Simon "Ghost" Riley oneshots

The Apparition

"Why are you never real?
The shifting states you follow me through,
Unrevealed,
Just let me go or take me with you.."

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The apartment was quiet.

Too quiet.

He stepped inside, peeling off his blood-soaked gloves and letting them fall to the floor. The door clicked shut behind him with a hollow finality. Outside, the city murmured with distant sirens and the hum of late-night life. But inside this place... there was nothing. Just shadows and stale air.

Ghost dropped his gear like dead weight, boots thudding heavily across the wooden floor. His mask was still on. It always was, long after the mission ended. He didn't know how to take it off anymore.

The bathroom mirror was cracked, spiderwebbed from where he'd punched it last month. He stood before it now, unmoving. The mask stared back.

Dead eyes in painted bone.

He reached up slowly, fingers trembling, and peeled the skull away. The fabric clung to his sweat-drenched skin like it didn't want to let go.

And then...

There he was.

Simon.

The man beneath.

Blue eyes ringed with red. Stubble darkened with dried blood. Hollowed cheeks. Bruises bloomed along his jaw. The scar across his throat looked angrier than usual, raised like something that wanted to speak but never dared.

He blinked once.

"Why are you never real," his mind whispered, the lyrics echoing like a prayer.
Simon stared at himself.
"Whenever you appear."

He didn't recognize the face.

This wasn't the man people thanked. The one soldiers admired. The ghost that haunted battlefields. This was someone else. Someone brittle. A boy who never came home from Manchester. A son. A brother.

"You leave me with that grace..."
There was something graceful about the way he wore pain. Like it was tailored for him. A second skin.

But it terrified him.

Because beneath that grace, beneath the precision and the rage, there was nothing solid left. Nothing human. Just fragments.

Simon reached up and touched the mirror, fingertips brushing the cold reflection.

The mirror trembled.
Or maybe he did.

"I am trembling in fear."

He didn't cry. Not really. Just stared at Simon, this stranger in the mirror, and wondered how many more pieces he could lose before there was nothing left to wear the mask.

And still... tomorrow, he'd put it back on.
Because Ghost was needed.

Simon was not.

The mirror shimmered.

Not really, but it felt like it did, as if time bent slightly around the figure staring back at him.

Not the Ghost. Not even Simon.
But something... else.

Something older.
More human.
More whole.

For a second, just one fragile, trembling second, he thought he saw her.

Behind his shoulder in the reflection.
That ghost that wasn't him.
The one that whispered in dreams, long after the mission ended.
The one who knew the Simon beneath the carnage.