Chapter Text
When they wrote his epitaph, Ghost anticipated it would read something like “Here lies Simon Riley, a man who survived.” He was surprised he had survived as long as he had, but as he approached his thirty fifth year of living, he wasn’t sure how much longer he could continue on the way that he was.
He wasn’t reckless, or careless, but in his own safety he was passive. If something bad had to happen to him and he ended up dead, he felt indifferent. He had no reason to feel any other way than that. He had survived everyone else with any meaning in his life, and he was a lone star waiting for the inevitable bang which would bring an end to his existence.
He was at home; this was not a place he wished to spend any extended period of time. It was sparsely decorated with a few bits and pieces which might have given away something of his personality, if he hadn’t protected himself a little too hard, if there had been anyone in his life remotely interested in seeing it. His place wasn’t big, and it was clean, almost as if no one really lived there at all. A few commonplace books here and there on house-plant maintenance or fitness and cooking, some small trinkets and ornaments he’d had time to grab before heading home after missions and assignments; a small, whittled wooden horse from a jungle training expedition in Busan that he’d gotten from a local resident for luck, who had given him water and a place to lay low; a colourful windmill from a small infiltration mission he’d done in The Netherlands; a soapstone tiger netsuke from a very strange trip he’d had in Japan that he often struggled to recall the details of. All of these things amounted to little pinpoints in his life, nothing really of significance to him anymore. No one to share them with.
He wondered who the last person to see him alive would be. If he was holed up at home any longer without any work, it might be the shopping delivery man, who brings his order of groceries to the apartment for him each week (Supermarkets make him nervous, his field of visions too restricted and he worries an enemy is waiting in the next isle with the Rich Teas and Ginger Nuts.) He makes a quiet thanks to the man who drops off the bags of shopping, and quietly closes the door, locks the four deadbolts and repositions the doorstop (he’s not paranoid, he swears), and unloads the shopping into the kitchen cupboards and the fridge. He wondered if he might then crawl into bed that night and die of boredom, desperate for some work; anything to put him back on edge.
Domesticity didn’t suit Ghost. He needed adrenaline.
His phone lay, unused, on the coffee table, perfectly squared with the in-lay in the right corner, screen facing up to the ceiling in case someone called, so he could see it.
No one called. No one except The Captain, to check he was still there.
He'd been sent on a period of extended leave, an injury to his right shoulder a little too aggressive for the doctors (or himself) to ignore and he needed rest. Irritation at the situation grated under his skin, It’s not even a gunshot wound, how can I be forced into months of leave? He was disappearing, object permanence forcing him into the ether never to be seen again. The SAS would forget about him and he’d be stranded in this clinical apartment until the end of time, until he simply couldn’t get up and out of his bed anymore. He felt that time was approaching like a herd of wild horses.
He did go out though. He wasn’t at home, alone, all the time. In fact, to stop himself from disappearing altogether, he would make a point of being seen by people. He thanked Covid for making it less weird to wear masks in public, and opted for the much more socially-acceptable black medical mask, which covered enough of his face that when he put on a plain black beanie hat to cover the tops of his ears and his soft blonde curls, it felt almost the same as his soft skull-face mask he wore on base.
Sometimes, when he was out, he’d buy himself a bottle of juice, or a plain black coffee, even if he wasn’t thirsty. He’d never cause a scene, talk too much or ask for anything overly complicated because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself, but he needed someone to recognise that he existed. Being the metaphorical ghost had its drawbacks, and one of them was the fear he was becoming a literal ghost. He just needed to be seen, to know his existence was still real.
He did have one friend, before he was killed. Gary had been a good friend to him for a very long time, they had come up together, signing up and being put into the same troop for their training, suffering under the same Sergeant; going through the CQB together, Peak and Jungle challenges feeling a little more welcome when you knew a friendly face would greet you at the end; joining the SAS together, working on missions together and becoming a trustworthy pair who worked in tandem, like clockwork, mechanics all slipping into place easily enough for the mission to run like a well-oiled machine. The pair had been inseparable. To Ghost, Gary had been indescribable. They’d had a playful banter, a light-hearted humour which kept them in the light, not letting them settle back into the sadness that came with the job at hand. The pair had lost so much, but at least they had had each other. Gary was his confident, knowing everything there had been to know about Simon before he became Ghost for good. And if he had believed in that sort of thing, Ghost might have argued that Gary was his soulmate.
There had been a small love between them, nothing acted upon, but a reliance on each other that signified their deep emotional bond. Ghost had loved Gary, and when he had been lost, Ghost had sunk further into himself, and had blamed himself for that loss. That bullet had just been a little too low to be a wound, and not fatal. It caught an artery, and he had bled out on the field in Ghost’s arms. No amount of haemostatic dressings was going to curtail the flow. Ghost had only just passed his combat medic training, he hadn’t been prepared for his first encounter to be his best friend.
