Chapter Text
When my time comes around
Lay me gently in the cold dark earth
No grave can hold my body down
I’ll crawl home to her
Death was something Simon no longer wanted to believe was the reality of the world.
He didn’t want to believe he was mortal-that the blood in his veins was one day going to run out in a crimson stream.
He didn’t want to think about the possibility that right when life had become something worth living for, it was being taken away from him.
He wanted to believe in a universe where he could live and breathe and love.
Love the stars surrounding the moon.
Love the way they twinkled and gleamed in the low light.
Love the comfort they brought in fits of loneliness.
Love her.
“-hear us.”
A voice?
No. That wasn’t possible. He was dead. He’d died in that field with Katelyn in his arms. He’d felt as the air left his lungs.
Hadn’t he?
“He’s wakin’ up!”
“Boys, I’ll be back.”
The voices were very clearly there and it was that of his teammates. But they hadn’t been on the mission-hadn’t even known about it. Laswell had sent him and Katelyn out in the dead of the night without even getting the authorization from Price, knowing he’d never let them go.
With considerable effort, Simon opens his eyes. He immediately has to narrow them back to slits, however, because the stark white of the hospital room he was in was harsh against his sensitive eyes. As he slowly comes to, his senses also return. The sterile smell of the room filters into his nose, a very sudden difference from the copper that had been coating his senses back in the field. He hadn’t been able to tell who’s blood it had been that was filling the air so intensely, but if he had to guess it was likely Katelyn’s.
Katelyn.
He sits up suddenly, wincing with a grunt as his head spins and his back screams in agony.
“Woah! Easy, Lt.”
He recognizes the voice as Johnny’s immediately, and doesn’t shy away from the hands steadying him against his back.
“Thank God you’re alright, mate,” Gaz says, and he also steadies Simon. “Had us worried.”
He wasn’t concerned about himself though–only her. Always her.
“Where’s Katelyn?” he asks, his core straining to keep him in the upright position. “What happened t’ her?”
“Ghost, ye need t’ lay down-”
Sharp panic was rising in his gut. “Where is she?”
Johnny opens his mouth to try to say something else, but the door to the hospital room opens. In walks a doctor and Price, who looked relieved to see him conscious. They step into the room and right as the door is about to close, another figure steps into the room.
“Laswell,” Ghost says as a way of greeting to her, voice cool.
“Lieutenant Riley,” she replies, voice level as she takes in his injured form.
That he had because of her.
“How are you feeling?”
Ghost scoffs at the question, wincing at how the action stirred the pain in his back. He can feel Price’s gaze, sharp as ever, on him at the motion. He realizes his mask was still off, likely for the doctors to examine him easier. However, it also left him very vulnerable and he didn’t exactly appreciate that.
“About as well as a man who nearly died can feel, ma’am.”
She has the humility to look the smallest bit sorry at that comment, and he is once again reminded of how Grizzly wasn’t here with him.
“Have the boys told you about Kate-”
“Staff Sergeant Ard,” he cuts in, voice betraying the animosity he felt. “Refer to her as Sergeant Ard or Petty Officer First Class Ard if you refer to me by Lieutenant Riley.”
He didn’t feel she had the right to refer to Katelyn by her given name after the hell she’d put them through. Logically, in the back of his mind, he knows that they both agreed to the mission willingly. However, that part of his brain had long gone quiet. It had been completely mute ever since he’d crawled to her prone body in the grass.
Laswell takes the interruption in stride. “Have the boys told you about Staff Sergeant Ard?”
“No, not yet.”
She looks to Price now, as if seeking permission.
It makes that ugly thing in his chest curl its lip and snarl.
The fact she was seeking permission from his captain now after she’d sent him and Katelyn into a hot zone without it was maddening.
“I’ll relay the news,” Price replies, voice low and the lieutenant can tell what he’d just thought isn’t too far from the mind of his captain. “I believe you mentioned having a debrief to get to?”
Laswell nods her head in farewell, and exits the room without receiving anything back from the other three members of the 141.
When the door closes, the attention returns to him. Ghost suddenly wishes Laswell was still in the room to avoid the piercing gazes of the three other men in the room. He pushes through, knowing he needed to deal with it to be able to find out where Katelyn was being held. Why she wasn’t in the same room as him was confusing considering they had been on the same mission, but he doesn’t let that deter him.
“Where is she?” he asks, slowly moving to sit more upright.
“Ghost,” Price says carefully, still standing away from his bed, unlike Gaz and Johnny who flanked him on either side. “When the two of you came in she was in critical condition. Hardly breathin’ at all. She’d lost so much blood that it was a miracle she made it back to the base alive.”
The ugly thing in his chest begins to stir again, shifting about in irritation.
“The doctors operated on her for nearly eight hours, trying to repair the damage to her internal organs and back. The bullet nearly severed her spinal cord.”
Dread began to unfurl in his gut, spilling up into his throat as it began to close.
“She’s down the hall,” his captain tells him, voice somber. “I’m sorry, Simon. She’s gone.”
Ghost couldn’t breathe.
“She didn’t go without a fight.”
“Simon,” Katelyn had breathed against his lips, fingers tangled in his hair. “I will always be there to make sure you can shine.”
He had chuckled at that into the kiss, the press of her lips against his hot and wet and messy.
He sought to claim and mark, wreak havoc and worship this altar of a body beneath him.
Ghost had never been one for religion, but suddenly he found himself like a man without purpose suddenly having found it in the form of a goddess appearing to him. She was his light-the one banishing away his mortality and carving a path for him to ascend into the heavens. She was bringing back Simon.
“If you want to pay your respects, you’re able to go visit the body. None of us have gone yet.”
