Simon's Toll | WC 2.8k
Simon Riley did not believe in love.
He never said it out loud to anyone, not even price, but he kept a private ledger in his head, the way some men kept a running tally of debts owed.
HIs father, Dead of drink and his own fists eventually turning inward. His brother, gone the way boys from that part of manchester go quietly, then all at once. His mother, worn down long before her body finally agreed to quit. A squad in the Reg he didnt let himself think about except at 3am, when thinking about it was unavoidable.
Everyone he had ever let matter had ended up in the ground and simon had built a career, then a mask, then an entire personality, around the idea that the pattern wasnt going to break for him.
So when captain price told him Hereford was sending over a new signals specialist for the close quaters rotation, Simons first feeling wasnt curiosity. It was the low, familiar hum of "this is going to be a problem"
You came of the transport in the rain with a duffel bag that looked like it weighed more than you did and you didnt stumble once on the wet tarmac, which simon noted the way he noted everything. As data.
You had a scar through one eyebrow that nobody explained and nobody asked about. You saluted Price like you meant it and you looked at Simons mask for exactly one second longer than most people did, then never mentioned it again.
That, if he was being honest with himself later, was the first thing.
Most peoples eyes did something when they saw the mask, a flinch, a flicker of perfeormed indifference that was its own kind of tell. Yours didnt do anything. You just filed it away, the same way youd file away a terrain feature or a sightline and moved on. Simon decided this meant nothing. He decided a lot of things meant nothing that year.
He made your life difficult, in the specific surgical way he knew how. He didnt yell. Yelling was for men who needed an audience. He just went quiet and precise, the kind of quiet that made junior operators sweat through their base layers. He corrected your stance during breach drills with two words. He let silences sit in debriefs a beat too long after you spoke, just to see if you'd fill them.
You never did.
You'd wait him out, jaw tight and then repeat exactly what you'd said the first time. undiluted.
By the third month he'd stopped expecting the transfer request that never came.
By the sixth, he'd caught himself, twice, checking where you were in a stack before he checked where Gaz was, and told himself it was tactical instinct. That was all.
There wasnt a scene where the ice broke. If you'd asked either of you to point to a single moment, You'd have struggled. It was more like weather than an event, a slow pressure change neither of you registered until you were ready until you were already standing in the rain. But if he was pressed , if someone put a knife to it, Simon would have said Al-Mazrah.
The hospital had been cleared three days earlier, or so the intel said. The intel, as it turned out, was written by someone who had never been within four hundred miles of Al-Mazrah and they would very much like to keep it that way.
By the time Taskforce 141 worked out that they'd walked into a live position, Price and Soap were pinned on the ground floor and you and simon were cut off two flights up, in a pedriatric ward with half the ceiling on the floor and the other half threatening to join it.
There is a particular smell to old concrete dust mixed with cordite that never fully leaves you. Simon had it in his sinuses for a week afterward. He remembers being annoyed about that, in the stupid sideways way your brain gets annoyed about small physical discomforts when it cant process the actual danger you're in.
He was behind an overturned desk, hands moving through a mag change on pure muscle memory, when he clocked the stain spreading across your shoulder. It didnt announce itself. You hadn't gasped or gone pale or done any of the things people did in the films. You'd just kept firing, controlled three round bursts, your breathing maybe half a beat off from where it should have been, which was the only tell that gave you away to someone who'd spent a decade learning to read exactly that kind of thing.
"You're hit."
"Through and through. Missed the artery." You didn't even glance over. "Worry about the stairwell"
He hauled you back by the strap of your plate carrier anyway, Because there are orders you follow and orders you don't and bleed out quietly while i focus on the door was never going to be the one he followed.
You swore at him. Properly, inventively, in a way that under different circumstances he might have found funny, and let him drag you behind the pillar without actually fighting him on it, which told him more than the swearing did.
The QuikClot went in hard, and you hissed through your teeth and grabed his forearm and that was when it happened. Not the shooting, Not the dust. The name.
"I've had worse paper cuts, Riley" you said, and then, a beat later, softer, involuntary: "simon,"
He'd been called Riley for years. Lieutenant, sometimes, when someone was being formal, or Ghost, when they wanted the mask instead of the man. Nobody used his first name anymore; he'd made sure of that, the way you make sure of anything you're trying to bury.
