Ashes in the Darkness

Alone

TW: This is a dark chapter, discussion of sexual assault, suicide, mental illness, torture, emetephobia, crimes against humanity, minor character death. Ghost is also kinda a sick man... but in a good way?

Ghost was used to working alone. Being alone. It had been that way for a long time, and he had never complained about it. In fact, he flourished during alone covert missions that involved stealthily moving through facilities and taking out enemies as he went.

His life had been full of feeling alone, even when he was child, he was a black sheep in his family. A living outlier against a backdrop of insanity and heartache. Tommy had always been the favorite to his father, who often ostracized Simon. His mother was loving but was often absent and distant from the rest of the family in an attempt to prevent his father from beating her. Simon had been forced to grow up on his own accord, figuring out life, school, girls, hobbies on his own. On the few occasions that his father did pay any attention to Simon, it was to take him to concerts that frightened him or to show him terrifying animals that also frightened him. Tommy had taken part in frightening him anytime he could.

Betrayal was something Ghost's life had also been filled with. Teammates couldn't be trusted; he had been taught that the hard way. The first time one of his teammates had sold him out to a cartel leader, making him a prisoner to a man that he wished had killed him a thousand times. He had been tortured, in every kind of way. He had been pushed to the breaking point so many times in that year that he was in Mexico. His friends had escaped, and he was once again left alone, with no escape or reprieve from the pain.

While he refused to break when he had been bound, forced to fight, forced to fuck, forced to do unimaginable things; he had kept the intel that he knew, never letting them know things that could compromise his teammates. But he broke at night when the pain stopped, and the dread started. Sobbing into the pillow, throwing up in the corner of his room, cleaning up whatever marks they left on him for that day. It had been his captors that had eventually let him go free... in the most brutal and disgusting ways possible. He had laid in that coffin for two weeks, letting the smell of his former superior fill his lungs like the fumes of gasoline. He couldn't die fast enough, his body had been damn near broken and starved to death, yet somehow, he still woke up every time he fell asleep. Pulling off the jaw off his former commander that he was sharing a coffin with, he had dug his way out of the sand.

He wanted to be, but he would never be the same. He had been diagnosed with it all: post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, major depression, night terrors and insomnia. He was given medical discharge from the military and special operations, his therapist saying that he should check into a mental facility. Heal with his family. He had tried to do just that, tried to make well with the world. But faces blurred into skulls, his friends became criminals. He never slept, never felt comfortable. His mother had tried to console him, yet his mind was uncontrollable.

He would have stayed and been tortured for another thousand years if he had not been betrayed the second time.

He had found his mother, brother, sister-in-law, even his young nephew, Joseph... all laying in their own blood. One of his teammates had been to blame for their slaughter. Paid off by the same man who had tortured him for so long. The emotional agony had been too much to bear for Simon, the slaughter had left him in a pit of hatred for himself. He had been truly alone. No family. No teammates. No military.

So, he had put the barrel of a gun in his mouth. Looking at his thumb in the trigger for long enough to make his eyes water with dryness. Eventually taking the gun out of his mouth and vomiting the rest of the night. But his thumb on the trigger had seemed to tell him something, telling him to join the devil in the darkness of the world. And whoever said that revenge doesn't work is a fucking liar.