, though. You haven’t had an episode in a while now. You scan the photos hung across the length of the twine, searching for a date, then finding one that sounds right. 08/17. So it’s been two months and fourteen days since your last outburst. A pretty good accomplishment, if you do say so yourself. 

“‘s been a while,” you mumble under your breath, your index finger and thumb pinching the bottom of the polaroid, observing it. This one is labeled with Riley as well, taken in a tattoo shop somewhere in Sheffield. It’s a long ways away from where Riley lives, funnily enough. The tattoo artist must be good for him to drive so far. You’ve only seen a few of his tattoos, and wonder if he has any that he’s hiding from you. From you, you mentally scoff, as if he’s thinking about you at all. 

He’s only seen you once. Riley’s a particularly mysterious character, at least to you. He only comes into the shop every other week, buying some variation of beef or pork. Two weeks ago he came in for pork belly, about two kilograms of it, and through some painful small talk, you learned he was making a pork dish for a gathering. He didn’t specify family gathering―he never does, which makes you think that either every gathering is a family gathering or no gathering is a family gathering―so you assume he’s talking about some kind of friend get-together.

Considering the dish he was making, all belly porchetta, you think he’s using around half a kilogram of pork belly per person, since that’s what you saw in a majority of the recipes you looked up. Assuming he did, you can guess that he had about three other people over, four if he didn’t make any for himself. You’re pretty confident that you know who the other three are. You’ve seen Riley around a few other people before, and it’s always the same three, and they have these weird nicknames for eachother. 

Or, at least, you used to think they were just nicknames. The more you heard them talk, though, the more you realized that they weren’t just nicknames. They were titles. Ranks, even. Riley is Lieutenant, or L.t., his friend Price is Captain, one of his other friends is either Gaz or Sarge, and his other friend Mactavish is Johnny. That, you think, is an actual nickname, but still. So they’re military. You’ve never dwelled too much on that fact, knowing that it doesn’t change much of what you already know about their friend group. 

You’re drawn to this friend group like a magnet to steel. You’ve taken a particular liking to Riley, though, who you’ve heard been called Lieutenant, L.t., and Ghost. Riley, who wears a black balaclava and has a blonde buzzcut that screams military so loudly you’re shocked you didn’t pick up on it earlier. Riley, whose dog tags hang on the coat rack near the front door of his flat, the black silencer around them rough to the touch. Riley, who chose the worst building to live in, considering the state of their locks. 

You release the polaroid and it sways a little where it’s suspended in the air, before stilling. You feel an itch. An itch that follows the lines of your fingerprints, swirling, a corn maze-like pattern being used as a guide for it. Your I-2 stays hung around your neck by a thick strap, and your hands go to it almost immediately, fitting in the worn grooves that your fingers have created over the years. 

Suddenly, causing you to lose your grip on the camera, the bell rings. Shit. Despite thinking about Riley, you forgot that this is his usual time. You take the camera off immediately and haphazardly set it down on the counter, dusting your hands off on your apron and rushing out of the room. The light outside is almost blinding, an ugly reminder of the outside world, and you squint for a moment to get past the too-white artificial lights and soon your eyes adjust to it. You walk up a few steps and open the door, walking a little further to get to the cash register, before seeing Riley patiently waiting near it. His card’s already in his hand. 

“Sorry about that,” you apologize for the wait, grabbing a pair of latex gloves from under the counter and putting them on, “what’re you looking for today?”

Riley hums and watches you put on the gloves, “‘bout two half-kilos of ribeye, if you’ve got any.” 

“We have exactly that much left, I believe,” you look up from your hands and give Riley a smile, “guess you’re taking the last few.” 

“Guess so.” He’s a man of few words, but you still savor every one he speaks. It’s satisfying, the sharpness of his tone; it almost reminds you of cutting the fat off of a slab of meat. A thin blade against fatty tissue, cleanly hacking away at the white flesh, though leaving rough marks at some points. 

You walk to the back, painfully aware of the window that allows Riley to see your every move, and see a partially butchered prime rib. There’s just enough for a ribeye and a rack of ribs, so you grab a clean meat cleaver from off the wall and chop off a good half kilogram of ribeye, laying the cut on a paper-covered scale and seeing that it’s just about half a kilogram. You trade off the cleaver to your non-dominant hand and reach for a sheet of paper, your gloved hand transferring the ribeye over to the brown paper and setting it off to the side. 

You repeat the process again until you have two half kilo ribeyes, both wrapped in butcher paper, and you take off your gloves before putting on a new pair, not wanting to get meat juice all over the paper. You stack one on top of the other and carry the papered ribeyes out of the room, the door opening and closing behind you as you walk over to the register and set the two down. Riley watches you intently. You revel in the feeling of his eyes on you.

“Date night?” you ask, curious. You wonder if there’s someone new you’ll be able to observe. Maybe someone who can help you learn more about Riley.

He huffs out a laugh, something that makes you hold back a smile, and shakes his head, “No, not a date. Just a night.” “Just a night…” you hum, not prodding further even if you want to, reminding yourself that you can’t poke too much or else he might never come back, “whatever you say.”

“I’m sure he wishes it were a date night,” Riley mutters, to which you let a smile crack through. 

“Good luck with your not-date night, then,” you bid him farewell and Riley nods, leaving you with a “have a good night”, the bell above the door ringing as he exits the room. You let out a breath. Jesus. 

— 

Ghost doesn’t think you know how obvious you are. Given your youth, he supposes he shouldn’t be shocked at this level of ignorance, but still. 

He’ll catch you in the corner of his eye. He thinks you think you’re being discreet, but that little camera you keep around your neck always seems to be swaying, and every time he looks a certain way, he can hear the small click and shutter of the camera. He can put two and two together. He’s not stupid, despite what you must think of him. 

Ghost keeps the packaged meat in his hands, not bothering to conceal them as he makes his way back to his flat. It’s a pretty basic building, with picked-to-bits locks and door hinges in desperate need of some WD-40, something he didn’t really think about too much until you started coming around uninvited. He’s not sure if you’ve noticed the various cameras set up around his flat. If you have, he isn’t sure why you wouldn’t take them out―he’s sure that you can. That you have the ability to. Or, he might just be overestimating you. It’s hard to tell at this point.

Ghost wants to confront you, desperately so. He wants to walk up to you in your own shop, wants to hear you greet him and ask him what he’s looking for that particular day, and wants to see the look on your face as he asks you to bring some lithium grease the next time you come around to rid those doors of their squeakiness. He hopes that you’re frozen when he says it, like a deer in headlights, unable to think until he asks you if you really thought he wouldn’t figure it out. It sounds a little cruel, but he thinks, given everything he’s experienced, he’s entitled to a little cruelty, especially if it’s towards his own stalker. 

You can handle it. He’s sure of it. He hasn’t been stalking you for as long as you have to him, but he’s essentially trained for this type of thing, so it comes much easier to him than he’s sure it does to you. As far as he knows, you haven’t gone through the same training as him. You don’t know what to look for. Given the inexperience you show in your actions, Ghost wants to assume that you’re self-taught, and picked this up recently. He doesn’t know if he should be flattered or not by the possibility of you getting into stalking because of him. Since, for some strange reason, he chose to go to your butcher shop instead of the one he would usually go to before the stalking. 

You’re young. Younger than him, at least, by a lot. You’ve never told him your age or anything, but it’s not too hard to tell by looking at you and seeing the way you talk to other customers. You always seem to be a little more polite around him, less joking, aside from today. You’re more laidback with other customers. He wonders if your stalking habits prevent you from acting normal around him, so you compensate for that by trying to act too normal. Except, it doesn’t work, because he can see how you act around other customers. He’s seen your normal. He knows it’s not what you act like around him. Sure, it could be that you’re only normal around him and no other customers, but he’s seen you outside of work too. The only other possibility would be that you only act normal around him specifically, but that just wouldn’t make sense.

Ghost wonders if you get something out of this stalking. He doesn’t look into statistics too much, so he doesn’t really know if stalking is just more popular among the younger generation, or if you’re just special in that way. It could be a hobby, but he’d think that you’d be a little more careful if it was. A little more experienced, even. It might be that it’s an addiction; maybe you feel ashamed of your stalking, but you just can’t help it. However, if you did, Ghost doesn’t think you’d be so obvious about it. No, he thinks that you’d hide it more, that you’d be more nervous around him. While you’re anything but normal in his presence, you can still make conversation with him, and try your best not to bring up things that you know about him that you really shouldn’t. If you felt any kind of shame about it, he thinks you’d slip up more, because even though you’re sloppy, you still managed to go unnoticed under his radar for however long until he caught you for the first time.

The only reason that he knows it wasn’t your first time when he caught you was because of something that you could’ve easily avoided. You tend to mutter to yourself, whether on purpose or on autopilot, and when you’re taking photos of him, you like cursing out the camera when it somehow malfunctions or whispering directions under your breath. Left, get that thing he’s holding, he’s heard you mumble, oddly loud for someone who's trying so hard to be discreet, right… down… good. 

It was disturbing at first. Ghost doesn’t find many things scary these days, but this came a little close to being scary; the thought of someone always watching him, documenting his every move, studying him like a researcher to a labrat. He’s never liked that caged feeling. Being unaware of your observation, not consenting to any of it, unable to consent to it because he’s not supposed to know that you’re stalking him at all. 

The worst part, he thinks, is that he feels a weird sort of sympathy for you. Again, you’re young, you sell meat for way too cheap despite its quality, you probably barely understand the severity of your actions. He doesn’t want to underestimate you. God knows he’s done enough of that. But, for some strange reason, he feels so strongly that you don’t grasp exactly what you’re doing. It makes him feel a little bad for essentially fantasizing about confronting you, knowing how conflicted you must feel, being so obsessive over someone as mundane as him. Truly, he hasn’t told you anything to pique your interest, so it has to just be something about him that’s got you so eager to witness every little thing he does.

He doesn’t know what it is. He hopes that he’ll find out soon. Maybe that confrontation shouldn’t stay a fantasy. 

Two weeks pass by like a short gust of wind. Quick, but still leaving Ghost a little disgruntled. He’s on his usual walk towards your shop, a small tingle on the tips of his fingers, an itch that won’t leave his palms, lingering on his hands like pins stuck in the cushion. The feeling is inexplicable, only noticeable by the time he had spotted the sign hanging over the red awning outside of your shop. He feels like he needs to grab something. Maybe he’s just that excited to get his hands on the pork tenderloin he intends to buy. Maybe he’s thrilled by the idea of asking you why he hears a camera shutter open every time he goes out in a relatively populated area.

The door bells ring as he walks in. You’re leaning against the counter, fidgeting with your gloves, your head whipping up when you hear the bells. You try to conceal it, but Ghost can see the ghost―haha, get it, ghost? Like his callsign? Oh, whatever―of a smile appear on your face. It should make him feel sick, but for whatever reason, it only makes the itch grow. Ghost looks around the shop, seeing the empty place, and walks up to the counter.

“Busy day?” he asks, making you breathe out a laugh.

“Very,” you reply, your words short but always having that sense of incompletion, “what’re you looking for today?”

“Half a kilo of pork tenderloin,” Ghost answers, leaning against the counter as you nod and head to the back. He watches you through the glass, biting his tongue.

There’s so much he wants to ask. 