Hearing it now. stripped of rank, said by someone with her hand fisted white, knuckled in his sleeve, it did something he didnt have the tactical term for. He filled the feeling away with everything else he wasn't ready to look at directly and finished the dressing.
You fought your way out back to back. It wasn't cinematic. It was ugly and loud and mostly consisted of Simon shouting ammo counts and you correcting his angles, and somewhere in the middle of it he noticed he'd stopped watching you to critique you and started watching you becausehe trusted you without reservation, to cover the six inches of his blind spot that had gotten better men than himself killed.
That was as far as it went for a year. Trust, unspoken, load bearing. He told himself that was the whole of it and mostly belived himself.
Vondel broke something loose that trust alone hadn't.
Forty eight hours in flooded sewer tunnels chasing a target who kept one step ahead of the two of you the entire time does something to a person's nervous system that doesn't switch off just because the op is technically over.
Simon sat alone in the safe house kitchen at two in the morning with a bottle of whiskey that tatsed like it had been distilled specifically to punish him, still wearing the balaclava rolled up over his nose, staring at wallpaper that had probably been ugly even before it started peeling.
You came in wearing sweatpants and looking like you hadn't slept in a week, because you hadn't. You didn't ask for permission. You sat, took the bottle and drank from it like it owed nyou money and set it back down.
"Cant sleep." you said.
"Close your eyes and pretend."
"Every time i close mine i can still smell the canal water." You looked at him. Really looked, the unguarded kind of look people only give you when they are too tired to keep the usual defences up. "How do you turn it off, simon?"
"I don't." he admitted, and the whiskey was doing exactly what whiskey does to the part of the brain that's supposed to stop you saying true things out loud. "I just find a smaller box to put it in."
He should have known where the converstation was headed and left the room. He'd been trained to recognise incoming threats from further away than this. Instead he sat there and let it happen, because for three years he'd been cold on purpose and he was tired, bone tired, the kind of tired that makes bad decisions look like small mercies.
What followed wasn't romantic and neither of you pretended it was. it was two exhausted people who'd been circling something for a year finally admitting, wordlessly, that neither of you wanted to be alone with the inside of your own head that particular night.
Simon set the rules before his boots had even properly landed back on the floor afterward, because setting rules was the only way he knew how to survive wanting something.
This means nothing. This stays between us. This is stress relief and nothing more.
You'd looked at him, not hurt, or not visibly, though later he'd wonder how much of that was performance on your part too, and given him the same flat nod you gave him on a battlefield.
"Loud and clear, Lieutenant."
For a year you kept to it with the same discipline you brought to everything else. Supply closets, the backs of transport vehicles, hotel rooms on either side of an op with a wall between them that felt thinner than it was. He was good at compartmentalizing; it was, after all, the only skill that had kept him alive this long. He told himself the arrangement was working. He told himself a lot of things.
Las Almas didn't ask his permission before it took the compartments apart.
When Shepherd's betrayal split the Task Force and Shadow Company started hunting them through streets that had gone from merely dangerous to actively hostile.
Simon lost contact with three quarters of his team inside the first ten minutes. He got Soap on comms, wounded but alive, and guided him through back alleys with the kind of cold, procedural calm that had made him useful to Price for a decade. But the channel that should have carried Price's voice, or Gaz's, or yours, stayed dead. Forty-eight hours of dead air is a long time to sit with the assumption that someone is gone.
He didn't fall apart the way people fall apart in films, with shaking hands and raised voices. It was quieter and worse than that. He simply stopped being able to access any part of himself that wasn't focused on getting to a rendezvous point, because if he let anything else in, grief, mostly, arriving early and uninvited.
He wasn't sure he'd be able to keep moving. He killed efficiently and without much feeling, because feeling had briefly become a liability he couldn't afford, and somewhere in that stretch of silence he understood, with the flat clarity of a man finally being handed a bill he'd been avoiding for years, that he had lied to himself for three years running.
It had never meant nothing. He'd just needed it to.
