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indigovigilance · 6 months

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Continuity Errors

Crowley can stop time. We’ve noticed buggy things about time. Let’s talk about it.

I’m going to start with an overview of every time he has definitely frozen time in order to establish the mechanics of Crowley’s time-stopping power in the GO universe. Then, I’m going to talk about other events where Crowley may have stopped time, and it wasn’t (directly) shown to the audience.

or read this 3,500 word beast of a meta on Ao3

edit: if you're deciding whether or not to read this, check out the reblog notes!

Opening obligatory "do not put anything about this in Neil Gaiman's askbox"

Crowley freezes time locally, selectively exempting individuals

S1E2

In S1E2, Crowley freezes time at the corporate training ground to interrogate Mary Hodges, formerly Sister Mary Loquacious (played by Nina Sosanya, actor for Nina in S2). It may seem like she’s just hypnotized and time is progressing normally around all of them, but that isn’t the case. Immediately before Crowley hypnotizes Hodges, we can hear gunfire in the background; a few seconds before Hodges is released from the trance, we hear shouting and sirens. But during the time that Hodges is entranced, all we hear is three things: the dialogue, music, and what sounds like the ticking of a kitchen timer.

We could do a little bit of extrapolation from the fact that the beginnings of gunshots and siren sounds are temporally very close together, especially depending on how we measure time. Crowley turns the paintball guns into deadly weapons at 36:59. Crowley freezes Mary Hodges at 38:47. A ticking sound starts the same moment. We also hear what we will come to recognize as the “pause time” sound, a sort of wobbly sound. The ticking sound seems to stop around… 40:07? Right before the line about lovely little toesy woesies? It’s unclear with the overlapping tracks. At 40:11 Crowley says “let’s go” and we can hear sirens in the background start now. Aziraphale then snaps his fingers and unfreezes Hodges at 40:17.

So during 191 seconds of screentime, 84 seconds of it was spent with time frozen, if I accept the ticking sound to be the indicator. If time was only frozen locally, meaning just the paintball grounds and not the nearest police station and roads leading to it, then emergency services had just over three minutes from the time the first live round was fired to arrival. If time was actually frozen globally except for Crowley, Azirarphale, and Hodges, then emergency services got there in 85 seconds, or less than a minute and a half. Maybe Britain is doing something wildly different than here idk but I think the more likely explanation for the event timing is that Crowley is only freezing time in a local bubble. The shooters stop shooting but the police are still driving towards them while Crowley and Aziraphale are interrogating an entranced Mary Hodges.

The case with Hodges is kind of confusing because the audience is presented with a false dichotomy between “frozen in time” and “hypnotized.” It’s actually both. Crowley has frozen time around the three of them, but Hodges, like Aziraphale, was exempt. It just so happens that she was also entranced at the same time, which explains as well why Aziraphale can release her from the trance, since our best evidence indicates that he can’t control time.

S1E3 & S2E3

In S1E3, Crowley freezes Jean Claude, the executioner at the Bastille. Immediately before, we can hear the guillotine, screaming and jeering outside the cell. As soon as Jean Claude is frozen, however (13:29, complete with wobble sound), there is complete background silence, except for the dialogue between our ineffable aristocrats. When Crowley restarts time, background noise restarts as well. This evidence indicates that Crowley froze time for the surrounding area as well as inside the cell.

In S2E3, Crowley freezes Mr. Dalrymple. We don’t have definitive information about how much of the rest of the world is affected since the scene takes place indoors on a quiet night and there are no external cues of time starting or stopping.

S1E6: Freezing Out Satan

In S1E6, not only are Crowley, Aziraphale, and Adam pulled out of the normal flow of time: it seems that they are also pulled out of normal space. They appear to be in an ethereal desert where we can see their wings, but we don’t actually know where they are. The way we enter, inhabit, and then exit this time-stop is completely different from any of the other three explicit timestop scenes: Crowley must use his whole body to summon the power to cast the miracle, they travel elsewhere, then he must use his crankshaft to exit the time-stop.

I take this to indicate that freezing time when Satan is near takes a lot more power than freezing time around Mary Hodges, Jean Claude, or Mr. Dalrymple. Presumably, the power a being has, the more power it takes to lock them out of a bubble to stopped time.

Time Stop Mechanics

Here are my key takeaways from analyzing these four scenes:

Crowley isn’t so much freezing all of time as pulling himself and Aziraphale (and sometimes Adam) out of the flow of time. The effort this takes is dependent on the entities that they are “pulling away” from. It is easy to pull away from humans, so much so that they don’t have to pull away very far and can occupy the same space in a bubble of paused time. When he is “pulling away” from Satan, however, he must pull away much further, all the way to another plane.

Crowley’s ability is so powerful that he can use it to escape Satan. He could use it to lock out other powerful beings, if he wanted to, but it would take a lot of effort.

Aziraphale, a being with power somewhere on the spectrum between human and Satan, could be frozen by Crowley’s powers. The fact that Aziraphale is still present and active during all of these scenes, unaffected by the time stop is only indicative of Crowley’s choice to exempt him, just as he does with a hypnotized Mary Hodges and Adam.

Crowley has stopped time on Aziraphale

In a previous post I have addressed the possible symbolic meaning behind the Honolulu Roast sign that suddenly appears behind Crowley in the S2E1 coffee shop scene. This addresses the symbolic meaning of Honolulu with respect to Aziraphale, but fails to address the “roast” part, which I have the opportunity to do now. I begin by establishing two premises:

Crowley loves Aziraphale and after 6,000 years knows him very well.