You come back quickly, just a few minutes later, and Ghost finds himself face to face with a packaged pork tenderloin. You’re quiet as you type up his receipt, but he doesn’t bother to pull out his card. The itch is bothering him. The itch starts to crawl up his wrist, curling around it like a handcuff, running along his veins and making the hair on his arms stand up. It reaches his shoulder and hits an old scar from a fight a long time ago, then reaches his neck, manages to wrap itself around it like a rope, and suddenly―

“Why’d you take that picture of me?” Ghost’s voice interrupts the calm silence, replacing it with a sort of tension. He sees the way you freeze up, your head slowly lifting up, your eyes locking onto his, all confusion and nerves. 

He doesn’t repeat himself. He just waits.

— 

You blink. What? 

“Sorry?” you laugh nervously, but Riley doesn’t budge. He only stares at you. You’re tempted to utilize your right to refuse service, but he isn’t technically servicing you, only talking to you. 

“You know what I’m talking about,” Riley responds, not getting threatening, but still leaning forward a bit and narrowing his eyes at you, “‘bout two or three weeks ago, Heaton Park?”

You stay silent, because despite your excessive planning, you never accounted for a possibility where Riley actually caught you. You guess you were so caught up in observing him that you never thought about what you would do if he ended up confronting you about it. You just didn’t think you were obvious. Maybe you aren’t obvious. Maybe Riley has developed a habit of being more aware of his surroundings or something after being in the military for so long, so much so that he was aware enough to detect your presence despite you keeping your distance.

Whatever it is, it has you choked up. You never imagined that you’d be in this position. It always felt like it’d be him who was confused, maybe even paranoid―but, surprisingly, it’s you.

When you don’t respond for a few more seconds, Riley doesn’t let up. He doesn’t go easy on you. He leans back but the state of his eyes don’t change, they don’t get any less skeptical or stormy, the gray-blue irises staring at you like two camera lenses. You swear you can hear a faint click every time he blinks, like he’s taking pictures of your every move, just as you had done to him. Like he’s observing you just as much as you observed him. You wonder, briefly, if this is how he feels when he senses your burning stare on him.

“Are you scared?” Riley asks, like an English Billy Loomis, “Did you ever think I was scared?”

You can feel a little sweat cultivating on your forehead. You’re sure Riley can see it too. His eyes flicker all over your face, and it feels like you’ve switched roles, with him being the researcher and you the subject. 

You can’t respond. How are you supposed to? You’re not scared, you’re dreadfully curious, wanting so badly to grab the camcorder you haven’t used in a good few years and just record. You want a stenotype and a chair, with a body double to act as yourself, to watch yourself have this conversation and take notes. You need order. You need a judge, jury, and executioner, to be allowed to be the reporter, to copy every word that exits Riley’s mouth. 

This is so out of his element. You knew he was confrontational, but―

“Do you never turn it off?” What? “The stalking?”

Stalking? “I think you should leave,” you force yourself to say, even if it leaves a suffocating feeling in your chest, forcing Riley away like this. 

“I’m not mad,” Riley tries to reassure you, “I’m a little disappointed, though.” 

“Disappointed?” you can’t help but repeat, despite your shock.

“Just a little,” Riley hums, so uncharacteristic of him, so unlike what you’ve seen from him. It’s so fascinating, yet horrifying. 

You’re quiet again. He’s disappointed? You should be more scared of the fact that he knows what you’ve been doing, the hobby that you meant to keep under wraps until you managed to get to a place where you no longer needed to participate in it, but you somehow find yourself more saddened by the fact that your subject is disappointed in you. It makes no sense. You can’t put it into one of the little boxes you’ve folded up in your head.

“Does it make you mad?” What? “Knowing that I know what you’ve been doing?’

You can’t find the words to respond.

“Do you understand what you’re doing?” Riley asks with a level of understanding you could never foresee hearing from him, especially directed at you, “Did you know that you were stalking me?”

That word makes you actually freeze. You stop breathing for a moment, switching from automatic to manual, all because of that word. Stalking? It feels foreign even in your mind, feeling so taboo just to think, the word barely a part of your vocabulary. You can’t recall ever using it to describe what you’d been doing. 

You don’t know if Riley senses this, or if it’s just the look on your face, but whatever it is, something seems to tell him that no, you weren’t aware of that. You don’t know how you didn’t know. Yeah, no shit, of course you were stalking him, how didn’t you know until now?

You genuinely don’t know what to do. Riley’s looking at you like you’re some kind of lost street dog, your palms are heating up, there’s a loud buzzing in your ears, and you think your voice box has somehow been turned off. You want to say something so bad. You want to apologize, even if you don’t entirely understand what you’re apologizing for. You want to defend yourself, because you weren’t aware of what you were doing. You want to do something. Anything.

“I’m gonna leave,” Riley sets a few tenners down on the counter, “but I need you to know that I’m not mad, okay?”

Oh, right. You’re not mad, just disappointed. Which is somehow worse than you being mad. “... Okay.”

Riley looks at you, scanning your face, searching you, “Okay?”

You nod and Riley exhales, picking up his pork tenderloin. “Have a good day.” 

When he’s gone, you feel a wetness on your cheek, and bring your fingers up to your face with furrowed eyebrows. You’re crying.

— 

Ghost doesn’t leave. He stays and watches you close up the shop, watching to see if anyone else stops by. He’s been doing it every few weeks after finding out about your hobby, always justifying it by telling himself he’s just looking out for you. It’s dangerous around here. It’s why he doesn’t live around these parts. You clearly don’t know that. Shit, if you were so unaware of your own stalking, how could you possibly be aware of the dangers around you?

You leave the shop and Ghost watches. You don’t even spare a glance in his direction, and that very fact tells him everything he needs to know. You’re vulnerable out here. You need his protection. You need it. 

Ghost gets up from his kneeling position and dusts his hands off on his knees. He can protect you.

Someone’s ribs are encasing your own. 

Well, not really, but it feels that way. Though your torso is clothed, as is the rest of your body, the defined bones of the skeleton beneath you poke and dig into your skin the same way it would if you were naked. The rotted wood around you creaks and sand falls onto your frontside from above, where the lid of your coffin is kept together solely by hopes and dreams. 

Only an hour ago, you blacked out. Fighting enemy soldiers whose fighting techniques you aren’t familiar with is hard enough, especially when they happen to keep bleach and rubbing alcohol in the same place they’re fighting you in. The two mixed together, poured and soaked into a rag that was later pressed to your face, created a substance that knocked you out. You know the name of it. You know it. But you can’t think of it, because remembering is too hard, and the wood surrounding you is too suffocating. 

Your limited air is becoming more and more apparent. There’s no light, no noise—well, unless you count the subtle static playing in your broken earpiece—basically, it’s sensory deprivation hell and you’ve committed one too many sins according to those enemy soldiers. 

Your whole body is sore. You don’t know if those soldiers messed with you after you passed out, or if this is just the result of fighting them for a few consecutive minutes, but whatever happened caused a strange weakness to invade and overtake your body. The oligarchy in your body created by this soreness left you unable to move properly, save for the occasional twitch of your skin or the ability to move your fingers freely. 

But fingers are useless when your wrists are bound. Maybe they aren’t physically bound to the floor of the coffin, but the invisible ropes made of the misuse of cleaning materials seemed to be enough to keep them down. It was irritating, and the mental ropeburn created pins and needles from your wrist to your elbow that only made you even more uncomfortable. 

The static continues. It’s cold. Cold, quiet, and God, how did I even get here? What time is it? What day is it? Your uniform isn’t enough to keep you warm. The tactical gear only makes your body heavier, not in the comfortable way that it feels when you’re heavy with sleep and ready to rest, but in the out-of-body way that makes you feel both like you’re floating and being pulled down like an anchor at the same time. You recall vaguely algor mortis, the stage of death where your body begins a gradual decline into an inhumanly cold state. 

Why you’re recalling it, you don’t— actually, no, you do know. The cold. That’s why. You’re cold. You’re cold. Don’t forget it. It seems hard to forget feelings, to forget the present, but you’ll find that it’s like breathing; inhale, you know that you’re cold, exhale, wait… you’re cold? How do you know? How can you feel? Inhale, you can feel things because you’re human, because you’re alive, exhale, you’re alive? 

Are you alive? Have you made it this far? What have you done? Not much, honestly. Or, not much that you can remember. Though there’s an overwhelming amount of hopelessness clouding your mind, you can still make out a few moments that play like a shitty wedding slideshow at your distant relative’s wedding who you didn’t know existed until a few hours before the event. The time that you told Ghost a joke that made him laugh. That other time that you told Ghost a joke that made him laugh. Or, no, wait, was that Price? 

That time that you chased after Soap while he had your unlocked phone, which, by the way, was a very normal response to that and was very valid. Yes, it was necessary for you to tackle him, even Gaz agreed with you on that. Ghost just enjoyed seeing Soap get tackled, for some very dark very strange reason that you would rather not think about too hard—assuming that you can even think any harder than a brick right now. Price, of course, disapprovingly shook his head and seemed to mentally weigh what the effect of a leash on the three of you would grant. 

Static-static-static-stat— “H—o?” 

You almost sit up, but your head bumps on the top of the coffin, and you groan. Oops. Thought a little bit too much there. 

You’re immediately dizzy and it feels like all the blood has rushed out of your head, but you still manage to stay conscious and try to figure out how to respond to whoever’s talking. 

“H—lo?” They ask again. You tilt your head ever-so-slightly so that the button on your earpiece can get pressed, and you almost start crying when you hear the small click and beep emit from the earpiece, signaling that it’s now on. 

“Hello?” Your voice is hoarse and it hurts to talk but you couldn’t care less. You have an opportunity to get out. You’re desperate to get out—or, at least, you should be. 

For the strangest reason, despite the claustrophobic environment you’ve been forced into, despite the sores that you know are forming along your stiffened spine from the rough wood you’re lying on, you feel comfortable in the most uncomfortable way. The fact that your memory is fuzzy and your movements are limited to twitching and stretching makes you uneasy, but at the same time, the absence of your typical nonstop stream of incomprehensible thoughts and feelings strangely lets you… relax. The lack of thinking, only lying down and staring up, puts you in a mindset that you don’t think is so bad. 

The situation is awful, but for whatever reason, the results of it are— are… oh God, what’s the word? It’s on the tip of your tongue, you swear, and now you’re thinking, well, shit, maybe this isn’t the best mindset. The void that grows in your head was nice maybe a minute ago, but now you’re forgetting words and yeah, no, I don’t like this, but at least you aren’t constantly second-guessing yourself. You aren’t contradicting every other thought you have, there aren’t mental wars waging in your mind that keep you unfocused and almost lightheaded, you aren’t arguing with yourself on how you truly feel. You just feel. And hell, you fuckin’ forget what you were even feeling just a few seconds ago. Thoughts come and go, nothing more than fleeting, and a part of you wishes that there was something for them to latch onto because being absent-minded feels a little too empty but your usual mind feels too full. 

You wish your mind was like that— that problem, with the glass, the… the glass… the one where everyone argues on something about it. Something about it. What do they argue about? What glass? There’s a glass, a drinking glass, that everyone argues about, and whatever side you’re on dictates how you think— what the fuck? What is that problem? God, if only you had a working phone right now to look it up. 

Oh, shit, yeah, the earpiece. There’s someone talking. Only just now have you actually acknowledged their words. They sound muffled and far-away, not at all like there’s a small microphone shoved into your ear that plays directly into it. 

“Private?” It’s crackly and still full of static, the sound is drowning in it, “Pr— a— —u there?” 

