Chapter 3: Lights Off
It takes five days for next time to come, and in those five days absolutely nothing changes, which is the most surprising part.
You go to work. You sit in the comms room and run net checks and argue with the MOD about frequency allocations. Gaz comes in to steal biscuits and tells you about his next disastrous date. Price stops by with a mug of tea, two sugars, and says "Sergeant" in exactly the same voice he always has, and then, on his way out, runs one knuckle down the back of your neck where nobody can see, and you have to sit very still for a full minute afterwards.
Soap is the least subtle man on God's earth. He winks at you across the mess hall so hard that Gaz asks if he's having a stroke.
Ghost does nothing at all. He nods to you in corridors. He calls you Wren on the range. He's exactly the same as he's always been, except that every time you look up, he's already looking at you.
On the fifth night, there's a knock on your door at eleven.
He's standing in the corridor in a black hoodie, the hood up, balaclava on. He doesn't say anything. He just holds out his hand, palm up, gloved.
You take it.
He drives you to the cottage. Price and Soap aren't there; you notice their absence like a held breath. "Johnny's taken the captain to the pub," Ghost says, before you can ask. "Told them we'd want the place."
"You told them."
"Asked." The corner of his eye creases behind the mask. "Johnny made a noise like a kettle."
The bedroom's dark when you go in. Not dim. Dark. He's pulled the blackout curtains, and the lamp is off, and when he shuts the door behind you there's no light at all, not a crack, nothing but the sound of his breathing and the smell of woodsmoke and gun oil and cold air.
"Alright?" he says. His voice comes from just in front of you.
"Yes."
"Can't see a thing, can you."
"Nothing."
"Good." A pause. A rustle of fabric, very close. "Give me your hands."
You hold them out into the dark. He finds them. His hands are bare. No gloves, for the first time since you've known him. They're warm and dry and rough, the palms scarred across in places, a long ridge of old burn along the side of the right one. He lifts both of your hands, slowly, and lays them against his face.
His bare face.
You go completely still.
"Go on," he says. You feel the words more than hear them, his jaw moving under your fingers.
So you do. In the dark, with nothing but your fingertips, you learn Simon Riley's face.
The stubble along his jaw, coarse and short. The scar you'd seen at the corner of his mouth, and another you hadn't, a thick raised line running up from his chin across his lower lip. His nose, broken more than once, with a bump at the bridge. His cheekbones, high and hard. A cluster of small ridged scars below his left eye, like something sprayed across it once, a long time ago. His eyebrows, heavy, one split through the middle. His eyelids flutter closed under your thumbs. His lashes are long. You hadn't expected that. His hair is short, buzzed close at the sides, a little longer on top, soft as an animal's.
He's trembling. Very slightly. A fine tremor running through his jaw.
"Simon," you whisper.
"Mm."
"Thank you."
He breathes out, long and unsteady, and turns his face into your palm and presses his mouth to it. Then he kisses you.
You've kissed him before, through a rolled-up mask, in lamplight with two other men watching. This isn't that. In the dark, with nothing between you, he kisses you like you're the only thing that exists. Slow. Endless. His bare hands coming up to frame your face the way yours are framing his, so you're holding each other, and he makes a small rough sound into your mouth that you feel down to your toes.
He undresses you by touch. You undress him the same way. You find scars everywhere: a long surgical one down his side, knotted ones on his shoulders, a ridged starburst on his thigh. You kiss every one you find. He lets you. He stands still in the dark and lets you, breathing harder and harder, until finally he catches your face in his hands and says, hoarse, "Wren. Love. Please."
He lays you down. He's heavy, heavier than Soap, a warm solid weight that presses you into the mattress, and he holds himself on his forearms above you and you feel his forehead settle against yours.
"Tell me," he says.
"I want you." You run your hands down his back. "Simon. I want you so much."
He reaches between you and guides himself in, slow, stretching you so gradually that by the time he's fully inside you you're both shaking. He stops there. Doesn't move. Just breathes against your mouth.
"Eleven minutes," he says, very quietly.
You stop breathing.
"Under that floor. Couldn't move. Couldn't answer. Dark like this." His voice is rough and low and he doesn't stop. "Thought, this is it. Thought it'd be quiet, at the end. And then you. Simon, answer me." He rocks into you, once, slow and deep, and you gasp. "Never been called that on a net. Nobody ever bothered. You shouted it like it mattered."