When he walked into the safehouse and found you sitting on a crate with your arm in a sling, dirt-streaked, alive, something in his chest did a thing he genuinely did not have language for. He crossed the room without registering Price, without registering Gaz, and pulled the balaclava off with one hand, letting his actual face be seen by a room full of people for the first time in longer than he could remember, because it didn't occur to him to care.
"Simon?"
He pressed his forehead to yours and just breathed for a second, badly, the breath catching in a way that was uncomfortably close to something he wasn't going to name in front of Price.
"I thought Gravesâ" His voice wasn't steady. He let it not be steady, which was its own kind of surrender. "I thought I'd lost you."
"Takes more than Shadow Company," you said, quiet, just for him, your hands coming up over his where they cradled your face, feeling the tremor he couldn't hide. "I'm right here."
Price, to his enormous credit, found something urgent to study on the tactical map and gave you both the thirty seconds of privacy the moment required.
It wasn't a clean turn after that. Simon didn't become a different man overnight because he'd had one bad forty eight hours and one good reunion, people don't work that way, whatever the films suggest.
He still went quiet for stretches. He still flinched, once, when you reached for his face too fast during a debrief and he hadn't seen it coming. But something had shifted permanently out of alignment with where it used to sit, and he stopped trying to force it back.
He told you that you were staying in the transport during the assault on Graves' position, and when you pushed back because of course you pushed back, he'd have thought less of you if you hadn't his voice dropped into a register that had nothing of the Lieutenant left in it.
"Please," he said, and the word cost him something visible. "I can't do what tonight needs if I'm wondering whether you're bleeding out somewhere I can't reach you. Let me know you're safe. That's all I'm asking."
You studied him for a long moment long enough that he wondered if you were going to make him say more, which he wasn't sure he had in him and then you nodded.
"I'll take comms. Go get our base back."
Weeks later, after Graves had gone up in a burning tank and Hassan had gone out a window in Chicago and the debrief paperwork had finally, mercifully, ground to a halt, you and Simon ended up on the same sofa in a London office that smelled like instant coffee and carpet cleaner.
Laswell was two rooms over, still filing something. The building had that specific, hollowed out quiet that settles in after everyone's adrenaline has nowhere left to go.
Your knee bumped his. You didn't move it away, and he didn't either.
"So," you said, not looking at him, turning your coffee cup slowly in your hands. "Is the arrangement over?"
He thought about it properly this time, instead of reaching for the easiest defensible answer. He thought about the nightmares that weren't going anywhere, about a job that would keep handing them exactly the kind of situations that got people killed, about the very real chance that one day the toll he'd spent his whole life fearing would come due after all. None of that had changed. He wasn't cured of it. He didn't think he ever would be.
But he thought, too, about forty-eight hours of dead air, and what he'd have given, in that stretch, to un-know how it felt to think you were gone. Whatever price loving you carried, it was smaller than that.
He took the cup out of your hands and set it down, along with his own, and reached for your fingers instead.
"I was a coward," he said. Not dramatically. Just honestly, which was harder. "Thought if I never said it, the universe wouldn't notice and wouldn't come collect. Turns out that's not really how it works."
"And now?"
"Now I don't much care if it notices." He looked at you properly, mask and all, nothing else left to put between you. "I loved you in that hospital. I loved you in that kitchen, though God knows I did everything I could to make sure you never found out. I loved you every hour I thought you were dead in Mexico. I can't offer you a quiet life. I don't know how to be anything other than what the job made me. But I'm not going to keep pretending I don't want to try."
You were quiet for a second, and when you finally leaned in and pressed your mouth to the scarred edge of his jaw, just below where the mask ended, he felt the single point of contact more than he'd felt entire firefights.
"You're not ruined," you said against his skin. "You're just haunted. I've been managing ghosts for four years running. I'm not planning to stop now."
He pulled you against him, careful of your shoulder out of a habit that would probably never leave him, and let himself, for the length of one exhale, just be a man sitting on an ugly office sofa with someone he loved, instead of a weapon waiting for its next assignment.
It wasn't a happy ending, exactly. Neither of you was naive enough to call it that. But it was, for the first time in a very long time, a beginning he didn't feel the need to brace against.
