Home - COD Simon Ghost Riley X Female OC

Chapter 25

MJ was hauled back into a truck and sat across from Halcon. He hadn't bothered trying to tie her bloody hands. She wasn't going anywhere.

He stared at her, her bruised, teary face. She looked exhausted and powerless. The satisfaction of it settled him, letting his adrenaline seep out as they made their way home. They had won. And then some.

She stared back at him, blood from a nasty wound on his arm ran down and dripped off his fingertips. Seeing him bleed stirred something in her. She sat a little straighter. She had been forced to watch Simon get hurt and she could only assume something horrible had happened to his closest friend, also in an attempt to help her. She would go down in history with that small group as a destructive force. Maybe she could find a way to be one here, too.

She had been truly hopeful, seeing him. Hopeful that maybe her life wasn't over, and he would carry her home again. She had known their time was short, she had thought they hadn't had long enough to know one another, and truly she had taken every single second of it for granted. She blinked, replacing Halcon's grimacing face in her mind with Simon's smiling one for a moment. It was a comfort.

"You did well, pajarito. I'm proud of you."

The words felt no different than when he'd put a collar on her like a dog and paraded her around before his friends. She lay her head back against the seat and closed her eyes again. It had been so long. She wasn't sure she could reacclimate to real life. Everything that had happened here would be only hers to know, even if she did. She would be alone in facing all of it. The strength she held to in order to survive the first time, the man that found her, the whole group of heroes that took her in, the ghost she became infatuated with. She hadn't recognized it at first, but she had been absolutely obsessed with the thought of him. And her constant inability to fight for herself, being taken again. Being made a pawn. If she made it back to the real world, she was afraid it might not feel real at all.

Self preservation would be important from this point forward, up to the point that she might be made to hurt someone else. That was the initiation she knew Halcon had spoken of before. She guessed that it wasn't off the table just because her sister was back with them. She had seen the 141 shut her back in the car, she refused to think how she somehow ended up with the family again.

MJ wavered between holding to her safe memories of her brief rescue as she had before and trying to forget them. They hurt now, a little too much. She had so many questions to ask Simon, about his life and his past and the things he liked and who he was outside of all of this, and she wanted to ask him so badly even if just to hear the sound of his voice when he answered. She was lucky to have had a moment with him, she knew. She knew it wasn't something that many others got to have, that it was a little treasure she could carry even if he was gone. She would have guessed her heart couldn't break any deeper, any further open, but she learned something new every day.

She would carry the handsome mystery with her forever, she decided. Any forgetting would be a false cover over the reality and that required a strength of will and sense of self to maintain that she already knew was slipping.

She was always surprised at what her tired little body could take. The fall could have been a lot worse, but when they walked into the small infirmary, all the nurse did was clean and bandage her wrists and torn up ankle, and offer her some prepackaged ibuprofen for her pain and swelling. Nothing broken, no concussion symptoms.

The woman brought her a granola bar, too, and a cup of water. Maybe she was a princess, after all. And then she left and no one came to get her. She sat in the small, white room for long enough that she allowed herself to get up and look out the window on the door. People were walking by outside so she stepped away and poked through cabinets and drawers instead. She found nothing useful. Especially since she didn't know what she might be looking for. She was going to be sore, she knew. She had been stretched all the wrong ways and she had worked really hard to get out. She sat back down.