"It did." Your eyes are burning. "It does. You do."
He makes a sound like you've hit him, and starts to move.
It's slow. It's so slow. Long, deep strokes, his whole body moving against yours, his mouth never leaving your face, kissing your eyelids and your cheeks and your mouth. You can't see anything. You can only feel him, the heat and the weight and the rhythm, and the way his breath catches every time you tighten around him, and the way he says your name against your skin like he's afraid he'll forget it.
You come first, quietly, shaking under him, and he holds you through it with his face pressed to your neck. Then he pushes deeper, and harder, and his rhythm goes ragged, and you wrap yourself around him and hold on, and he comes with a low broken groan, your name and something else, something you don't catch, buried against your shoulder.
You lie there in the dark afterwards, tangled together. He's heavy on top of you and you don't want him to move. Your fingers are still tracing his face. You don't think you'll ever stop.
"What did you say?" you whisper eventually. "At the end."
He's quiet so long you think he's fallen asleep.
"Said I love you," he says, against your skin. "Shouldn't have. Too soon."
You laugh, and it comes out wet. "Simon."
"Mm."
"I love you too."
His arms tighten around you, hard, almost too hard. And in the dark you feel his mouth move against your shoulder, and you're almost sure, though you'll never be able to prove it, that he's smiling.
The front door goes at half past one. Voices in the hall, laughing, trying and failing to be quiet. Soap saying "Shh, shh, sir, they'll be asleep," and Price saying "You're the one who's shushing, Johnny, you sound like a deflating tyre."
Footsteps on the stairs. A tentative knock.
Ghost lifts his head. You hear a rustle as he finds his balaclava on the floor and pulls it on. Then he says, "Come in."
The door opens and the landing light spills in, and there they are: Price in his coat with his hat in his hand, Soap behind him, flushed from the cold and the pub, both of them looking at you and Ghost tangled in the sheets with the same expression. Soft. Pleased. A little bit awed.
"Alright?" says Price.
"Alright," says Ghost.
"Room for two more?" Soap asks, already kicking off his boots.
It's not a big bed. It's a huge bed, actually, but there are four of you and three of them are enormous. Nobody cares. Soap clambers in on your other side and wraps himself around you like an octopus, cold nose in your neck, smelling of beer and frost. Price undresses more slowly, folding his clothes over the chair, and then he lies down behind Ghost and puts his arm over both of you, his hand resting on your hip.
You lie there in the warm dark, squashed between them, and feel three arms resting across you.
"Got something for you," Price says, after a while.
"Now?"
"Seems as good a time as any." You hear him reach over to the bedside table. Something cold and small is pressed into your hand. A chain. You run your fingers along it and find a tag. Then another. Then a third.
"Couldn't put your name on ours," Price says. "So we put ours on yours."
You can't see them. You don't need to. You run your thumb over the stamped letters and know whose is whose by the feel, PRICE J., RILEY S., MACTAVISH J., three tags on a single chain, and the backs of your eyes go hot, and you clutch the chain against your chest.
"You don't have to wear them," Soap says, muffled into your hair. "Only if you want. We just..."
"I want."
"Aye?"
"Johnny." You laugh, crying a bit. "Yes. Obviously yes."
Price leans over Ghost's shoulder and kisses your temple, his beard scratching. "Get some sleep, love," he murmurs. "We've got you. All of us."
Six weeks later, you're back in the comms room at two in the morning with the headset on, running Bravo Six through an infil in a country you're not allowed to name. Rain is hammering the windows. The kettle only works if you hold the switch down.
The chain is round your neck under your shirt. The tags are warm against your skin.
"Wren, Bravo Six. In position."
"Six, Wren. Copy. Two-One, Two-Two, check in."
"Two-One, set." Low and flat, the way he always is.
"Two-Two, set. Hiya, bonnie."
"Two-Two, maintain radio discipline," you say, and hear Price laugh, very quietly, on the open net.
Then a click on a private channel, the one you set up last week and that nobody else in the building knows exists. Just a breath. Then Ghost's voice, barely above a whisper.
"Wren."
"Go ahead."
"Love you."
You key the mic, and you smile, and you say it back. Then you lean forward, hands steady on the console for the first time since Urzikstan, and you bring them all home.