Crowley is a dick.

Crowley sits down at the table across from Aziraphale and asks him what the problem is. At this point, there is no “Honolulu Roast” sign behind him. The camera flips to Aziraphale as he (badly) tries to deny that there is any problem. When the camera flips back to Crowley, a “today’s special: Honolulu Roast” sign has appeared behind him.

What does Crowley do next?

Crowley roasts Aziraphale.

Crowley proceeds to read Aziraphale to filth, rattling off all his tells and putting him in his place for even daring to think that he could mislead Crowley about his internal emotional state.

While we’ve seen a lot more of his soft side this season, we cannot forget that the demon Crowley, at the end of the day, is a prick. He really did pause time just so that he could go get a chalkboard, write a pun on it, and hang it on the wall behind him like a display card for open mic night. He’s still going to help Aziraphale, of course. But he’s going to make fun of him first.

Let me reiterate: Crowley literally paused time, got up from the table, put up this sign, then sat back down in (as close to) exactly the same position (as possible) to fool Aziraphale into not noticing the pause, because this joke is entirely for Crowley’s own amusement. We have some cinematographic evidence of this besides just the sign itself: the lamp behind him has moved slightly, and the camera angle focusing on Crowley has changed. Literally, the left hand side of the frame gets cut off due to the repositioning. From a production perspective, this scene would have been shot all at the same time, so should not have changed angles. That said, they did a by-hand follow-in of Crowley walking in and sitting down, then switched to a dolly, but… I have faith that they could have matched the shot line-up practically pixel for pixel if they wanted to. All to say: changing the camera position before and after, alongside the other conspicuous changes, seems like it was a deliberate framing choice used to indicate that Crowley tried his best to get back into exactly the same position, but was just a little off.

But Crowley’s prank is troubling from a perspective of honesty and agency. Based on the way the dialogue progresses, it seems pretty clear that Aziraphale doesn’t know that he was frozen. Whether or not Crowley could freeze Aziraphale was beside the point until this scene where we learn that Crowley would, even for a really dumb reason like making a joke at Aziraphale’s expense.

Before moving on, I want to note that the sudden appearance of this sign could be characterized as a continuity error, even though it was the result of a deliberate action by an in-world character. Jettison your traditional understanding of “continuity error” as “production made a mistake.” In this universe, we can have continuity errors by virtue that Aziraphale is experiencing time as if it is continuous, not noticing that he functionally blacked out for a few minutes and that things have changed around him. This is not a show-level continuity error. This is an Aziraphale-level continuity error.

Crowley can reverse time

Credit where credit is due: it was this comment on the Ao3 version of my meta, The Erasure of Human!Metatron, that became an earworm that got me thinking specifically about Crowley's abilities:

So thank you, LoveIsLove <3

Let’s go back to the Mary Hodges scene, or actually a few minutes before. Our ineffable idiots get shot by paintballs.

“Look at the state of this coat. I've kept this in tip-top condition for over 180 years now. I'll never get this stain out.”

“You could miracle it away.”

“Hmm… Yes, but… well, I would always know the stain was there. Underneath, I mean.”

Aziraphale finagles himself a favor without ever actually asking for it. Full points, princess. But let’s examine the actual content of the dialogue. This cannot be a complete 100% bluff; Aziraphale is not going to tell a straight lie to Crowley that they both know is false about the respective nature of their powers. It must be the case that there is some truth to this statement. There is a fundamental difference between what Aziraphale can do about the paintball stain and what Crowley is actually going to do about it. Furthermore, what Crowley does is something different than a miracle.

Crowley then blows on the stain, it disappears, and Aziraphale looks quite pleased. Yes, yes, he cajoled Anthony J Acts of Service Crowley into doing his signature move, but also, he’s genuinely thankful that Crowley did something for him that he couldn’t do for himself, because miracles don’t work like that. Notably, Crowley doesn't snap his fingers or make any other gesture that we normally associate with miracles, and we don’t hear the miracle sound, which is further evidence that this is not a miracle, but something different.

If you haven’t already, please read my meta entitled Jimbriel, Satan, the Book of Life, and what it means for Crowley. It explains in depth and with evidentiary support my theory about how erasure works in the Good Omens universe. The Cliff’s notes version is that erasing something, whether it be a name from the Book of Life or a paintball from a coat, is akin to erasing a pencil mark on paper; it’s technically gone but you’ll always know it was there. Underneath.

What Crowley has done, then, is not erasing the paintball stain.

He’s reversed it.

When he blows on the paintball stain, he is reversing time in a microcosm of the universe, truly making it so that the paintball never hit the jacket. In a world full of rubber erasers, Crowley has the only Control-Z. When things are “erased” by the Book of Life, they are changed, but when Crowley reverses something, they never happened (making Beelzebub’s description of the Book of Life actually a more accurate description of Crowley’s power). It is something unique that Crowley can do that Aziraphale can’t, and we haven’t seen any evidence of any other celestial being pausing or reversing time. Please feel free to reblog with links to relevant meta if I’m wrong about that.

In true Neil Gaiman style, Crowley using this power to do something mundane like get rid of paintball paint was an incredibly benign and subtle way to indicate that Crowley has an immense, untapped power that we have not yet seen him use for any major purpose.

I repeat: we didn’t see him use it. Because usually, like Aziraphale, we the audience are exempt from the time freeze, and we get to watch what happens. But this time, we were frozen out with Aziraphale.