Gary was the last loss that Ghost was ever going to suffer. He was better off alone, better off friendless, keeping everyone at arm’s length. They had been through so much together, and the betrayal at the hands of their commander had been the final straw for Ghost.
He’d withdrawn, and not that he wanted deep connections, but he did need life around him.
A few weeks prior, he’d seen an advert in the local paper he’d picked up from outside the train station on his way past. It had said “NEEDED: NUDE MODEL FOR LIFE DRAWING CLASS. £15/HOUR.” He’d considered it, having been told by his therapist that he needed to start stepping out of his comfort zone, socially. Nude modelling wouldn’t be up his alley but it would kill two birds with one stone. He would be seen and acknowledged by more than one person at the same time, and it would get him out of the house. He didn’t know if being looked at by so many at one time in an almost analytical way would do anything for the voices in his brain, or the judgement from his therapist. It would certainly leave him vulnerable, being naked in a room full of strangers, especially if anything happened. He’d have nowhere logical to hide a weapon for his own, or their, safety.
He called the number anyway, stating he wasn’t interesting in modelling, but really would like to join the class as a student. She hadn’t been impressed at his rejection of the modelling gig, but she was pleased another student wished to join her class. She had told him the location, that it was on Tuesday nights at 7pm, that it was £25 per class, and he would need to bring his own sketchbook and mediums with which he wished to create. He’d laughed to himself over the way she’d said it, when he knew she meant “pencils or charcoal or paint.” But it was an excuse to get out of the house, to meet other people, to do something his therapist had suggested a long time ago. Art therapy had been helpful for him in the beginning, and journalling, but he’d strayed away from that when the therapy appointments became fewer and further between, and he'd sunk himself headfirst into work, mission after mission, assignment after assignment, so no thoughts could intrude and make him confront The Bigger Picture at play for his life. He knew Life Drawing wasn’t exactly the art therapy he’d done before, but he figured it was a step in the way of learning to express himself a little better, a little clearer.
When he’d moved to London, he barely knew anyone, save for his Captain and possibly one other solider he’d not seen nor spoken to in years. There were cousins back in Manchester that he’d maybe met twice in his life, and not since he was a kid. There were no school friends, no barrack buddies from when he first joined. Everyone he had been remotely close to was gone. He desperately needed to get back to work. Maybe this class was the next best thing.
When he was a boy, he’d liked to write, and for a while it had been the only thing he had wanted to do with his life. He had invented imaginary people, much more desirable than the situation his child-self faced at home, and filled notebooks and scrap pieces of paper with their lives and their stories; a boy who grew up and got so hulking and hairy that people had begun hunting him for his fur, and he had to hide in the trees, and then a girl met him and thought he was some great gorilla, before she realised the gentle boy that was hidden beneath the hair and the muscles, and she’d fallen in love with him regardless of his disfigurement; explorers discovering a new world, where there were women everywhere and they were all kind and loving and attentive, and not in a sexual way – something more motherly. It had been wishful thinking. As he’d grown older, and the life with his family had gotten more morose, he’d decided that being a writer wasn’t a viable career path for him to follow. He was directionless, floundering, drowning in the depths of possibility of what his life could have been. But with the impact of things at home, the ocean of possibility shrunk to that of a pond, and he packed away his writer-dreams, and took himself down to the local recruitment office on Albion Street and signed his life away for Queen and Country. The army would give him all the direction he needed.
Tuesday rolled around and there was a nausea that had buried itself deep in the pit of Ghost’s stomach. He’d tried to combat this anxiety by scouting out the building the class was scheduled to take place in. He’d looked around for potential entry and exit points, points of weakness, blind spots and any other threats which may put him and everyone else in danger. This wasn’t the sort of adrenaline rush he had been chasing. There were too many variables, too many unknowns. He wasn’t sure how ordinary people dealt with not knowing what was coming next, not having everything planned out for them. He couldn’t guess what was coming and that made him nervous.
But he forced himself anyway. He’d already paid the money (they had some online system to pay the deposit to secure his spot) so he didn’t want to waste that. He stood outside the front door, staring up at the old brown-brick building, a cigarette hung between his lips. He’d pulled his hood up over his hat, but his mask hung under his chin as he smoked, trying to will the nicotine to calm his nerves and take the edge off his anxiety. Maybe this was why people turned to drugs, he thought to himself, chewing on the inside of his lip before taking one last pull on the cigarette. He dropped it to the ground and stamped it out with the heel of his boot, popped a chewing gum in his mouth so as not to gas himself with his own cigarette-breath, and recovered his face.