“... Huh?” You question dumbly, sounding more confused than you ever have before. There’s a ringing building up in your ears, and the person on the other end—who is talking?―is talking again. 

“Ar— —ou ther—?” They ask again, sounding… worried? Concerned? Wait, shit, those are the same thing. Damn you and your lack of a mental thesaurus. Wait, no, if you… if you use the same meaning in two different words… would that not— whatever. You don’t even care anymore. This ‘mindset’ doesn’t feel very nice anymore. You’ve been conscious for too long, you’ve started questioning yourself again, but in the worst way possible; usually, you can actually think properly when you question yourself. Now, you’re questioning your own knowledge without actually thinking about your questions first, so instead of the usual hellish loop of what does this mean? Why did I say this? What else could I have said?, you’re now stuck in the purgatory of, what was that word? What can I say? What did I just think? What? Huh? 

“Yeah… genius…” You manage to scoff, despite the heaviness of your tongue and the cotton in your mouth and mind, “Where else… would I be?” 

“Oh m— God,” The person on the other end breathes out, “Do y— kno— who you’re t—king to?” 

You shrug—well, you move your shoulders the tiniest bit up and back down—even though they can’t see you.

“Priva—?” They ask again, like a broken record, making you groan without you even realizing it, “G—z. Sergea—t Ga—ck? Y’remember?” 

“G’z,” You mutter, trying to sound out the syllables, “Giz… G— oh, shoot… Gaz? Sarge?”

“Yeah,” Gaz laughs, a little clearer now,  “Sarge, sure. Y— doin— —kay?” 

“Uh-huh,” You exhale, a little relieved that it’s just Gaz, “Hi.” 

“Hi,” Gaz sounds like he’s smiling, it’s audible in his voice, “Y’wanna t—l me where y—u ar—?”

“Uhh…” You look around the coffin with limited head movements, “I dunno, probably… probably a, uh… one a’ those grave things. Coff— coffin. In one of those. In a grave thing. Maybe. Wha’ are those called? The things?”

You sound dazed even to yourself, and mentally chastise yourself for the usage of grave things, even though you had no better words to describe it. You swear, you know the word. It starts with an “s”, you think, there’s a whole movie with it in the title by some guy named Steve-something. It has graves, coffins, the other thing that’s a coffin but not, graves, dead stuff, all that… hm. All that swing? All that… all that jazz, right, all that jazz. Wow, go ahead and clap yourself on the back for that one— oh, that’s right, you can’t, because you’re stuck in a fucking coffin. 

What a day.

“You’re in a cof—n?” Gaz asks, shocked. 

“Uh-huh.”

“Underg—nd?”

“Where else?” You deadpan, even though, for whatever reason, your instincts scream at you to be a little bit nicer. For that reason only, you tack on, “Respec— …respectfully.” 

“Jesus,” Gaz lets out a shaky breath, his voice growing a little more faint, as are you, “Wh—e do y— rem—ber being last?” 

“I don’t…” You mumble, eyelids growing heavy, threatening to droop down and meet the waterline of your eyes. 

“Don’t… what?” Gaz asks, sounding almost… scared? 

“Rember— rem’m… remember,” You reply, “Woof. That was… a toughie.” 

“Oh my God, th—’re lo—ng it,” Gaz whispers to himself, or maybe to someone else, “Private. Do y— know at all w— you m—ght be?” 

“Uhh…” 

“D—” This time, you know this is Gaz cutting himself off, because he gasps right after he begins talking and starts a whole new statement, “Is your tr—ker on?” 

“My wha’?” 

“Tracker, the— the th—ng, it’s a—ched to y—r earp—ce,” Jesus, how much can this thing cut out? 

“I don’t… what the— what are you tryna say to me?” You ask, for some reason… censoring yourself? What? Why… huh? You don’t censor yourself, you’re not five. Well, at least, you don’t think you are, not right now. Wait, when are you five? What are you saying? Or, thinking— what are you thinking? 

“The— Captain,” Gaz calls out to someone else, “The t—!” 

“Tra’ker,” You mumble to yourself, “Huh. I have one a’those?” 

“[c/n],” Gaz says into his earpiece, the sound suddenly louder than before, making you jump and almost hit your head on the ceiling of the coffin, “Are you h—rt?”

“I don’ think so,” You respond, looking down at the shadows casted over your body, “Can’t tell.” 

Gaz lets out some kind of pained noise and you feel your eyelids growing heavier. Your lungs hurt. Your lungs hurt? Oh, shoot, your lungs hurt. Gaz should probably know that. 

“Actu’ly,” You take back, sounding almost intoxicated, feeling like you’re breathing through a straw, “My chest hurts.” 

Close enough. 

“Your chest?” Gaz questions, the static slowly but surely clearing up, “Your lu—gs?” 

“Uh-huh,” You confirm. Your breathing was already a little shallow, but now its turning labored, and it feels like there’s rocks in your lungs, more and more appearing from God knows where, weighing down and taking up so much space in your lungs that the oxygen you breathe in must search for refuge within the cracks and crevices in between the stones. 

Exhale, and the carbon dioxide that leaves you seems to find a way to invite more rocks into your lungs. Inhale, and there’s less and less room, exhale, there should be more room, but instead the room— inhale, there’s no room, try to inhale again, you can’t— inhale, breathe, breathe, gasp, hold your breath, don’t exhale-don’t exhaledon’texhale— 

“[c/n]!” Gaz shouting your name startles you and forces you to exhale, a low whine coming out with it, making Gaz shut up. There’s a warm liquid dripping in trails down your cheeks, reaching your jaw and chin, the feeling of it sending waves of discomfort through your body and straight to your brain. 

You desperately try to breathe in, try to inhale anything, even if it’s the sand falling from the ceiling or the carbon dioxide that you’ve tried so hard to keep inside. 

“[c/n],” Gaz repeats your name, in a different tone this time, something more soft, something that resonates and echoes in your empty yet full mind, “We’re close, we— almo—t there, you s—l with me?” 

You continue to struggle with your breathing. Exhale, exhale, inh— exhale, inhale, ex— ex— exhale, in— in— Jesus fucking Christ, just inha— in— in— 

“I can hear you,” Gaz says, uncannily clear, he must be at least… at least something klicks within the radius of… of me… of me? Where am I? “You’re gonna be okay, okay? You’re gonna be fine. I need you to stop panicking, okay? I know that— th—t sounds easy to me, because I’m not in a coffin, but if you keep breathing like that, you’re gonna make it worse for yourself.” 

You finally inhale, but it feels so wrong, like hearing crunches while chewing what should be soft food. You gasp. You’re choking? What’s that other word for choking? Starts with a “c”, right? Wait, no, that’s choking. Dang it. 

Gaz is yelling in your ears, and it almost sounds like he’s actually there, but the wooden walls encasing you and this stupid, very smelly skeleton underneath you tell a different story. You cough. You cough again. And again. And now you’re just forcing the bad air out of your lungs, which is great and all, but now there’s no air in your lungs, which you would like to argue is far worse but you can’t argue because you can’t think and you can’t think because you’re in some coffin with a stupid— what did you even want to argue, again? 

There’s yelling. There’s commanding. There’s footsteps, heavy ones, ones that come from combat boots and men in tactical gear, the same gear that weighs you down like an anchor, that keeps you glued to this skeleton, who’s ribs encase your own. 

Or, at least, it feels like they are. Even though you’re wearing tactical gear, it still feels the same way it would if you were naked. The annoyingly present bones of the skeleton dig and poke into your skin, and there’s sand falling from between the planks of rotten wood above you, where the ceiling of the coffin is held together solely by hopes and dreams. 

An hour or two or three ago, you blacked out. You think you did, at least. You think you might black out again. Fighting enemy soldiers who fight with techniques you aren’t familiar with is hard enough, but fighting the invisible forces that prevent you from breathing in good air is even harder, because they don’t fight with guns or knives or fists; they fight with rocks that they shove into your lungs and vines that they tie around your already-tight throat. 

There’s no light, but there’s sound. Sounds that would be useful if you could think. You don’t remember thinking. You don’t remember remembering. 

But you’ll always remember this skeleton beneath you, who’s ribs encase your own. 

Or, at least, it feels like they are. The tactical gear you’re wearing does you no good, serving as the only barrier—the most useless barrier ever—between you and this skeleton and this coffin and the sand that's begun pooling around you. The skeleton, who’s ribs are— why are you repeating yourself? 

Gaz is yelling in your ear. Someone else is— someone else is there? Someone else is there. Talking, yelling, screaming, commanding, running, searching, above you— above you? Above you. While you exhale, gasp, exhale, choke, gasp, gasp, try to breath, fail, exhale, exhale, there’s men above you digging, digging and lifting weight off of you, you think. There’s more sand coming through. The loss of pressure must be making it looser.

Are you thinking? Are you feeling? Can you remember? What is there to remember? There’s an incomprehensible jumble of thoughts in your mind, and you think, trying to control your thoughts, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. 

It’s getting easier and harder to breathe. You can’t. You can… wait, no, you can’t. 

You can keep your eyes open— you can keep them open, you can k— 

“—eep your eyes open, Private,” Gaz begs you, pleads for you, his voice far but close, loud yet quiet, “C’mon, keep ‘em open, stay awak—” 

—e, stay awake, stay awake, no, no, no, no— 

— 

You wake up to a stark white ceiling and some kind of electric beeping. Your head is clearer, fortunately, but still not clear enough to immediately remember what exactly happened. You remember a coffin, a skeleton, suffocating, talking to Gaz, and that’s about it. You shiver. A skeleton. You can still feel the phantom feeling of its ribs hugging your body, something you think your captors might’ve done to make you feel even more uncomfortable. 

While you’re thinking about the skeleton, you don’t notice the sliding of a curtain and the footsteps that grow exponentially louder and closer to you. 

“G’morning,” Gaz says, making you jump up and sit up instinctively, before you promptly lie right back down. Gaz snickers at you, and you turn your surprisingly sore neck to glare at him. 

“Y—” You cough, furrowing your eyebrows as you bring an unstable and floppy hand to slap around your face, finding an oxygen mask nestled right on your nose and mouth. You take a few breaths, the task uncannily easy now, “You can knock that off. No laughing at the injured.” 

“Oh, I’m not laughing at the injured,” Gaz clarifies, sitting down at a plastic chair he’s pulled up beside your bed, “I’m getting ready to yell at the injured soldier who gave me a heart attack about five hours ago after suffocating in a coffin buried six feet under in some cemetery in Derbyshire.” 

“Derbyshire…” You muse, “What’s that? Or, where’s that?”

“‘bout forty klicks from Sheffield,” Gaz hums, before seeing your blank stare, and sighing tiredly, “The one with the cute houses and the pudding.” 

“Ohhh,” You nod, now understanding, before joking, “At least I got buried there instead of, like, the bluejay one.” 

“The bluejay one?” Gaz asks, confused, before pausing and asking you incredulously, “Jaywick?” 

“Yeah, that one,” You hum. Gaz blinks at you, before groaning.

“Is this how you felt when I thought Las Vegas was in California?”

“Probably,” You grin at him, “It might be closer to when you thought NYC was the capital of New York.” 

“If it’s not the capital, then why is it named after the city?” Gaz asks, exasperated. You shrug.

“Doesn’t change the fact that the capital’s Albany.” The room is silent for a little bit. The beeping, which you’ve now identified as a heart monitor, is loud. Your heart’s beating is fast and feels like it’s going to beat out of your chest. Gaz looks down at his chest, fidgeting with his hands, wringing them.