Clock Theory revisited: a reinterpretation of “continuity error”

A summary of clock theory

Neil Gaiman’s ask and answer on clock theory

Neil Gaiman responded to an ask about the clock jumping forward from 9:25 to 9:40 before and after the kiss with a single sentence: “It’s a continuity error, I’m afraid.”

In the usual manner, Neil is not lying, but he is relying on you making an incorrect interpretation of his seemingly straightforward and innocuous but actually ambiguous and incredibly meaningful statement. As I stated with regards to the Honolulu Roast chalkboard sign, do not interpret “continuity error” as “production made a mistake.” Interpret “continuity error” as “Aziraphale believes that his experience of time is in lockstep with the actual flow of time and doesn’t realize that 11 minutes passed while he was frozen.”

Let’s consider the evidence:

Image at timestamp 41:04 “[Hold that thought!]” the clock reads 9:25

Image at 45:04 “If Gabriel and Beelzebub can go off together, then we can” the clock still reads 9:25

Image at 47:56 the clock now reads 9:40.

Image at 48:14 the clock reads 9:40

There are two four-minute gaps, from the perspective of the viewer, and we have views of the clock face at both ends of each gap.

Gap 1, from 41:04 to 45:04, the clock hands do not move at all, nor do they in any of the intervening shots.

Gap 2, from 45:04 to 47:56 (or 48:14, as you prefer), the clock hands move 15 minutes.

The Occam’s razor, Doylian explanation for why the clock hands don't move from 41:04 to 45:04 is that the clock is a prop. It does not have any timekeeping mechanism, the hands don’t move unless some human being opens up the glass, reaches in there, and manually adjusts it. They weren’t going to interrupt filming this moving scene to move the clock hands minute by minute, so it seems pretty plausible that the fact that it doesn’t move is just an artifact of production limitations.

The Watsonian explanation, which I do not favor, is that Crowley has frozen time for just the two of them. They are in a microcosm all their own. If true, this would have an abundance of implications, such that they are actually free to speak to each other freely, which they don’t. So I feel like with that alone, we can set this aside, but I’m open to being convinced otherwise.

If we accept the “clock is a prop” explanation for Gap 1, it doesn’t really hold for Gap 2 that they moved it a full fifteen minutes. So much care and attention to detail was given for all other parts of this show; I don’t realistically believe that a production staff member moved the hands a random amount. The music carries us from Crowley’s exit to Metatron’s entrance seamlessly, yet more time seems to have passed in-world than on-screen. There are two possible explanations:

There was more material that was supposed to be filmed to account for 15 minutes that got cut

We are supposed to figure out that there’s some “Greek play” style shenaniganery afoot

I will debunk explanation #1 with simply this: David’s contact lenses would sometimes rotate so that the slit pupils were not vertical. This error was fixed by VFX in post.

You might assume, when watching Good Omens, that Crowley’s serpent-like eyes are created using contact lenses. Or perhaps you’d presume they’re CGI. Actually, they’re a mix of both.

“The CGI versions were usually because the contact lenses had swiveled in David’s eyes … and we had to fix it,” says Mackinnon.

If they could fix Crowley’s eyes in post, there is absolutely no reason to expect that they couldn’t or wouldn’t have fixed the clock hand positions in post, especially if it was someone’s job to reach in there and change the positions to try to maintain set continuity in the first place. Additionally, there is deliberate use of clocks to symbolize various themes across both seasons. A Doylian error like this is not something that would have been overlooked and survived into publication.

So we are left with explanation #2. Time has passed that we, the viewers, don’t observe. What was happening during that time that we missed? More importantly, who knows that this time has passed? Aziraphale doesn’t seem to, and it’s unclear what the Metatron does or doesn’t know.

Some fans have posited that the Metatron is doing the time manipulations, but canonically, the only entity we have observed manipulate time is Crowley. We assume the Metatron is powerful because the angels are all afraid of him, but we’ve never actually seen him do anything, and so have no primary evidence for this. All over, he’s got some big “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” Wizard of Oz vibes happening; I’m not convinced he could miracle his way out of a wet paper bag, and there’s a chance that in Season 3 we’ll find out that he’s all bluff. Not so with Crowley.

My hypothesis is that Crowley froze Aziraphale and everybody else for a one block radius, including the Metatron, and did something important in the bookshop before it lost its protection. Please see my meta on Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the Bookshop for an evidence-based argument on why the bookshop was the only place in the universe that Crowley could have safely hidden something. Since Aziraphale is no longer the head of an independent embassy, whatever Crowley was keeping safe in there isn’t safe anymore, and needs to be moved. Universe time continued to pass and the clock reflects that, but Aziraphale and the Metatron aren’t aware that they were paused.

Which also gives us a new interpretation for the kiss.

The Kiss, revisited

Crowley didn’t want to send Aziraphale a message.

Crowley needed a plausible cover for the immense effort it was going to take him to freeze time against Aziraphale and the Metatron that he knew was standing outside.

How do I know he knew?

No nightingales.

Juliet. Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;

Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:

Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

Romeo. It was the lark, the herald of the morn,

No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:

Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

No nightingales could be the end of a romance. I argued as much in my inaugural meta just six weeks ago (and what a six weeks it has been, people!) But “no nightingales” could also be a secret signal to two people who have a unique bond through Shakespeare that Crowley has realized he is not safe, and he needs to leave, and he’s trying to tell Aziraphale that without letting their spectator in on the message.

Now he has to stop time to secure whatever item he’d been keeping safe in the bookshop. But keeping Satan at bay required him to lunge upwards, using his whole body to freeze time. He can’t get away with anything like that here in the bookshop, that would give up the ruse.