“Still nervous about Covid?” the lady at the desk asked with a friendly smile, motioning to the mask on his face. “Don’t worry, we’ve made enough space so you won’t all be sat on top of one another. No need to wear that inside if you wish.”
She would have been in her mid-forties, greying blonde curly hair in a wild bob that stopped and followed the line of her jaw. She was thin, but looked the artsy-type; large colourful (probably hand-knitted herself) cardigan, pine-green corduroy jeans and a t-shirt with some faded logo that had definitely come directly from 1995, and the milk-bottle glasses on her face magnified her eyes to about 50 times the size they should have been. He smiled and hoped it would reach his eyes in a friendly attempt to get through the first mini boss of The Reception Lady.
She checked his name (he’d given an alias to be safe) and she ticked him off, directing him up two flights of stairs and through the third door on the right. He had almost asked her if she would be there at that desk all night, but after overhearing a brief conversation she’d had as he’d begun his slow ascent to the class, he was aware she’d be joining them and that spiked his anxiety. Who would be watching the door? His nerves spiked his chest, blood seeming to stop in its tracks.
It took a herculean effort to make it up the two flights of stairs, as every fibre of his being told him to turn around and go home to the safety of his own apartment behind locked doors and bolted windows and closed curtains. He had been in much more stressful situations than this, so why was he struggling with a simple fucking art class? He persevered, looking through the little glass panel in the top of the door to make sure he was in the right place. There couldn’t have been more than fifteen people here, and he had been a little late so maybe that would have been it. He laid claim to an easel, settled his sketchbook against it, and placed his bag on the ground by his feet. He eyed the door from his position, able to see the full spectrum of the room from this perspective, back against the furthest wall where there were no entry ways. The Reception Lady came into the room then, and clapped her hands, followed by a young-ish man with a too-free smile and soft, easy eyes. The man came and positioned himself in the seat directly next to Ghost, which was not that close because they’d been careful with social-distancing and had made sure people had enough room to get creative in their space.
Ghost eyed him carefully, taking in the broad shoulders, the ever-so-slightly too tight t-shirt clinging to his thick biceps, the bright gaze he had settled upon the teacher and The Reception Lady, the light laugh he let out at her little jokes.
Ghost was encapsulated.
His attention was broken as the teacher called the session to begin, taking a moment to introduce herself (She was called Caroline, and she was an older lady, probably in her sixties, and she was the arts-director for this little collective here in East London) and then welcomed and thanked everyone for joining them. She’d mentioned not making people do the introduction thing, feeling that it might make people nervous, but that they were free to chat during the session. She kept moving her hair behind her ears, her long grey hair constantly falling into her face. He had half a mind to offer her an elastic band, but he noted the hair-tie on her wrist and wondered why she wouldn’t just tie it up? It made no sense to him.
Ghost felt very self-conscious then, all of a sudden feeling very claustrophobic, and too hot as he realised the class began and he was somewhat trapped in the room now. He pulled his hood off, his hat from his head and shoved into a pocket, and shrugged out of his leather jacket, hanging it on the back of the chair he sat on. He unzipped his hoodie, hoping to cool down a little. Maybe rolling up his sleeves would help? Expose some skin and let the cooler air catch him? He wasn’t sure, but he felt electric in that moment, his blood feeling fuzzy under his skin. He tried to calm some of that energy, small movements – knee giggling, running a hand through his hair, ruffling the tresses to scratch at his scalp.
This was the most human interaction he’d had in weeks.
He decided to focus all his concentration onto the sketchbook in front of him, channelling his attention to the blank paper. He wasn’t listening really to what the teacher was saying, she seemed to be expressing that they were free to use the time however they wanted, but that the model would change positions a few times within the two hour slot, and what he did hear was that she said they could come and go as they saw fit, leave early if they wanted to (but no refunds.)
He felt a little relieved at that, that he wasn’t trapped here. He was free to go when he needed to.
The jiggle of the door handle set his nerves on fire once more, as he watched the door open and a little old lady walk into the room. He needed to calm down, of course the model would be entering the room otherwise how were they going to draw her? ‘Calm the fuck down Simon, stop being so irrational’ he chided himself. The absurdity of drawing this aged woman quelled his anxiety for a moment, taken aback once more as she took to the podium and dropped her gown without any warning. He wasn’t one to judge, he promised there was no judgement, but he wasn’t able to process how someone could be so… Vulnerable?
He took a chance at a look at the others in the room, most of them seeming to take her in and contemplate the best way to transfer her likeness to paper.
He averted his gaze back to his easel.