“I, uh,” You start, making Gaz look at you again, “When I was in the coffin…” The mere mention of it makes Gaz’s gaze sharpen and his hands still.

“It was hard to breathe, and also really hard to think,” Gaz nods along, “But I was still thinking, I guess, and I wasn’t thinking too hard. Like, jellyfish type shit, y’know? Like no thoughts, but also thoughts, but like…” 

Gaz raises an eyebrow at you, and you try to explain it better, “Do you remember back in like, ele— when you were five or six and you like, just got a conscious and you’re thinking but also not?” 

Gaz’s face relaxes and he nods wordlessly. You continue, “That’s how I felt.” 

“I’m sorry,” Gaz frowns, putting a gentle hand on the metal bar on the bed you lie on, “That must’ve been… weird.”

“No, no, I liked it,” Gaz’s face goes right back to confusion, “It was nice. Which is weird. But I didn’t feel weird. I felt, like, really calm in that sense, for the few minutes that I wasn’t panicking.” 

“You… liked it?” Gaz asks skeptically. You nod. 

“Yeah.” 

“How?”

“It was just…” You try to find the words to describe it, “I don’t know. I didn’t have control over it, which really bothered me. I felt, like, small, for some reason— like my mind is shrinking but my body is still the same, y’know? So it was really…” 

After a few moments of you trying to find the word you needed, Gaz offers, “Disproportionate?” 

“Yeah, that,” You nod quickly, “It was disproportionate and sucked, and it was obviously really scary, but I wasn’t processing stuff like I usually do. Which was great.” 

“That sounds…” Gaz wrinkles up his nose, “... awful, but okay.”

“I think a lot,” When Gaz raises an eyebrow at you, you weakly slap at his knee and continue, “And earlier, when I was in that coffin, I wasn’t thinking. Everything was just going in and out just like that. It would’ve been nice to keep some of those thoughts, yeah, but when I can properly think like I am now, I keep too many thoughts and it’s like— it clutters up, and it just lingers for way too long.” 

A small flash of understanding crosses Gaz’s expression. “So, you liked not thinking too much, because you already overthink too much, and being in the coffin and high on something happened to both help and not help with that?” 

“Yeah, basically,” You hum, before realizing, “That’s way simpler than what I said. Huh.” 

“That’s that overthinking,” Gaz muses, to which you respond with a frown. 

“I’m not saying I wanna be all claustrophobic like that again,” You clarify, because you still see doubt on Gaz’s face, “But I liked thinking like that. The non-thinking-thinking. I think it would help with my stress and stuff.” 

Another flash of understanding crosses Gaz’s expression, except this time, there’s a hint of something else in there. Realization? Curiosity? You’re none the wiser to it, getting a little more confused yourself. 

“Oh.” Gaz’s slight frown disappears, the upturning of the corners of his lips now visible, “Okay. I get that. I actually think I know what’s happening.” 

“You do?” You ask, confused. 

“I gotta confirm it with the captain, though,” You’re more confused. It’s visible, you guess, because Gaz laughs at your expression.

“Don’t worry, it’s not bad,” He clarifies, still grinning, “I just have some suspicions. Y’mind if I let Price know what y’said?” 

“... Sure?” You hesitantly say, to which Gaz responds by standing up and starting to speed-walk away from your bed, making you snort. 

“I’ll be back in a bit!” Gaz calls out over his shoulder. You sigh and turn so that your whole back is on the mattress of the bed. 

You were being honest, but at the cost of Gaz apparently “knowing what’s happening”, which is… disturbing, coming from Gaz, who you’ve affectionately titled a “D1 bird-brain”.

But whatever. It’s true, anyway, how you felt. It was uncomfortable, but it was somehow so much better than how you usually are. Or, well, not so much better, but at times when you’re overthinking or overwhelmed, you wish you could just turn off your brain, or something. Okay, maybe not turn it off, but turn off certain parts. You like thinking, and you do it all the time, but doing it all the time for you is like a full-time job on top of your already full-time job of being a part of the 141. 

You don’t even make sense to yourself, but that’s okay. You make sense to Gaz, apparently, and possibly Price as well. 

Speaking of— 

“Hey,” Price greets you, his usual quokka-smile gracing his lips, Gaz following in right after him with the most smug look you’ve ever seen. What a bastard. 

“What did you do?” You immediately ask Gaz, who only shakes his head and looks away, amused, making you a little annoyed. Price seems to know what you’re talking about as well, judging by the way his smile grows a tiny bit. I hate inside jokes. Only I’m allowed to have those with people.

“He told me what you told him,” Price hums, before sitting down into the chair previously occupied by Gaz, “And I have an idea you might like.” 

“... Okay,” You look at him suspiciously. 

“When I was still in the SAS—”

“Oh, so around the same time as the Trojan War?”

“Shut it, you.”

“Sure, Captain.”

Price sighs, exasperated, while Gaz snickers at his unamused look. Price, ever-so determined to explain this to you, proceeds, “Back when I was in the SAS, there was this other lieutenant who happened to be a good few years younger than me. Too young, in my opinion—” 

“Look at yourself,” Gaz interrupts him. 

“Bugger off,” Price sneers, “I’m tellin’ a story.”

Gaz puts his hands up in a surrendering gesture, “Keep your hair on, Captain, jus’ pointin’ out that you were younger than them when you first joined the army.” 

You blink at the two. “I think that’s the first time that I’ve heard British slang that I can actually understand.”

Price takes a deep breath, “However, it wasn’t up to me to decide if or when they joined. So, I got to know them a little better, and found out that the stress they got after assignments was so bad that they had this coping mechanism that they had thought to be fairly strange. I asked them what it was, and because we’d known each other for ‘round a year now, and I was to be moved to a different unit, they told me that they didn’t really know the name of it exactly but what they did was they would sit down in their jammies, ones that reminded them of their childhood, watch some cartoons, all that and some more. And I asked them how that helped them, because back then, I was a dense little shit who couldn’t think for more than two seconds, and they said that it let them think the same way that they did when they were a kid.”

You blink at him. “So the idea is… ?” 

“Maybe you two are related,” Gaz muses, “And the denseness is hereditary.” 

Price groans, “Put a fuckin’ sock in it, Kyle.” 

You gasp scandalously, before comically whispering, “First name after telling him to shut up? You’re just gonna let that slide, Gaz?” 

“I’ll shove a sock up your—” 

“My idea,” Price interrupts the two of you, preventing what could’ve been a fifteen-minute long spat, “is that you do that. You throw on your jammies—” 

“Jammies,” You repeat incredulously.

“―you watch some cartoons, play with stuffies—”

“We have stuffies?” You interrupt Price again, who pauses this time.

“We should, yeah,” He nods, “There’s a bin of ‘em around here somewhere, for emergencies.”

You furrow your eyebrows, “Emergencies?”

He looks at you pointedly, “Emergencies.” 

You blink at him. Blink, bl— “Oh, fuck off, I don’t need stuffies. I don’t think any of this would help me. I’m not five.” 

“Yeah, but you wanna be, don’t you?” Gaz questions you, voice a little less joking, though it still has a little humor in it— a safety blanket, basically, in case you take his words the wrong way. 

You stay silent. Price speaks up, “Tell you what; we’ll come back tomorrow, just me ‘nd Gaz, and you can let us know what you think of the idea. If y’like it, I’ll get you whatever you need to help you out. If you still don’t like it, you don’t like it, and we’ll figure somethin’ else out, alright?”

You sigh, “Alright.” 

Price smiles at you and gets up to clap you on the shoulder, “Get some rest, soldier, up the wooden hill and off to Bedfordshire with you.” 

“What the hell?” You immediately question, looking at Price like he’s gone mad, “Up the—”

“Don’t listen to him, he’s bad British representation,” Gaz hurriedly says, getting up and pushing Price lightly out of the room, talking to him in a theatrical whisper-yell, “You’re introducing them to sayings they’re not yet prepared for! Nobody says that to anyone above the age of twelve, Captain!” 

Price simply laughs and lets Gaz push him away from your bed, not bothering to push aside the curtains obscuring the view of you as he pushes him out of the medbay entirely. 

You blink at the swaying curtains.

“English people,” You mumble to yourself, turning over onto your side, “God damn English people. I’m never grouping Soap in with them ever again.”

— 

True to his word, Price walks in with Gaz the next morning.

Price sits down next to you.

“G’morning,” He greets you softly, chuckling at the disgruntled look on your face, “Woke up on the wrong side of the bed?”

“Woke up and thought I was six feet under for a second,” You mutter, making the smile on Price’s face falter. 

“Sorry,” Price apologizes, reaching out a slow hand—so that you can move at any second—to grasp your own hand and squeeze it gently, “Y’good now?” 

“Mhm,” You hum, nodding, your gaze shifting to Gaz, who looks as disgruntled as yourself. You snort and ask him, “Are you good?” 

“Someone,” Gaz snarks, glaring daggers at Price, “Woke me up two hours before my alarm so that he could force me to search for supplies with him.” 

“I wonder who that could’ve been,” Price hums, ignoring the way Gaz shakes his head disapprovingly, “Anywho, have you given any thought to the idea?” 

“The idea?” You question, before quickly realizing, “Oh, right, yeah, the idea.” 

Price looks at you both expectantly and patiently, while Gaz forces himself to pull his glare away from Price and put his gaze on you, observing your expressions and response. 

“Uhh…” You look at Price with hesitation, and he looks back at you without a trace of pressure in his eyes, making you sigh, “I’ll try it, but no guarantees that it’s gonna work.”

“Thank fuck,” Gaz groans, “My hard work hasn’t gone to was— ow!”

Gaz takes hurried steps back after Price stomped down hard on his foot, and the latter simply smiles at you at your response. 

“Great,” He gets up, dusting off his army-green shirt and pushing his chair back, “D’you reckon you’re good to get out of bed now?” 

“Probably,” You shrug, testing the waters by pushing yourself up into a sitting position. You wince at your still-sore back and your stiff legs, but otherwise feel okay, okay enough to feel confident in your ability to actually stand—though, you suspect you may need to grab onto something for extra support. 

Oh well. You’re sick of this bed already, and if you can stand, you’re gonna stand. 

Price sees this, however, and is quick to hold his arm out for you to grab onto as you swing your legs over the bed railing and hop off the mattress way too fast, making yourself dizzy in the process. You feel his concerned eyes burning holes into the top of your head as you try and succeed in regaining your footing, keeping a firm grip on his forearm in the process. Thank God for Captain Price and his too-muscly arms. 

“You alright?” Price asks, to which you respond with an affirmative nod. 

“Fine,” You hum, taking a deep breath before tentatively letting go of Price’s arm. He frowns, but doesn’t protest. Gaz looks at him questioningly, and Price shakes his head, nonverbally communicating to the sergeant that it’s nothing to get worried over.

Gaz decides to lead all of you out of the medbay, with you following after him and Price right behind you. You occasionally lose your footing, slipping on nothing, but you never fall, and even if you were about you, Price would catch you. You know he would. He’s been watching you like a hawk, hands twitching every time your footing is lost. But instead of begging for you to just take his arm, for fuck’s sake, he walks up so that he’s right next to you and starts talking. 

“So…” He starts, making you look over at him, “Y’want me to go over the plan?”

“The plan?” You ask, raising an eyebrow, “Sure.” 