But what if he lunged at the person everyone knows he’s in love with and violently kisses them on the mouth, his entire body tense with the effort of freezing time in the presence of two ethereal beings? No one would notice the difference, or think anything nefarious of it; a Class A surreptitious time-stop.

One last crackpot theory.

Aziraphale knows what Crowley did. Well, he knows that he froze time, and for the first time realizes that Crowley has locked him out, and that he used the kiss as a cover. The violation of agency, trust, and their romantic bond are all breaking across him in the instant that time restarts, after Crowley has gone away for 11 minutes and returned to almost, but not quite, the same position inside Aziraphale’s arms. It is an intimate act that Aziraphale is fully tuned into, and for the first time, he’s noticing the continuity errors.

His horror-filled expression is one of broken trust. But his bond to Crowley is too strong for even this to break it. He knows that whatever reason Crowley had to pull this trick on him, it must have been a good one. It must have been to protect him.

“I forgive you.”

***

One more completely crackpot theory based on the Gavin Finney interview at The Ineffable Con last weekend.

The camera was supposed to circle them. Finney says that this was to show that they are the center of their universe, and their world is spinning.

Okay, okay. But could it not also have represented the spinning of clock hands? I’m just saying.

Closing obligatory "do not put anything about this in Neil Gaiman's askbox"

Find my entire collection of metas here

534 notes · View notes

yeyinde · 1 year

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SEA, SWALLOW ME | Simon Riley x GN!Reader

No one wrenches you open, leaving you raw and exposed, like Simon. A wound that never heals. A sickness that never dissipates. You carry the weight of him between your ribs and thundering heart. A place of safekeeping, protecting this precious knot that gnarls inside of you from everything else out there that might want to hurt it. It thrums now, dizzy with the feeling of him so close to you.

》 WARNINGS: 18+ – MATURE, SMUT | GN!Reader: no use of pronouns, gendered language or anatomy; very soft smut; light breath play/choking but. It serves a narrative purpose.

》 WORD COUNT: 9,4k (of pure, unadulterated nonsense)

》 NOTES: UM. This was meant to subvert standard D/s | Predator/Prey dynamics for Ghost but became a mess of nonsensical metaphors instead.

As far as missions went, this was slated to be amongst the easiest assigned out to your group—a standard hostage rescue of a foreign diplomat.

It's a sequence you've played out many times over in basic training. The steps, drills, are already ingrained in your memory with minor changes to suit the situation unfolding in a place you'd never been before, and probably will never see again. Rudimentary. Boring, almost.

The chance of injury was minimal. The probability of death is even infinitesimal.

And yet—

He pulls you into an alcove in the safe house you've been holed up in for the last twelve hours, alternating between bouts of sleep, and pouring over each minute detail of your roles.

Price's voice cracked an hour ago.

It was Gaz who called it with a soft chuff. "Guess that means we're good to go, eh, cap?"

"Off with you, then," he groused, reaching for a bottle of water. "We'll head out in an hour. Be ready."

You meant to sneak away to the gym and exercise some of the anticipation pooling inside your veins—a physical outlet to exert the antsy feeling that made your fingers tap a soundless beat against your shaking thigh; a post-mission ritual to saturate your brain in those feel-good chemicals caused by the rush of adrenaline.

But you were stopped by a hand on your wrist. One that snaked through the tenebrous of the storage closet that housed the guns, weapons, and ammunition, all spread out on the walls with a bench in the middle.

Simon leans back against it, guns spread out on the surface behind him. The hand not curled around your wrist is pressed flat, bare, to the granite top, only inches away from the collection of knives he meticulously tends to before each assignment.

His sleeves are rolled up to his forearm, ink coloured in a hazy smear of yellow from the lamp spilling across the table in the corner. Your eyes are drawn there first—the shadows cast over the thick veins running along his forearms, hidden beneath the charcoal.

The other flexes around your wrist, rough skin scorching when it presses against yours. Seeing the bulk of his palm swallowing the entirety of your wrist and half of your hand has your mouth running dry.

There's something about him, about the fold of his massive frame condensing itself into a nook much too small for him to fit, that feeds into a part of your head that aches to fly. To scale mountains, to reach the summit. To be the first person to stand on top of the highest peak, and gaze down at the world shaded in blues, greens, and greys below.

Staring at Simon fills you with summit fever.

"Did I scare you?"

It's hard to rip your gaze away from him with so much of his flesh bared to you. He's usually dressed by now in his jacket and vest. Always prepared for the next slaughter. This—

This is new. Unusual.

You huff, rolling your eyes toward the domed ceiling, and struggle to stave off the influx of anxiety that gnarls inside of you. A break in the routine. It unsettles you. "Hardly."

He makes a low, starchy noise in his throat, muffled partially by the balaclava covering his mouth. "That so?"

He runs his thumb over your pulse, drawing your attention to the rapid thud of your heartbeat under his finger. It's a slow, meticulous circle, and his eyes dance with derision when you scoff, a touch embarrassed, and curl your fingers into a fist as if that would somehow stop the thundering in your chest.

"Whatever," you murmur, defensive. "I drank an espresso. It's just a natural, bodily reaction—"

His hand twitches again, fingers lifting from your skin as he slowly peels away from you. The chill against your flesh makes you shiver, already missing the intensity of his heat.

"If you say so," he volleys, settling his hand back on the table, palm cupping the thick ledge, fingers tucked under the surface. The motion makes his muscles quiver.