Their bodies had molded together, a fire wholly consuming enveloping them in its embrace.
She sought to heal and mend, spread her love and give him a place to land upon when the walls came crashing down.
“Is that so?” he had questioned, lips drifting down to her jaw. “The moon outshines the stars at times.”
Katelyn simply scoffed, tugging his head up roughly so they made eye contact.
“It would be too dark without the stars regardless,” she replies, and their lips meet again in the increasingly familiar dance they’d found themselves in.
“I know you two were close, so I understand if you’re not ready yet.”
Simon’s body moves above hers, hands grasping at her hips, her waist, her back. She responds in kind, digging her fingers into his shoulders, his biceps, his hair. They were joined into one body now, now a continuous form at the point an outsider would not be able to tell where one began and another ended.
They sought to build and grow, drown one another in emotion and possession to show the world they’d found a home in one another.
It was a night Simon had never wanted to forget. He wanted it inscribed behind his eyelids, into his brain. The feeling of her against him–beneath, on top, next to–was more intoxicating than any drug or hard liquor ever to grace his senses.
His brain had been a broken record of KatelynKatelynKatelynKatelynKatelyn.
“I’m so sorry, son.”
Ghost felt completely hollow, like the small part of him still human had been torn from his chest. And, he supposed it had. After all, she had been what was keeping him alive in the end, was what had been the final key needed to unlock the chest in his heart holding Simon.
Beside the hollowness an anger begins to build. He had accepted his fate in that field with her heavy body in his arms knowing they’d be together in whatever was next. The universe was cruel, stripping away yet another thing from him in a burst of ash and fire. It was common knowledge for anyone who’d spent any length of time watching the two of them work together that if one left, the other would follow.
They were joined souls, fighting for their next breath so long as the other did the same.
They were two pieces fit together, leaving the puzzle of their lives incomplete without their unity.
They were what kept one another sane, chasing away the demons and the darkness for a shot at tranquility.
Now, he was a husk of a man.
He distantly felt arms around him, and despite it feeling wrong – because it wasn’t her – he allows for it to happen. He knows it’s not just for him but also them. So, he lets them hold onto him.
Simon was slowly starting to unravel at the edges, Ghost enveloping him more and more until the scarred face was gone and replaced with a skull over scratchy fabric.
—------------------
The funeral was awful.
They’d flown Katelyn’s body back to the States where she’d been born, hosting a service in Alaska where her father still lived. There, in the cold dark earth, she was laid to rest. At least, the coffin was laid to rest. Her ashes had been divided up between her parents, siblings, and–albeit reluctantly–Ghost.
Her father had recognized him almost instantly when he’d opened the door, and the smile he bore at seeing himself and Price faded almost instantly.
Being former military, he knew what the folded up American flag with Katelyn’s tags on the top being held in Ghost’s arms meant. He’d been completely silent, beckoning them inside and collapsing onto the couch. Price had settled beside his old friend, a hand on the other man’s shoulder. Ghost had stood off to the side, still clutching the American flag like it was a lifeline. Her tags glinted in the light, winking at him like she would constantly.
A month later, the entire team had gathered together around her coffin and given her the proper send-off, Ghost being the one to pound the insignia of the United States Navy into the hard surface. The 141, Laswell and her wife, Nikolai, and around forty Marines made up the military side of the funeral. The Marines were ones who had all been involved with her somehow before she’d transferred to the 141 and left the States, and had naturally all wanted to be there upon hearing news of her death. There were supposedly dozens more, all soldiers who remembered the fierce corpsman who’d come in guns blazing to save them in the middle of a warzone or had managed to bring men a foot taller than her down to their knees in submission.
Her parents, her mother’s new husband, siblings, and countless other family members were all in attendance. They all approached him upon seeing his imposing form, offering looks of sympathy and hugs he accepted only out of courtesy. Apparently Katelyn had spoken about him the most out of all the members on the team, touting the skills of a man who “is way more quiet than a guy his size should be”. Her father was the only one who didn’t give a look of sympathy and instead stood silently by him, wearing his old dress uniform.
The service had been heartfelt, Katelyn’s mother descending into a sobbing mess by the end of it. Katelyn’s brothers all were the hardest to watch, her older brother, Caleb, breaking down knowing his little sister was gone. If he remembered correctly, the two of them were less than a year apart and were the closest out of the bunch. The twins, Rory and Fergus, were both in utter shock with silent tears running down their faces. The youngest, Andrew, stood stone-faced, dressed in his own dress uniform of the Army. Her father was emotionless the entire time, the only indication of his grief being the silent tears rolling down his cheeks like the twins.
When it was over, Katelyn’s mother had stormed up to him and screamed at him for not getting her out of the military world. She’d wanted her only daughter to settle down and become a good wife, and blamed Ghost for not having her do that. She only lasted a short couple minutes in her outburst before she collapsed into him, being removed gently from his chest by Caleb.
Katelyn’s mother’s words rolled off his back, his heart far too numb to comprehend the full depth of what she meant.
It’s only when he’s alone by her tombstone several days later that he understands it.
He’d had a chance to pull Katelyn away from the military world, settle down with her. But he hadn’t. He’d delayed time and time again with her, keeping them at the stage where there wasn’t a full commitment yet.
Were it not for his own selfish desire to keep her in his sights at all times, she could’ve been alive.
He wouldn’t have a necklace holding her ashes.
The 141 would still have their Mama Bear.
Ghost feels a darkness coming over him, so unlike what he had felt in that field holding Katelyn close to his chest.
He doesn’t fear it–he was too numb anymore–but for another reason.
It crashes over him, suffocating and brutal, a reminder of how the moon would now shine alone in the night sky.