“You get changed into your pajamas, we get on the bed, cuddle a lil’, you get a stuffie, we see what happens and then see what to do from there,” Price explains simply, “Any problems with that?”

“No, sounds good,” You hum. It sounds fucking fantastic, you think, but he doesn’t need to know that. 

“Good,” Price smiles down at you, before saying, “You remind me of them.” You tilt your head to the side a bit, “The lieutenant?”

Price nods, “Yeah. Really sweet person. Had a whole collection of stuffies and blankets.”

You smile, “Sounds nice. They just keep all those in their quarters?”

“Yeah.” You both fall into silence again, comfortable silence, and soon enough, the three of you reach your sleeping quarters.

You all walk in. Well, except for Gaz, who is stopped by Price at the door. You turn around to question them, but Price stops you before you can even open your mouth.

“You just go get dressed,” He says, nodding over to the drawers in the corner of your room, “We’ll be outside. Just knock when you’re done.” 

Skeptically, you look between the two, before you nod and close the door, leaving you inside your room alone. You try not to give too much thought to it, trying yet failing to ignore every thought that crosses your mind, busying yourself by choosing pajamas. 

Soon enough, you’re dressed in your favorite pajamas—fluffy pants and a loose t-shirt, as well as just-as-fluffy slippers to replace your boots—and knocking at the door to signal to Price that you’re done. He opens the door, and Gaz is nowhere in sight, but you choose not to ask about it. Instead, you step to the side so that Price can walk in and sit on your bed, closing the door behind him.

On the bed already is a fluffy blanket—it must’ve been set up earlier, considering that Gaz was apparently woken up at around four in the morning to get everything ready. 

You sit down on the bed next to your Captain, your fluffy pajama pants and loose t-shirt already making you feel relaxed, as well as your fuzzy slippers. You don’t really wear this outside of going to sleep, but after wearing a medical gown for the past twenty-four hours, you’re more than happy to make one small change in your routine. Price smiles down at you, one arm hovering around your back questioningly, before you nod and let him fully wrap it around you and pull you into his side. You’re already pretty tired, despite the fact that you got a full night’s worth of sleep, so the pajamas are honestly pretty fitting.

You sigh, turning your head slightly so that your cheek is pressed to his chest. Gaz walks in just seconds later, your gaze immediately moving to him as he sits down on the bed right next to you, sandwiching you in between him and Price. In any other situation, this would make you feel claustrophobic, but it feels oddly… comfortable right now. You notice the stuffed animal in Gaz’s hands—a small, round, fluffy cow with a black and white coloring pattern—and look at him questioningly. 

“That s’posed t’be for me?” You ask, strangely drawn to the small stuffie. Gaz seems to see your fascination with the stuffed animal and smiles softly at you, a weird sight, considering that the two of you are having kerfuffles every three seconds at the very least. 

“Uh-huh,” Gaz nods, offering it to you, smiling even wider when you gingerly grab it, “Y’like it?”

“It’s cute,” You mumble, looking it over in your hands, rubbing your thumb against its soft fur and black beady eyes. You know what you want to do with it. You want to hug it close to your chest, like you used to oh-so many years ago, back before you had to force yourself to stop sleeping with stuffed animals out of fear that you would need them in order to sleep forever. It only partially worked; you never slept with another stuffie again, but instead found yourself waking up with a bunched up part of your blanket or your pillow in your arms, pulling tight to your chest. 

You really wanna hug it. You missed stuffed animals. You miss stuffed animals, present tense. You miss their soft fur and the baby pink of their ears, the polyester trapped safely inside the confines of the felt and fluff, the sweetness and child-like wonder that you lost with them. 

Both Price and Gaz sense the conflict in your mind. 

“Hey,” Price softly rubs your arm with his thumb, with gentle circles and too many yet just enough callouses, “You’re thinking a lil’ bit too much there. You wanna hug the stuffie, go ahead and hug it.” 

It’s easy, you think, so easy to just… think, but let go of my thoughts when I have him to ground me.

You hug the stuffed animal, pulling it close to your chest and wrapping your arms around it, your limbs too long for what you’re trying to do but doubt and stress in your mind slowly growing small enough to compensate for the lack of a smaller body. It’s frustrating, yes, but Price’s arm around your body and Gaz’s hand that cautiously rests on your shoulder makes your body feel the tiniest bit smaller, and it makes your mind the tiniest bit cloudier. 

“There y’go,” Gaz coos, his voice a type of soft you didn’t even know was possible from him. Price only chuckles, and you should feel annoyed because they sound like they’re teasing you, like they’re a part of an inside joke that you’re not, but they’re not. They’re here right now, Price’s arm is around you and Gaz’s hand is on your shoulder and they’re speaking so softly and— and you’re letting your thoughts go. 

They’re coming and going, some staying longer than others, but they never pile up, never clutter up like a messy desk or a disorganized folder. They’re neat and held up by mental thumbtacks, pinned to the corkboard of your cerebral cortex, sometimes melting into the beige board and other times staying, but never getting to the point where the thoughts are stacking on top of each other or where there’s no more room for anymore thumbtacks. 

It’s something you never thought you’d be able to experience, but here you are, experiencing it, breathing it in like oxygen. Like an open field, bright and clear, with your Captain’s or your Sergeant’s arms—wrapped in blood and flesh, not stripped down to the bone, not poking and prodding at you—around you and keeping you grounded. Your very own anchorage; the perfectly crafted bumps and dips in their arms that fit around you like puzzle pieces when they pull you towards either one of them, as if your Creator knew that you would find refuge in them, as if They knew that you would know how perfect it is.

Because it is. It’s perfect, in the way that a salmon knowing its birthplace despite swimming so many miles away is. In the way that homeostasis works; your body finding equilibrium, that perfect balance between your internal systems and outside forces. In the way that the stuffed cow in your arms seems to seep through your chest and go straight to your heart and soul. 

You don’t realize that you’ve zoned out until Price lightly shakes you. 

“Y’alright, darling?” He asks, concerned, his gruff voice more gravelly than usual. You blink and look over at him, and you’re sweet again. Sweet and loved, and loving to love. Or, at least, you think you’re loved. You might be a tad bit delusional, but there’s something in Price’s eyes, some kind of light that reflects pink and green hues, some kind of nurturing-feeling that doesn’t go away when he blinks. 

“Uh-huh,” You nod, the way your head moves up and down almost like a bobblehead figure, “All… sunshine ‘nd rainbows over here.” 

Price breathes out a small laugh and Gaz raises an eyebrow at you. 

“Yeah? All sunshine and rainbows?” Gaz teases you, “Are you sure there’s anythin’ happenin’ up in your noggin?” 

You pout and lightly swing your leg at him to kick his calf, and although you’re only wearing slippers and are kicking about as hard as a pillow, Gaz makes a show of pretending to get seriously injured by it. He gasps dramatically and brings his knee up to his chest, hugging his calf to his torso and rubbing at the spot you kicked. He pouts right back at you, immature and theatrical, and you giggle—fucking giggle—at his antics. Gaz can’t help but let up the act, grinning as soon as your laugh sounds out, the noise music to his ears. 

“You havin’ a laugh while I’ve gotten hurt?” He antagonizes you, voice light and fluffy, “Brat.” 

“Noo,” You deny, voice growing just slightly higher-pitched, your movements a little less controlled by yourself, “I’m never a brat.” 

“You sure?” Gaz raises an eyebrow at you, letting his leg down, “I think you’re lying, duckie.” 

“Nuh-uh.” 

“Yuh-huh.” 

“Nuh-uh.” 

“I cannot believe you’re both still annoying, even when they’re bein’ little,” Price sighs exasperatedly, making both you and Gaz laugh, your laughter more bubbly and light while his is knowing and proud. 

“Lil’ kids aren’t an exception to my teasing, Captain,” Gaz snickers, reaching over to ruffle your hair while you squeal quietly and lean back into Price to hide away from your attacker’s hand. Price snorts and pulls you a little closer to him.

“All little ones, or just this one?” Price nods down at you. Gaz hums, thinking.

“Ah, just this one,” Gaz grins, making Price sigh. The latter brings his other arm around and turns so that he can pull you to him with both arms, while Gaz suddenly frowns. 

“You’re hoarding them,” Gaz whines, while Price only raises an eyebrow at him. You feel oddly joyful at the thought of Gaz also wanting a share of your attention, or at least some of your physical affection.

“Shoulda gotten here faster than me, mate,” Price simply hums. He sounds so smug, voice full of smarm and expression knowing, because he’s more than aware of the fact that Gaz quite literally could not possibly get here faster than Price had.

“You made me get the supplies!” Gaz argues, though softer than he usually does, being more mindful of your newfound mindset, you assume. 

“Ehh, you could’ve refused it.” Price says, blatantly lying as he does, watching in amusement as Gaz gapes at him.

“What?”

You like the attention, but what you like even more is the conversation Price and Gaz start up afterwards. They don’t take their attention off of you, no, not one bit, but they aren’t talking directly towards you, you’re just existing and it’s amazing. 

Price begins asking Gaz about something, probably his reports, and Gaz responds positively, you presume. Price is talking calmly and slowly and Gaz is nodding along, his hand making its way to your own, his fingers interlocking with yours and squeezing your hand every now and then. Your pajamas feel awfully comfortable now. What did Price call them yesterday? Jammies? Usually, you’re an avid hater of English slang, but you can’t help but feel a little warmer just thinking about the word jammies. 

You can feel your eyes going half-lidded, and you can hear someone chuckling. Probably Gaz. He likes laughing at you, but it’s never in a mean way. Maybe that’s why you feel so comfortable with the laughter. It reminds you of an older sibling, someone who’s basically programmed to tease and make fun of you, but still likes you. Or, at least, is expected to still like you. You enjoy the idea of a chosen older sibling more than a biological one, funnily enough, because the expectation of liking someone is so different from actually developing a liking to someone. With the expectation, there’s almost no choice; there’s still a chance of them not liking you, but it’s expected of them to like you, so they’re gonna try anyway, and it makes it feel less authentic, less real—but with choosing, they choose you to have that bond with them, they choose to treat you the way they do, not because it’s expected of them from birth, but because they see something in you that draws them to you. 

Gaz is that person. That older brother that chose you to tease, to play fight with, to argue with, to laugh with, to hold hands with—he chose you. And because of that, his laughter is acceptable, and his teasing is never taken to heart. 

Your eyelids get a little heavier, and someone’s gently tilting your head so that it’s resting more comfortably against their chest. Probably Price. He likes physical touch, unsurprisingly, and shows it as much as you allow him to. He particularly likes to loosely wrap a hand around one of your wrists with his thumb resting over your veins, gently pressing inward to feel the beating of your heart. Why he does it, you don’t know. Maybe he likes the reassurance of your living. Maybe he likes how it grounds him, how it reminds him that you’re a tangible being with a beating heart and a working mind. how it might let him know that you’re real and here with him. 

Or maybe it’s something deeper, maybe it goes back to that other lieutenant, maybe it goes back even further to when he was sixteen and had just joined the British military. Whatever it is, you accept it wholeheartedly, because when he does it, it reminds you as well that he’s alive and searching for proof of you being alive as well. Because you believe that living people will always search for other living beings, or at least you know that you always will, because the feeling of brittle bones and the sight of dead bodies haunts you in ways that you never thought possible. 

Your eyelids droop down completely. 

“I feel like I should say good night, but it’s barely no—” You think that’s Gaz.

“Shut it and let them sleep, for Christ’s sake.” That’s probably Price.