Goosebumps prickle along your flesh. Your throat runs dry.

"Got somethin' for you."

It's standard, benign—the words are flat considering the weight behind them, the potency. They're all he'll allow in this brief window of privacy when everyone else is busying themselves with their pre-mission rituals.

Price leans against the wall in the corner of the room, fingers curled into the straps of his tac-vest. His chin is dipped low, eyes fixed on the table a metre away where the files lay open, floorplans exposed. Despite the evenness of his brow, and the squared set of his shoulders, you can see the weight of everything circling in stormy blue.

The success of this will be shared amongst everyone, but the loss will be solely his own.

On the opposite side of the room, Soap picks over every centimetre of your weapons and tactical gear. Scouring every iota in an effort to make sure nothing will fail anyone.

Gaz, as the youngest, shoulders it all, and pours over the blueprints, committing each exit and entrance point to memory. He won't be caught unawares if a route is compromised. He'll get everyone out to safety.

By stark contrast, Ghost does nothing.

He doesn't look over the documents, but he doesn't need to. The blood vessels streaking through jaundiced white speak of a sleepless night staring at the photos of the men you're supposed to hunt down. The people you're supposed to rescue.

Before he slips on his gloves, you catch ink stains on his thumb and inside his forefinger. The thick scent of gunpowder and oil clings to him. His weapon is sleek: gunmetal grey and cleaned. Meticulous. His attention to detail is unyielding.

He did everything he was supposed to do last night when he didn't come and sneak into your room.

But he never does. Not before a mission.

You sometimes wonder if he likes to torture himself with the if only or the what if that lingers whenever you split apart, left to your devices and wholly dependent on yourself for survival. He keeps his distance. Doesn't want, nor need, the distraction.

Some might think it cruel that he avoids you like you're already caught in the clutch of the Reaper; skin shading a sickly grey as your blood rots from within. But you know him. You know Simon.

And when he hands you your gun, you can feel that it's already been loaded, and tended to. There's a fine sheen of oil glued to the tight folds of metal from where his meticulous cleaning couldn't reach.

Your tac-vest is packed with everything he deems necessary for your own survival (and even a few things he doesn't but you do).

He hands you a knife, too—one you know is from his personal collection. It fits into the palm of your hand like it was made for you, and you wonder—with a small smile blooming across your cheeks—how long he took looking over them before picking this one. A perfect fit.

"Thank you," you murmur, low and soft. No one is paying attention to you at all—there is no time to do so when you can feel the seconds ticking down. "I'll do my best not to get your pretty knife dirty."

He snorts. "Defeats the purpose, doesn't it? And it ain't mine."

"My knife, then."

You glance down at the smooth curve of the blade, sharpened to a deadly point, and twist it in your hand to stare at the handle. It's black. Two stems jut out from the hilt, extended a bit longer than the blade. It's triangular and pitched in the centre before tapering off to a sharp point. It's the length of your forearm. Longer than the tactical knives issued by the weapons branch in the SAS. Bound in leather. The stitches look much too similar to the ones he threaded through your gaping skin in Jakarta.

"Fairbairn-Sykes," you say, glancing up at him. "Thought they stopped using these?"

He rolls one massive shoulder. A man with his girth shrugging insouciantly is a strange sight. You almost expect to hear the distant roar of an avalanche.

"Much better'in the cheap ones they give you."

"Oh, yeah? Kinda hard to hide, though—"

"If you don't want it—"

Simon reaches for it, but you pull it close to your chest, grinning.

"You can't take my knife away."

He huffs, lowering his hand back to the table. His eyes are piercing. Heavy. "Then stop complainin' about it."

A fly buzzes by your ear. A bead of sweat drips down the nape of your neck. Something about the look in his dark, shadowed eyes sets your teeth on edge.

It wells on your tongue, then—soft words not meant to be uttered in a room saturated in contracted death—and the astringent flood strips your enamel until your teeth ache with the urge to let them out, or swallow them down. You wonder what he would say if you let them free. If they slipped from your tongue and filled the room with the stench of your poisonous wants, ones left to rot inside your chest, your throat.

The burn of them blisters your esophagus, leaving behind open wounds leaking infection into your bloodstream, into the vessels that run to your lungs, your heart.

The tremendous weight of them makes your knees quiver, struggling to stay afloat in the thick atmosphere that sits, oppressive and unignorable, between you.

It's all one-sided, of course—a hunger felt only by you. He doesn't acknowledge the gossamer of tension that bleeds into the room, wrapping tight around your neck like a phantom noose. To Simon, nothing is amiss; nothing is wrong—

And it isn't, you think. This spooling knot inside of you, wound tight into a ball, isn't wrong. It isn't bad to feel this way, but it's terrifying.

Being with Simon is a bit like climbing a mountain.

But there is scaling one in a harness, secured safe and sound with ropes and pitons, and then there is this:

A free solo up the side of a chossy.

The chalk on the tips of your fingers clumps together under the stickiness of your damp palm. One slip, and you'll be a wreck at the bottom before you can even try to hold on.

Jagged rock at the bottom gnashes its teeth together in anticipation, eagerly waiting its chance to grind your flesh into pulp, and offer your spilled blood to Thanatos.

Melodramatic, maybe, but something about Ghost brings out a sense of morbid sentimentality from within you. The feeling is a harsh juxtaposition to who the man really is.

A mythological being who lingers in the foreground like a psychopomp, but gives you whittled knives from his personal collection, carefully whet to a fine point, and cracks stupid jokes in a deadpan manner as if the world around you wasn't raining bullets and reeking of gun cotton.