“Steamin’ Jesus…”
Ghost looked over at the man next to him, his eyes wide, and a little frightened as he looked over at the woman before them. “I hope I have that confidence when I get there, eh?” he winked in Ghost’s direction, picking up his charcoal to begin. “Neeps and tatties on display for everyone,” there was a laugh in his whisper, a gleam in his eye and a charm in his tone.
Ghost huffed in response, feigning a laugh to be polite. He picked up a pencil and started sketching, feeling his brain emptying as he began drawing, lines sketching out the general shape of the woman before him. She did have a great form for sketching. She had so much character on her body, clearly lived in well and she obviously had a great time. She had careful lines around her eyes, around her mouth, her eyes were bright and soft, and she seemed to be the kind of person who laughed freely; the type of grandmother Ghost had prayed for as a child. Her wide hips and heavy chest made the lines and curves of her body pleasing to sketch, the soft creases in her skin giving beautiful texture. Soft was probably the best word to describe her.
They all sat in relative silence for an hour, Ghost feeling a lot of the anxiety dripping out of him and allowing the calm of the studio to wash him clean of any bad feelings. The model bent to pick up her gown, and covered herself quickly, nodding to the group as the teacher appeared again. She let them have a break for 10 minutes, to allow them to smoke, or go outside and stretch their legs and back.
Ghost shrugged back into his jacket and hoodie and beelined for the door, taking the steps down two at a time to get outside. He hadn’t realised it but he desperately craved the nicotine. He dipped around the side of the building, pulling his mask down to rest the cigarette between his lips. He lit it up, taking a deep drag on it to hold in his lungs. He knew it was a terrible habit, but he didn’t care. He probably wouldn’t live long enough to see the repercussions of the habit anyway. Not in his line of work.
“Can I get a light?” came the Scottish voice. He turned to face the voice, the same bright eyes from the studio looking over him.
Ghost quickly covered his face again before holding out the lighter to the other. He felt very conscious all of a sudden, averting his gaze back to the ground at his feet. He pulled his mask down carefully once more, smoking his cigarette and wished to god he was alone at this moment.
“I’m John,” The man said, offering his hand out to Ghost.
Ghost looked at it for a moment, and back to the man before him. “Kieran,” he lied, resting the cigarette between his lips so that his right hand was free to shake the other’s.
They stood around to the side of the building in relative silence, smoking their cigarettes, taking quick glances at one another. What surprised him most was how unawkward he felt in this other man’s presence. The other looked down at his wrists to the time and sighed, “Time to go back in,” John smiled, nodding his head in the direction of the main entrance. They made their way back upstairs and took their places and continued their work, a relaxed atmosphere sinking over Ghost as he sketched away the evening.
At the end of the session, he began packing away his things, silently thanking the model for her participation with a nod and a covered smile in her direction. He shoved his sketchbook into his backpack and started getting himself ready to leave, patting himself down to feel for his packet of cigarettes for the walk home. He pulled a cigarette from the carton and held it with his lighter as he made the final checks to leave. He glanced over to where John had been idling himself, clearly looking to speak with Ghost before he left.
Ghost nodded to him and began for the door, hoping it’d be an easy exit. He wasn’t interested in conversation, and certainly didn’t have the energy quota for being more sociable than being surrounded by a group of strangers for a whole evening. He had enjoyed the drawing, and the silence in the company of others. But he felt a hand grip his arm, and it took everything in him not to turn around and swing for whoever it was who was holding him.
Of course it was John.
“A couple of us are going to the pub next door, did you want to join us for one before home?” there was an eagerness in the question John posed, and it felt like an earnest request. “It’s only 8pm, seems like a good time for a nightcap, eh?” his smile reached his eyes, and the put in Ghost’s stomach grew.
“Sorry, I can’t. Gotta get home for the dog, you know? He’s been in all night,” He lied, “He’s been in all day by himself.” He didn’t have a dog, not anymore.
“Ah, well maybe next time,” John offered a hand to Ghost, “Until then, Kieran. See you next week.” He said, shaking Ghost’s hand. His handshake was firm, grip strong, but not tight. He watched as John went back to his easel to pack up the rest of his things and gather the other attendees. He watched the way John’s eyes seemed to scan the room, and it felt oddly familiar, the same anxiety checking Ghost needed to do constantly, maybe he was ex-military? Ex-army men had a certain way about them, the way he carried himself felt very Drill-Sergeant. The way he stood, hands clasped at the base of his back, the way he leaned his head towards the person speaking to him, leaning in to give them his full attention. It reminded him of Price. It felt uncomfortably familiar and he wasn’t sure whether this man, who had seemed to take an interest in him, was someone to be weary of.
The hairs prickling on the back of his neck, back to the door for too long, he turned and went home, to his non-existent dog, and his empty apartment.