“I’m just saying—” Definitely Gaz.

“I’ll staple your mouth shut so y’stop sayin’ anything, how about that, y’muppet?” Definitely Price.

In The Matrix, Morpheus gives Neo two options: blue pill, or red pill?

He says that if Neo takes the blue pill, “the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe”. But the second option, the red pill, if Neo takes that, he will “stay in wonderland and [he] show [Neo] how deep the rabbit hole goes”. Neo, of course, takes the red pill, and is shown the “real world”. 

Neo is thought to be “the One”. With the “O” in “One” being capitalized, so you know that it’s a pretty important title. 

In the end, Neo becomes confident in who he is and what he can do, and defeats the “Agents”. Trinity confesses her love to a “sleeping” Neo, their ship is getting attacked by whatever those weird fuckin’ creatures were called, and Neo defeats the last of the agents. The end. 

You take pills too. But yours are blue. They’re matte, powdery, baby-blue pills that are branded with the name “ZOLOFT”. It’s sertraline, to be specific, and you’ve been taking it for the past few months. You’re new to pills like these, ones meant to treat anxiety and depression and a number of other medical issues, so you didn’t know how much to take at first. You asked your doctor so many questions. You think about it often, and wonder if, even though it’s their job, that doctor had gotten annoyed at some point because of your inquiry. 

These pills do similar things to the ones in The Matrix, though. You take them, preferably at night, and wake up in your bed like you always do. You believe whatever you want to believe, and another chapter is closed at the end of every day, marking another page closer to the end of your story. 

Some days, the story feels like it’s going to end sooner than expected. 

A side effect of sertraline―or, well, Zoloft specifically―happens to be suicidal ideation. It’s not that common, not that talked about, and isn’t the most well-known. But then again, most mental disorder-treating medicines have some kind of side effect like that, and plenty of people take things like antidepressants without an issue―or so you thought―so surely you could deal with something as simple as sertraline, right?

Wrong. So, so, wrong. 

It’s probably really bad for a person who works in a military group to be dealing with such thoughts. You think about quitting sometimes, for the sake of the other people in the task force, because what could happen if the wrong straw breaks the wrong camel’s back while you’re doing an assignment? What if, caught in the crossfire between your team and your enemy, you say fuck it and decide that it’s all just too much? What are the odds of that happening? What are the odds of anything happening? What were the odds of the Earth being created, of the first animals evolving, of the first humans speaking the first languages? Statistics are so important, chance is so important, and odds determine everything. What are the odds of you deciding whether or not you have the will to live? The ability to keep going, to keep the routine you’ve always kept, to keep from taking one of those G19s from the armory and turning off the safety before pulling the trigger? To commit to such a permanent solution, one you’ve deemed as the “s-word”, because thinking about it sometimes is too much.

Or maybe it’d be a rope, your brain continues without your consent, A chain. Anything that will hold your body weight up enough for you to dangle from the fan on the ceiling―an image that makes you lean towards a chain, sickeningly enough, because of the idea of your abnormally stretched neck on display. The purple bruising that would appear, the indentations of each link, the smell of your blood and the metal of the chain unable to be told apart. Maybe your eyes would still be open, and it would look like you’re staring down at anyone who walks into your office. There’s so many possibilities. They add up, and create new odds, new chances. Every time you simply think, you are creating a new way to go about life, and that creation is sometimes stored so deeply in the back of your mind that it haunts you. It comes back around, becomes more common, the chances of it happening go up. 

Sometimes the odds feel like they aren’t in your favor at all. Sometimes you wonder how you could’ve ever thought that any part of the universe was against you. It’s not bipolar; it doesn’t come and go in extremes, it just comes and goes. The odds will lower in your favor some days, and you will deem those days “bad days”, and other days they will be so high you don’t even think about “good days” or “bad days”. But those other days are almost as bad as the “bad days”, because they go by so quickly. You take them for granted so easily, too easily, and they leak through the thin lines between your fingers, leaving you with nothing by the end of the day. 

Sometimes on “bad days”, your hands go from cupped to praying, and you will plead with yourself to just get better. You never do, on those days, and after taking your medicine you will go to sleep and believe that the next day will be better. Or, at least, convince yourself that the next day will be better. 

You would’ve understood if Neo took the blue pill. If he stayed in blissful ignorance, even after all of the weird shit that happened to him. If he continued to wake up every day in a “normal” world, to sell computer systems and hacking programs, to be anyone but “The One”. 

Because that’s what you do. You take your medicine, and go on with life as normally as possible, even with all of the things that you’ve been through. You wouldn’t want to be the one responsible for saving the world, or beating up robot-alien-things, or whatever. Just like how you don’t want to be held responsible for really just… taking care of yourself. 

Which you’re shit at, by the way, if that doesn’t make things worse. 

You take your sertraline and that’s about it. It’s not like it doesn’t work, it’s just underwhelming sometimes. Before you got on it, you would take more things to heart, think about things more, and were probably a little more prone to actually killing yourself. After starting to take it, it was admittedly pretty rough. It felt like your anxiety had increased a little, like your paranoia had only heightened, and everything felt so elevated. 

Then, maybe a few months after beginning to take it, everything dimmed out. Like one of those lightbulbs you can dim, everything gradually came back down, and even lowered to a more tolerable level. You were glad, at first, that you had endured those first few months the way that you did because you’re not sure you would’ve even been here to this day had you not. Reading several articles and Reddit posts about Zoloft definitely didn’t help, especially as someone who was taking it partially for anxiety, but still, you managed. 

And then you realized that just taking the medicine didn’t do as much as you hoped it would. 

It helps you deal with anxious and depressive thoughts, yes, but you still feel like something’s missing. That lightbulb in your mind has dimmed, but it’s only just enough light to see ahead of you. Before all of this, the light was bright enough to blind you, to make you see that dreadful stark-white that still sometimes haunts you―when it dimmed down to where it is now, it was obviously a relief, but you feel like now there’s not enough light. 

You understand the whole point of the medicine is to dim that light, to help bring down your mental state to a more “normal” one, but you think that even people who don’t have diagnosed mental disorders feel strong emotions like you used to. Maybe not as strong, but definitely something adjacent to it. You miss that, funnily enough―getting strong enough emotions. 

Right now, you’re sitting at your desk in your office, staring down at the plate of mashed potatoes in front of you. You get it almost every time it’s offered, and endure the teasing you get from your teammates, all for one purpose. 

To hide your pills in it.

Mashed potatoes are starchy, yes, but easy to swallow without chewing. They’re thick enough to help hide the feeling of the pill going down your throat, and don’t leave that weird aftertaste in your mouth that taking your medicine with water does. You tried taking the pills with water at first, like you would with any other medicine, but with this specifically you just can’t. It’s too easy to notice, they’re too big to just hide with water, and it feels like swallowing a rock every time you take them with water. 

So, mashed potatoes it is. 

The pill is already mixed into it. You had folded the small blue tablet into the mushed vegetable with a plastic fork, trying to keep it as hidden as possible, making sure no hints of blue bled through the beige-yellow of the potato.

You’re now watching the mashed potatoes, unblinking, as if it’s going to grow legs and run away from you. It’s never truly easy swallowing the medicine, even with the mashed potatoes coating it, but it’s usually easier than it is today. Then again, today was deemed a “bad day” the moment you woke up, so this was to be expected. 

You grab the white plastic fork after a brief moment of hesitation and pierce the food with it, hand trembling ever-so slightly as you do―not from anxiety, but from your lack of water intake―and pick up a clump of potato with little strength. The vegetable oddly weighs your hand down the tiniest bit more than usual, but you ignore this in favor of pushing yourself to just force the food into your mouth. You try your best not to chew, your jaw only really moving to chew the side of your cheek instead to satisfy your urges, and eventually manage to swallow the food. 

Right off the bat, you can tell the cluster you swallowed had the pill in it. Lucky me, you think almost bitterly, not sure whether you should be happy or uncomfortable, at least it’s over with. It’s not that it’s a bad thing that you got to the pill so quickly, but usually you’re able to get a few bites of medicine-less potato in before the actual medicine itself. Nonetheless, you scoop up another fork-full―fork-full?―of mashed potatoes and try to eat as much as you can to get rid of the weird feeling of having a pill going down your throat. 

Just the fleeting thought of having a pill that big going down your throat makes it feel like your esophagus is closing. You feel yourself grow closer to nausea at the feeling, setting down your fork and pushing the paper plate of your dinner aside, just to rest your elbow on the table and put your forehead in the palm of your head. It’s bad enough that you feel ashamed because of the fact you even have to take antidepressants, so it’s even worse that those same antidepressants are throwing bad side-effects at you. 

Ashamed because needing medicine to function the same way anyone else does feels so pathetic to you. Maybe it isn’t pathetic. Actually, you know it isn’t; you don’t look at other people who do the same thing and think that they should feel as ashamed as you do. But you still look at your bright orange prescription bottle, labeled with your legal name, and think that you shouldn’t need it. 

You think, for a moment, that it’s because of how much you’ve dehumanized yourself. 

Dehumanized is such an ugly word, and it leaves a strange bitterness in your mind after thinking about it, but deep down you feel that it’s true. You know that you’re human, obviously, because physically that’s what you are. You are, undeniably, a homo sapien―a person, a living being that is a bipedal primate mammal. You, in a less literal sense, have those same cords attached to you that Neo did when he first went to the “real world”. 

But you need those cords, you think, lifting your head so that your chin is resting in your palm instead of your forehead, you need to stay attached to the Matrix. 

Because you took the blue pill. You found a way to keep yourself attached to the Matrix, to keep yourself grounded to what you wish you could experience without them. And those cables weigh you down, and that pod you stay encased in limits your movement―sometimes you feel more like the pod than the person inside of it―but it all seems so worth it to you, doesn’t it? To keep believing what you want to believe, to wake up everyday and dose yourself with that fifty-milligrams worth of sertraline hidden under a pile of food, to eat that food and swallow that pill even though it makes you feel like a mutt? 

You take a shuddering breath in, your thoughts building up in volume and mass, more questions entering your mind too fast for you to process them all. You feel that familiar rush of adrenaline, the kind that triggers your ‘fight-or-flight’. It lights your nerves on fire and causes them to jump, to electrify, and you feel your fingers twitch with the feeling. It almost feels like there’s something crawling along your nerves, under your skin, and the thought almost triggers your gag reflex. Your eyelids flutter, barely shutting for just a moment before you force them open. Your gaze flits over to the still-mostly-full plate of mashed potatoes. 

You’re usually able to finish them, even on “bad days”. But today, with nausea swirling uncomfortably in your stomach, and a too-big pill going through the thin tubes inside your body, you find that it’s much harder to even think about picking that fork back up. You can almost feel your heart beating through your palm, that continuous th-thump, th-thump growing exponentially faster, and your palm getting sweatier by the second. You shift your feet and find that invisible needles are poking at the bottom of them, small pins that push and prod at your skin that leave a strange hot-cold feeling. It forces you to take the pressure off of your feet by holding them up ever-so slightly, the soles of your shoes just barely touching the ground. 

You swear your heart rate increases at all the different sensations lingering on your body. You can feel your breathing starting to pick up, and for God knows what reason, you suddenly find it difficult to keep your eyes locked onto one object. Your gaze dances around the room as a surge of chills runs up your spine. A trail of goosebumps rises after each wave of biting cold, passing over the bony projections of your dorsum. After having so many of them, you know instinctively the signs of an oncoming anxiety attack, and know how quick those symptoms escalate from simple shallow breaths to the inability to keep your breathing consistent at all. Yes, they develop slower than a panic attack does, but the gradient from fine to not-fine is hard to view as slow when there’s so many symptoms to keep track of.