Your gaze wavers, falls. There are a lot of things you are meant to say now, and many more that are forbidden. None of them brim through the humus that sticks to your throat. Disturbed dirt in a lonely graveyard.

A flurry of motion snags your attention. In the corner of the room, you catch sight of the fly sitting on top of an intricate web. It runs its hands together, waiting. Mischievous. A morsel of food is still tangled in white lace. It feasts without worry, unaware of its impending demise as its feet glue to the threads woven below, shaped like the cracked skulls in a catacomb.

As the fly feeds, the spider cocks its head up from a darkened crevasse, a multitude of eyes gleaming in the flushed light hanging overhead.

It waits.

Poor thing.

"Thanks," you say again, wrenching your eyes away from the opening maw of the ossuarium in the corner. The sight unnerves you.

It's not meant to be any more sincere than the first utterance of your gratitude, but you say it—if only to fill the stifling silence, and wonder if that carefully curated mask would shatter into pieces, revealing the bare-faced man (human: flesh, bone; vulnerable) beneath, if you uttered the words pulsing against your vocal cords like a pizzicato.

He levels you with a flat look as if he, too, hears the whine of c minor screaming in your chest.

"Hilt is new. Try not to get it dirty."

You fight a shiver. Force yourself to give some facsimile of a smile in response.

"Wouldn't dream of it, Lt."

(A liar.)

You tuck the pretty knife in a tawny leather sheath into your pocket.

"I'll take good care of it."

(A thief.)

Behind smeared grey, charcoal black, his eyes narrow. Pensive. Considering. Something rears, lurks. Hidden in shadows. Cut into brimstone. It's the same shade of death that only surfaces when he's on the battlefield—no longer Simon, but—

"See that you don't."

A ghost.

(Just warmer than most.)

Your eyes stray back to the corner of the room where the black spider prowls closer to the hapless fly struggling to be free.

Yeah, you think, a touch dazed. Your fingers tighten around the leather-bound hilt of the blade. Me, too.

You dirty his knife.

The chance for an injury is minor, but never zero. You find this out when someone grabs you from behind, knife pressed to your jugular. There is no fear, no terror.

Just—

Embarrassment. Stupid. You know better than to leave your six unchecked.

It ends with a paper-thin cut to your skin, and your knife buried in flesh.

The hilt is bloodied. Authentic leather stained red. Grotesque. Garish. You can't tear your eyes away from the droplets that stain the handle.

Plastic, usually. You know this because you looked it up. Polymer-covered wood.

The leather was handmade. Sewn with thick, black thread. Glued to the stripped wood.

Wrapped up pretty just for you.

(Just for you.)

And you ruined it like you promised you wouldn't.

(A liar. A thief.)

It makes you wince, and the burn in your chest hurts more than the sting in your neck. You thought you heard death and his fiddle this morning, but who knew his boney, rotted fingers would wrap around your wrists like it was the hilt of a conductor's baton.

Simon doesn't say anything, but there's a weight in his silence. A soundless ticking in the background as he watches, placid, as you make your way to him.

Nails bite into your palm until they're sticky with the blood that pools between your fingers. It's meant to be grounding. Replacing one hurt with another, but the biggest injury is the one to your pride, your ego. It's burned, blistered, and not even the swell of something you feel roiling through you at the sight of Simon, steady and sturdy—faultless despite the roaring that seems to echo around, the scream of the tide trying to pull you under—is able to quell the sting of humiliation.

Your hands are stained just like them. Scars mattered across soft tissue, and despite the way they spill over your flesh like Orion, you still feel the pull of torn flesh beneath your armour.

This—

This was an accident. Unfortunate. Unforgiving. It lingers between aching teeth, and tastes of raw wire.

You won't let the shame dip its talons into your pride despite the bruise forming on the side of your veneer.

Your chin lifts: defiant, almost. As if waiting for him to say something.

Anger, you think, is easier to wield than culpability.

There are a number of derisive, droll words he can pin you with, and your mind runs through the possibilities, the ones you heard barked out over the comms. Things like: rookie mistakes. Shoulda checked your six. How'd this happen? Thought you were better than this. Another scar to add to your collection, then? Better stop before you end up lookin' like me.

It surprises you, then, when he says none of them.

"Alright?"

His hand lifts, and a weight settles against your jaw, lifting your chin. It's barely a cat scratch, and doesn't even need stitches, but it stings something fierce when he stretches the skin around it. Pulling, tugging. You clench your teeth, swallowing back a wince.

He catches it, anyway.

Stupid.

You wait for the rest. For the or what? that traditionally follows a simple alright, but nothing comes.

His hand drifts, palm cups the side of your neck, and—

It's indescribable. A rush, maybe. A raw, pulsing wound throbbing inside your throat where his heavy, rough hand sits. A plinth. You can't lower your chin with it in the way. Stuck, you think, and then—

You shiver. It's instinctual. The curve of your neck is vulnerable; a sacred place. Animals protect their jugular, their soft bellies, from attack, and something primal in you tenses up. Waiting for the strike. For the snapping of jowls into your soft skin.

None come. Stupid. Of course—

"Jus'a little scratch."

His hand leaves almost quickly as it appeared, and you drift aimlessly, unconsciously, after it.

Snapped out of your strange reverie when Price calls out your name. Paperwork, probably. You've been hurt, and as a response—or a sneaky punishment—you have a mountain of forms to fill out, t's to cross, i's to dot.