At the thought of such a thing happening, your gaze instantly locks onto the prescription bottle sitting on your desk. It’s still uncapped―fortunate for you, because you’re seriously doubting your ability to uncap something with a child-proof cap on it right now―and in your eyes is practically glowing. It’s so tempting, because it’s just right there, so easily accessible, so easy to just grab and pour however many pills you need down your throat. The thought makes you realize how dry your mouth feels, how constricted your throat feels, but your mind is too filled with a flurry of incoherent thoughts to dwell on such feelings. 

With your free hand, you grab the uncapped bottle. It shakes with your hand, now more from your building anxiety than your dehydration, and makes the tablets inside rattle. You bring it to your lips, ignoring the chiding voice in the back of your mind telling you how disgusting it is to just put it on your mouth like that, and shake it just enough to get a single pill out of it. The dryness of the pill sticks to the wetness of your mouth, just below the border of your bottom lip. You set the bottle down and poke at the pill with the tip of your tongue, the weird vanilla-like taste of the medicine spreading across the muscle easily. 

Your mouth is dry, so you have to use the residual saliva sitting on your tongue to slick the pill up enough to go down somewhat-smoothly down your throat. It’s still rough, and some areas of the pill remain powdery, the feeling of it sliding down your throat enough to make you gag. For a brief moment, the action causes the pill to lodge in your throat―it’s not big enough to make you choke or anything, but it’s enough to make your heart beat faster and your hands grip onto the edge of your desk tightly. Your thumbs are tucked under the edge, the first knuckle at the tip of your finger bent and the flesh of the tips of your fingers turning lighter from the pressure. 

You cough once you feel the pill go down your esophagus entirely, and breathe raggedly afterwards. Deep down, you know that the medicine takes some time to work, and that if you gave it a little longer than a minute that you’d start feeling better. But the reeling anxiety that wraps around your throat like a chain seems to pull you impossibly farther away from that betterness, and forces your throat to tighten to a point where your breathing feels limited. You go from breathing through your nose to your mouth, where you can still taste the lingering artificial-vanilla with every inhale. 

It’s getting worse, an annoying voice tells you, one that manages to be louder than the others, the medicine’s supposed to help. You’ve only taken a hundred milligrams so far. Another and it’s a hundred and fifty. An overdose is only if it goes over two hundred.

It’s stupid logic but more tempting the more you think about it. It is, after all, only a third pill. You’d be pushing it—

Do you really care all that much that you’re pushing it? What if you want to break that limit? The limits you made, to keep yourself alive, that you still sometimes question the existence of? 

―but that doesn’t really compute well in your mind, and you soon find yourself reaching for the bottle again. Each pill shakes with your hand, and with each tremor another wave of tablets hits the sides of the bottle, like a visual representation of the thoughts that bounce off of the walls of your brain. You lift the bottle, and bring it to your lips, the area that makes contact with your mouth cooler than the rest of the bottle from earlier when you had done the same thing. You’re about to tilt it up before you hear a sudden knock at your door. 

The noise is startling and makes you drop the bottle, the pills spilling over the edge of it and onto the table. 

“Shit,” you curse quietly under your breath, quickly flattening your hand and sweeping all of the pills into a pile, and picking them up in clusters. You manage to get them all back in the bottle before another knock sounds out, and cap the bottle before opening up one of the small drawers on the side of your desk and shoving it in there. 

“Come in!” you call out in a strained voice, praying that you’ll be able to keep it steady for as long as the person at the door needs to talk to you. You close the drawer just as the door creaks open. 

Much to your horror, you look up to see your Captain. 

Your palms are still sweaty as he walks in, so you try to discreetly wipe them off on your pants, and hope to whoever can help you that he doesn’t pay too much attention to the sweat gathered on your forehead. You take a deep breath as silently as you can, attempting to gather yourself before Price can notice anything being wrong.

“It’s a quarter past two,” Price comments once he walks in, closing the door behind him, “why are you still awake?” 

You look over to the digital clock on your desk almost immediately and, oh shit, it is exactly 2:15. You look back over at Price, who is busying himself with pulling the chair that was once in front of your desk around it, presumably to sit next to you. You still feel the dreadfully fast pace of your heart, that th-thump, th-thump, th-thump that you can hear blaring in your ears. It makes itself known in your chest, in your wrist, even in the base of your throat―almost every pulse point in your body has forced you to become aware of its existence.

You swallow dryly, trying to ignore said feeling, and reply, “Why are you still awake?”

Price raises an eyebrow at you, pulling the chair up beside you and sitting down in it, “I asked first.” 

You look at him with an unimpressed look on your face. “Can’t sleep. Why are you up?”

Price hums and leans back in his seat, arms crossing over each other, “Same reason.”

It doesn’t sound like a lie, but it doesn’t sound entirely true either, in your opinion. It’s not that you don’t trust him, but he just seems like he’s up to something. What that something is, though, you aren’t sure. 

“Why the food?” Price nods over to the plate of mashed potatoes, very noticeably unfinished. 

Your gaze follows his to the mashed potatoes. You can still feel the moisture on the palms of your hands, the small tremors that wrack your fingers, and Price’s presence does nothing to soothe your flaming nerves.

“Wanted dinner,” you shrug as casually as you can, forcing a neutral expression onto your face―you briefly overthink what a neutral expression looks like, and decidedly just let your face relax the best you can, “I didn’t get any when everyone else went, I was busy with something, and didn’t really want to head over to the mess with so many people over there, plus I was busy.” 

You look over at Price after your lengthy explanation, not realizing just how lengthy it was, and watch the corners of his lips quirk up into an amused-yet-worried smile. 

“You said you were busy twice,” he points out, before pausing, and pointing out again, “and it looks like you’ve taken a few bites out o’that at most.” 

You don’t bother to look at the mashed potatoes again; you know very well how they look, and know how undeniably full the plate looks. 

“Didn’t feel that hungry,” you make up a poorly thought-out excuse, that even you can understand is unbelievable. 

Price blinks at you, slowly, before sighing. 

“Are you alright?” Price asks, looking more concerned than amused now. You should’ve known from the moment that he walked in that you wouldn’t be able to hide anything from him. If not for the fact that he always seems to know what’s going on, then because of the overwhelming presence of your disquietude. 

You look at him and try to figure out what to say. What is there to say? You were panicking just two minutes ago, with your prescription bottle in one hand, the other too shaky to hold up the damn thing. You can still taste that vanilla. You can still taste the plastic. The bottle itself never once touched your tongue, but every time your tongue rests in your mouth, the tip of it pokes at the same exact place the bottle made contact with. You expect it to taste of vanilla, like its contents, but it doesn’t; it tastes like the pharmacy you got it at. It tastes like the sterile white of the counter, the fingers of the person who handed it to you, the money you spent on it, and the time it took you to get it. 

It’s nothing pleasant. The strange vanilla of the pills aren’t either, but they’re preferable to the bottle itself. 

Price notices you zoning out for a moment, and waves a hand in front of your face. Your eyes unconsciously track his hand for a moment before you blink back into reality and look at him. You knew you were fucked earlier, but when you look at his expression, at the look in his eyes as he watches you snap back to reality, you know that he knows. Maybe he doesn’t know exactly what happened, or how it happened, but he knows something. Fuck, he knows. 

Or, maybe he does know. Maybe he heard your cursing through the door, even with your low voice, maybe he heard the pills spill onto the desk, maybe he heard the opening and closing of the drawer, maybe he―

He’s staring at you.

―has security cameras set up in here, because he does in every room, every hall, everywhere but the bathrooms and the sleeping quarters―

He’s talking. It’s muffled by the sound of your own heavy breathing.

―or maybe it’s just intuition, a gut feeling he has, where he just knows that something’s wrong, that same gut feeling that everyone seems to get when something isn’t the way it’s supposed to be―

Your palms are sweaty. Your heart is pounding out of your chest. You’re starting to feel a little lightheaded.

―the same “gut feeling” that you experience every day but have to ignore because it’s not a gut feeling it’s anxiety and your real gut feelings feel the almost the exact same way anxiety does so you may never know if you ever get an actual one―

Price grabs onto your arm, though the feeling of his skin on yours can’t push past the skin-crawling sensation that coats your skin.

―but how do you really know that your gut feelings aren’t gut feelings? How do you know that anything is anything? That it’s really Price that’s sitting next to you, that it’s your own office you’re sitting in, that―

“[name]!” Price’s voice snaps you out of the trance you seem to be in, and you sharply inhale at the sound of his voice, his volume much louder than you expected it to be. 

You didn’t realize how fast and heavy your breathing had really gotten until this point. You look at Price, a little more on the panicked side now, with restless eyes that can’t stop flitting all over his face. He takes his hand off of your arm before you can even notice it was there in the first place, and leans back away from you. 

You try to take deep breaths, but each breath feels like trying to breathe underwater, and each inhale-exhale leaves you shuddering. You look down at your lap, breath hitching and stuttering, and the moment you open your mouth in the hopes of breathing easier, you are all too aware of just how dry it’s become. You’re sure you let out some kind of sound that alerts Price of your growing distress, because he hesitantly leans forward and takes a deep breath. 

“[name],” Price keeps his voice soft and quiet, quieter than he’d been just a few seconds ago, his soothing voice a gentle wave crashing against the rock of your mind, “you’re okay. Look at me, soldier.” 

Like a remote to TV static, the noisiness of your mind is partially calmed and the waves that wash over your brain provide sweet escape from the overwhelming adrenaline and cortisol thrumming in your veins.

Mindlessly, you do as he asks, his words grounding you and tugging you back down to Earth more effectively than any anchor could. When you look at him, his eyes are clouded with concern and there’s a small frown on his face that almost perfectly juxtaposes his usual quokka-smile.

You know you’re still trembling. You can feel the hairs that stick up on your legs and arms, the weird hot-cold feeling that creates pinpricks of discomfort across your body, the way your heart is trying to escape the prison cell of your ribcage—but none of it compares to the unbelievable dizziness you feel. Your head is a balloon filled with helium and it is slowly deflating, but not fast enough. You feel like you’re no longer in control of your own body—or were you ever in control? 

Your stomach is churning. There’s a sense of dread that dwells there. You might throw up. 

Cutting through your thoughts is Price once again.

“You listenin’?” your Captain asks, to which you nod after a delay of a few seconds. Price holds a hand out and gives you a questioning look, the question of ‘can I touch you?’ clear enough on his face that you nod lightly and he takes your hand gingerly.

“Do y’know where you are?” Price asks. You nod, and he softly requests, “can you tell me where?”

“My office,” you answer simply, the gravel in your voice making you wince. The warbling that escapes your mouth is nowhere near your usual voice, and for a moment you think you might be right about needing to vomit, but you manage to push it down and pray. Price ignores this and pushes on.

“And who am I?” he asks, as if he doesn’t know. 

“... The Captain.” Price purses his lips—he doesn’t really want to accept this as an answer, because he wants you to say his actual name, but he knows what you mean, and you know what he’s doing. He knows that you mean that you’re here, that you’re present, and you know that he’s trying to ground you the best he can.

“Do you know my name?” he questions, to which you nod again, though a little more moderately, seeing as the repetition of nodding your head only makes you more lightheaded, “what’s my name?”