The weight of Ghost's gaze on you is almost as heavy as the heft of his hand, and you linger for a moment in that strange, phantom noose, wondering what it would feel like if he held on just a little bit—

"Go on, then," his chin jerks toward Price. "Get cleaned up."

Something shifts inside of you. The open of a proverbial floodgate.

It's instant:

The weight of his palm, the press of his fingers—you feel them against your skin, a phantom whisper. A breath.

There's something almost comforting about the danger of exposure, you think. About bearing your neck to the biggest predator around.

It's not an act of submission. You'd never submit to Ghost, much less anyone else, but—

There's a sense of vulnerability there. Trust.

(It's that unseen edge of danger: a spark of life in a world that's always shades of muted grey, and draped in the folds of calamity. Death sits only a hair's breadth away no matter where you go. So close, you can feel the ghastly chill on your skin; always cold. Always freezing. You can set fire to your flesh, but your teeth still chatter.

For the first time in years, the skin on your neck burns with feverish heat.)

(The warmth fades. You chase it, pressing your fingers flat to your pulse, but still feel the icy drift of the waiting Sheol against your skin.

Cold to the touch once more.)

His fingers ghost along the skin of your wrist, skimming over your pulse. It’s soft. Gentle. A light brush that has no other meaning or purpose except to gain your attention—

—and oh, doesn’t it just.

Simon doesn’t let it linger. He pulls his hand away when your chin jerks toward him, and slides them into the pockets of his trousers. Hidden away. Out of reach.

Your wrist burns.

"Could've just said hello."

His eyes are heavy under the hood of his sweatshirt and lined with the grease paint he couldn't scour off. Maybe he never even tried to. Glacier blue framed in ashen blonde. His eyes remind you of the sandstone cliffs that line the Corfu shore. Stark white. Deep blue.

They're weighed down with something—exhaustion, maybe. The last you'd heard of him, he was chasing after leads that might link you to Shepherd with Gaz (who sent a dry text in the early morning, between the keds and the dad jokes, I don't know how anyone could be scared of this Manc; and: does the man ever sleep, or is he fuelled on Tenzing and spite alone?). And now—

“C’mere.” He murmurs, eyes heavy and lidded, sparking with something sharp, acrid. Humour, you think, heart stuttering in your chest.

The word is uttered just as softly as the touch against your flesh, and the sound—the phantom memory of the featherlight brush—burns with the heat in his gaze, the warmth that seeps through the gloves, and into your skin. Bone deep. You can feel the burn of him congealing in your cartilage.

"Finally gonna do me in?"

It earns you a dry scoff, the barest hint of an eye roll. "If I wanted to, you wouldn't see me coming."

"You could have just said no, never," you mock, stifling down a grin. "Or—I wouldn't even think about hurting you—"

The rest of the words are cut off when he steps closer. Liquid agility: he moves quickly for a man cut from Everest, sifting through the shadows with no more than a soft thud of his heel clipping the linoleum. Ghost looms before you in a blink, head tilted down to gaze at you.

His hand lifts, knuckle grazing the swell of your cheek. It's softer than he has any right to be. A warm brush across cold skin. The Agulhas current colliding into the Somali. It ripples across your surface and rattles the rotting bones below. The empty husk of you trembles.

"No," he murmurs, words distant and warbled under the roaring in your ear. You watch a flicker of something tremble across his face. A frisson shuddering too fast for your sluggish, mortal eyes to discern.

You can't find the remnants of that ugly, gnarled thing that sometimes stares back at you when he's unaware. A beast hiding in a forgotten bivouac, creeping through the desolate ruins of a travesty that reek of upturned humus. A ghost disinterred from its slumber.

But when you stare at him, bare-faced and uncertain, you see a darkening edge in the cuts of blue: deep canyons and crevasse that warm when your reflection swims in the glossy curve, wide eyes and parted lips filling the tenebrous, the shadows.

The things, disentombed, are at rest. Clouded over by the shocked face that swims in endless pools of blue.

"Never."

"Oh," you murmur, honeyed sweet and viciously coy. "How sweet of you."

(It takes you a moment to realise he's mocking you.

Your heart still thunders like the words were true.)

Simon cleans the hilt of the knife for you, bare fingers scouring away the blood that stains the leather. He lets you watch as he works, content to lean against the wall in silence as he dabs a cloth in a petri dish filled with cleaning solution, and gently scours the stain from the hide.

The motions are gentle, and familiarity bleeds into each swipe. This isn't the first time he scrubbed away the rotting blood of a dead man, and some part of you aches, stupid, knowing that it won't be the last.

A testament to the age-old woes of an occupational hazard.

Watching him work, silent and unbothered by your intrusion ("of all the bloody gits, you're somehow the least annoying. For now;"), fills you with a strange sense of comfort. Of longing.

(Domesticity makes your teeth ache and your cheeks burn.)

His knuckles are bruised. He won't tell you how it happened. Doesn't say much outside of, it's done, already, so no sense in worryin' about it.

You suppose he's right. No sense in dwelling over what you can't change. But the sight of his hands—bruised, cracked and bloodied—makes your mouth dry, and your heart race.

There's something about his hands that captivate you.

You can't stop staring at them. The memory of what his molten flesh felt like against your icy skin sears into you. The weight of his palm on your neck. Steady, solid.

Something predatory had risen from within you, and cocked its head to the side, allowing him an ounce more of your flesh for him to take. To touch.

A bear will seek the warmest cave to slumber after gorging itself on flesh and bone. A moth will kill itself just to touch an open flame.

There's something alluring about heat. Flames. Fire.