You take a few shaky breaths, ones that are shallow and uneven, ones that hitch enough for it to be so noticeable that Price manages to pick up on it. You open your mouth to talk, but find that your tongue is too heavy to lift to create coherent sounds. The thought somehow heightens your anxiety, something that seems to be noticeable to Price, judging by how his expression shifts to something impossibly softer.

“Here, let me—” Without another word, Price cautiously brings your hand up to the middle of his chest, where his sternum is. 

He exaggerates his breathing, taking long, deep breaths in, and similarly long exhales. His chest rises and falls satisfyingly, and it’s clear that he wants you to copy him. You try your best at first, taking that same too-deep breath that he does and fail almost immediately as you choke on the air you attempt to inhale. Price brushes his thumb over the back of your hand and takes another exaggerated breath, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. You keep your gaze more focused on the lower half of his face as you copy him, oxygen going in through your nose, and carbon dioxide going out through your mouth. 

That one successful breath is followed by an unsuccessful one, then another successful one, then another, and it’s a little rocky but you find that soon enough you’re breathing. There’s air flowing in and out of your body smoothly, with each exaggerated breath you take, almost in sync with Price, until finally he puts your hand back into your lap but continues to hold it. He squeezes it once before letting go, and clasps his hands together. 

“What’s my name, soldier?” he asks, and this time you think you can answer him. 

“John Price,” his name feels weird coming out of your mouth, especially with no honorifics, but he accepts the answer anyway. 

“Good,” Price praises, giving you a small smile, “you’re doing good.”

The approval he gives you helps to calm your nerves the tiniest bit, and you feel yourself slowly coming down from the God awful high that you’d just been on. Again, you’re not sure how he knows, but he senses that you’re calming down―is it because your breathing is steadier? You aren’t nearly as restless? You’re no longer zoning out?―so he leans back in his chair and watches as you do the same. 

“Now,” he breathes out, “can you tell me what’s going on with you?” 

You look away from him for the briefest moment, sparing a glance at the cabinet you know the bottle of your pills lays in, before looking back at him. If he noticed you pulling your gaze away from him for a split second, he doesn’t mention it nor does he make it known that he did. 

“There’s not really anything going on,” you shrug, to which Price scoffs. 

“[c/n],” he looks at you, disbelieving, “two seconds ago I had to help you breathe normally. I know that there’s something that’s going on, somethin’ that had to trigger what just happened.” 

You stay quiet and he gives you an expectant look. The pressure from his fixed glare makes you feel like you’re about to explode. 

Finally, you answer him defeatedly, though vaguely, “I was in the middle of taking my medicine when you knocked.”

Price stays silent, expecting you to elaborate. 

“And…” you try to find a way to make it sound less awkward than it does in your mind, though you suppose there’s never really a correct way to go about something like this, “I almost took more medicine than I needed to.” 

The silence continues, but now Price looks less expectant, and instead more of a mix between concern and something else you can’t identify. That something, though, is still soft, and still has a hint of pity―maybe sympathy?―to it.

“Almost?” he repeats, “was that on purpose?” 

When you think about it, it’s complicated. You didn’t necessarily intend to overdose, you just dismissed the idea of it. Or, at least, you don’t remember trying to overtly kill yourself. Then again, you knew the risks of taking more pills than prescribed to you; had you taken that third pill, you would’ve only been one more away from an overdose, and even then you’d still probably get some kind of health issue. 

Price’s face hardens when you don’t answer immediately. He must be taking your silence as a “yes”. 

“Not… really,” you answer slowly, “I don’t know what I was thinking.” 

He nods, waiting a few seconds before asking, “Have you thought about it before?”

By it, for some reason, you sense that he isn’t asking exclusively about taking one too many tablets.

It’s tempting to be dishonest about it; it’s a shameful thing to you, to use the things that are supposed to help you to harm yourself, to be so careless with your own life. You know that it isn’t necessarily all your fault, but there’s still that small part of you that can’t help but feel guilty for using something so many other people try so hard to get to almost kill yourself with. 

After a few beats of silence, you decide to answer, “Yeah.” 

Price nods again, and he looks like he expected that answer. “D’you want to tell me more about that?”

You could, hypothetically, go in-depth about all of your weird thoughts about committing. The ones you’d been having just, what, fifteen minutes ago? Thirty minutes ago? The ones about chains wrapped around your throat, stolen guns from the armory, deep purple bruising and a stretched neck. Those thoughts, the ones that try to make ending your life sound pretty, that try to make it sound appealing. It’s not to convince yourself, you don’t think, but rather to help you come to terms with the fact that you were already convinced that you were going to commit at some point. The thought still scares you, because you’re a pussy―terrible, terrible choice of words, a voice at the back of your mind insists, you’re not a pussy, you’re just like anyone else―but you felt like you just knew that you were gonna die by your own hands. That you’d already made the choice, and now you have to understand it, to realize it. 

You are in that room full of TVs, with The Architect in front of you, telling you that you have no choice. That, in fact, the problem is choice. You are surrounded by a million other yous, all protesting, all denying that you have no choice but to kill yourself, all yelling “Bullshit!” because deniability is the most predictable of all human responses. 

But, you remind yourself, The Architect was wrong. He told Neo that he couldn’t do anything to save Trinity from her “fate”, but Neo did save her. He plunged his hand into her chest and forced her heart to beat. 

That’s true. 

And, you add on, The Architect is a computer program, tasked with mimicking human emotions, despite never having felt them. He could never understand the power of human will, of the desperation so many humans have to live. 

Because The Architect was never alive. He is a sentient computer program, whose job is to create a world in which humans can “live” while they are fed on in the real world, but his problem was his inability to create anything less than perfect. We aren’t expected to be perfect, and are taught that flawlessness doesn’t exist, which is why he came to the conclusion that he needed a “lesser mind” to help him create a better Matrix. 

You aren’t supposed to succumb to the idea of having no choice. Because that, in itself, is a choice. Everything you do is a choice. Even if everything you do will only add up to the same ending, to the same fate, why should you waste time not making the choices you want to make? When you assume that you have no choice, you assume that everything you do will go to waste, but that’s not true. You aren’t the only person that exists. You aren’t the only person who makes choices. The choices you make affect other people’s choices, and those choices affect another person, and another, and another. You still have to live through the choices you make, as does everyone else, so even if everything will end the same, why should you make inherently bad decisions when you could be making good ones? Why should you go through things you don’t have to go through, just because you believe that nothing matters in the end?

“Not really,” you answer Price, snapping yourself out of your thoughts, “I don’t… want to think about it too much right now.” 

Price looks a little more worried now but he doesn’t protest your decision.

“Is there anything in here that you could use to hurt yourself?” he asks after a moment, “Or that you’ve already used?” 

You bite your tongue. Technically, the pills count, you suppose, but those are your meds. You can’t really have those confiscated.

“Other than the medicine, no,” you answer truthfully, much to Price’s relief, as is evident on his face as his hardened expression softens. 

“Good, good,” he shifts in his seat. 

He’s gearing up for something. You can tell with the way he subtly presses his clasped hands together, the way his face goes through a mix of emotions, and the way the deafening silence of the room really seems to be getting to him. 

Suddenly, he asks you, “D’you think you’re going to… ?” 

He doesn’t ask you explicitly, but you have a good idea of what he’s asking.

“I was thinking about it,” you respond softly, “before you came in.”

Price nods, having expected that answer. You’re not sure if it was obvious, or if he just assumed you were thinking about it because of you confessing to having thoughts of it before this. 

“Y’know I have to tell someone about this, right?” Price reminds you gently, as if you didn’t already know, “Someone up the chain. Might be Laswell.” 

You hum affirmatively, because you didn’t expect anything less from him, and know that it’s for the better. It doesn’t make you feel any better, obviously, but you know how to be realistic when the time calls for it, and you know that if the roles were reversed you’d do the same thing. Not because it’s mandatory, but because when you imagine Price in your situation, the thought wraps itself around your heart and twists. 

The room is silent for a beat, and you get the feeling that Price is somehow more uncomfortable with the quiet than you are. He shifts in his seat while you stay still, and he clears his throat to break the silence for a brief moment before speaking up again. 

“It’s late,” he points out the obvious, before pausing and irresolutely asking, “do you want to head back to my quarters with me for the night?” 

His words confuse you for a moment. You open your mouth to ask why, before it suddenly hits you―oh, right, you just basically confessed to being suicidal. He doesn’t want to leave you alone right now. 

“Yeah, sure,” you agree, less questioning than Price expected you to be judging by his momentary look of surprise, before he nods and begins to get up. 

He pushes his chair behind him, standing up straight, and holds a hand out for you to grab. You grab it gingerly and use it to haul yourself up, your knees cracking as you do after having been sat for so long. You wince at the sound and Price gives a light-hearted chuckle.

“I thought I was s’posed to be the old one?” he teases, making you give him an unimpressed look and let go of his hand. The room falls back into soundlessness.

You both remain silent as Price leads you out the door of your office, turning off the lights and closing the door after you, and continues to lead you down to his sleeping quarters. His are farther down the hall from yours, because of his higher rank, and therefore takes longer to walk to from your office. The long walk is quiet enough to hear a pin drop, but you both don’t mind this, as the atmosphere here is more comfortable than the one in your office. 

Eventually, you make it to his room, where he opens the door for you and signals for you to walk in first with his hand. You enter the room and hear him enter shortly after you, and go to sit on his bed before pausing. 

“I’m still in my…” you gesture to your clothes, gear-less but still not your “normal” sleeping clothes. Price raises an eyebrow at you as you wave at the state of yourself. 

“I’ve seen you sleep in worse,” he points out, “and I think you sleep in this than in your actual sleeping clothes.” 

You’re about to ask how he even knows about that, before he answers you before you can voice your question, “I’ve seen you walking back t’your quarters in these clothes and hear you snoring a second later at least ten times.”

You close your mouth and sigh through your nose, before muttering, “Didn’t know I was talkin’ to fuckin’ Sherlock Holmes.” 

Price snorts at your retort, “If I’m Sherlock, are you Watson?”

You think about it for a moment, before shaking your head negatively. 

“No?” Price toes off his boots and walks over to you, sitting on the bed, “Then who are you?” 

You sit down next to him, “I dunno. I’m like…” 

“Like Neo,” you continue, ignoring the way Price’s eyebrows immediately raise, “and you’re Morpheus. But less smart.”

“You’re not Neo,” he scoffs, “and I’m not a less-smart Morpheus.” 

“I wasn’t askin’ you,” you grumble, shaking your already-loose boots off of your feet and crawling up Price’s bed. You manage to snake under the covers and feel Price’s eyes on you as you do, staring holes into your face.

He hums in acknowledgment, not bothering to answer you verbally, and instead gets up to lift up the covers and get into bed. The bed is small enough as-is, but with two people inside of it, it obviously gets much smaller. Price doesn’t seem to mind, though, and turns so that his back is facing the door and his front is facing you. Directly in front of you is the base of his neck, but if you tilt your head up, you can see him looking down at you with tired eyes. 

You let out a soft breath through your nose and realize just how tired you are. Price seems to notice this, because his arm comes up and rests across your side, his hand splaying across the middle of your back. He gives you a comforting sweep of his hand, before settling it on your upper back, absentmindedly rubbing his thumb in soothing circles against your clothed back. 

You close your eyes, and he closes his, and it feels like you’ve woken up in the real world and removed the cables from your body.