(Ghost smells of cedar embers: pyrolysis.

You're cold enough to want to burn the tips of your fingers in the open flame. To immerse yourself in the fire that'll char your flesh, and blacken your bones. Hollowed marrow, now filled with charcoal and brimstone.)

Your knuckles twitch. You curl your fingers into fists by your side.

"Done," he says, sitting back in the chair, and shaking you from your reverie.

He turns to you, the knife perched in his upturned palm. The leather is dark, wet, but the blood is gone.

On the table, the water in the Petri dish is diluted pink.

You let yourself linger when you reach for the proffered knife, knuckles grazing the rough flesh of warm, bare palm. Greedily catching tendrils of heat on the tips of your fingers.

"Thanks."

His eyes brim with something you can't name. "Try to keep it clean, or you'll ruin the leather."

You want to say, no one told you to make it pretty for me in the first place, but you don't. You think, instead, of summit fever, of scaling walls. The view from the top of a mountain must be worth the risk, the danger. To see the curve of the earth, and pure blue of the horizon yawning for you. As close to god as a mortal can climb with their bare hands.

It hits you like a punch to the gut. The rock crumbling. The chossy wobbling. Your feet giving away, fingers scraping against the granite as you fall to the rocks below.

He waits, eyes narrowing in that same shade of pensive contemplation as before.

You're lingering too much. Touching him too openly. Greedily. You wonder why he lets you when you pull away, shamefaced and meek.

(How much of it, you wonder, is an act and how much of it is real. Subconscious submission. Meek and unassuming. It rears inside of you, a skittish animal. But you're not scared. Not of him. Never.

A sick joke. Mortal folly. Something inside of you wants to know you're alive, and so—

Roll over and he'll think you're prey.)

You manage a shaky smile, mind racing to the same tremulous crescendo as the arrhythmic drum of your heart.

You don't meet his gaze. Can't when there's a deluge of something—ugly and awful—roaring through you at the sight of his hands, and the scars that cover them. Some, you note, deep enough to knick bone. False starts. Your teeth ache at the sight. Stomach knotting. Churning.

Something vicious gnarls through the rotten entombment of your living heart.

Gaze lowered. Neck bared.

Hook, line—

"Got it, Lt."

He fractures his fingers in Medellín after chasing a man through the barrios. They're cracked on the concrete when he jumps from the roof and catches it on a metal rod sticking out from the ashlar.

Those same ones that tilted your jaw back, bones creaking under the strain of his grip.

Ghost doesn't flinch, of course—you don't even know they're broken until he asks for gauze and a splint at the safe house you're holed up in. You just see him swing that same hand out, catching the man by the throat when he tries to slip past. Steady. Solid. An expert killing machine, numbed to the pain, the carnage.

Simon holds him tight to the wall by his jugular, barking out coarse questions, demanding answers. His voice carries (who are you working for? Where are the others? Gimme a reason not to snap your neck right now—), and you watch it all unfold from your perch on the rafters beside the alcove.

Watching his six—supposed to be, anyway—but you can't stop staring at the way he dwarfs the other man. The curve of his fingers, long and thick, around his throat. It fits like a scarf. A neck brace.

Simon's so—

Massive. Undeniably so. And seeing it like this is mesmerising. Hypnotic, almost.

Whatever the man says is swallowed by the roaring in your ears; the rush of the wind whistling through the houses below.

He gasps something out, eyes wide, and whatever it is, it makes Simon nod.

Right, then. Target acquired.

The moment his jaw snaps shut, information unveiled, he barely has a chance to beg before Simon's hand twitches.

You hear the sharp snap from your perch above him, and barely have a moment to collect yourself before the man goes limp. Simon pulls away from him, a half step back, and without his support, he falls to the ground with a soft thud.

His hand falls to his side when the man falls, and it's then, in the fading ochre streaking through the concrete, you notice the drops of red staining his gloves. They catch in the light—a Rorschach of brutality and death—and you can't stop staring at them. At his hands.

A small thing, really. It's hardly anything noteworthy considering the litres of blood that saturate any of you on a particularly gruesome day, and yet something about the red smears on the back of his hands, staining the worn, faded white metacarpals catches your attention. Eyes glued to the way he shakes his big hand, as if throwing off the sting of split bones.

(Even with splintered fingers, he was still able to snap a grown man's neck. The thought shouldn't be as enticing as it is.)

Later that night, you sit on your knees between his broad thighs, and gingerly take his bruised hand into yours. The contrast is laughable—his palm alone swallows the entirety of yours up. A cantaloupe to a satsuma. The mental image makes a smile crack on the corner of your mouth, a little twitch.

He catches it. Always, always—

The hand that isn't several shades of indigo and burgundy lifts, settling on the curve of your jaw. Long, thick fingers splay out, stretching from the slope of your bone just below your ear, down to your chin. The entire expanse of your face cupped in his palm.

Simon is a big man. Massive.

(You sometimes forget that he's a direct descendant of Everest.)

Something inside of you gnarls, and tightens. There's always that thread of unease whenever he's juxtaposed to mortal men, to yourself; a lingering remnant, an atavistic fear for the beings that are bigger, broader than yourself. The primal instinct to run from the things that look like they could snap your bones into pieces with just their bare hands.

It's a small thing, considering, and always washed away by the surge of desire that pools in the space it once occupied.

He's big.

(You've always had a fondness for heights.)

"Does it hurt?"

If it does, he'll never admit to it; but you murmur the words, anyway—if only to feel the power in his hands when you move your jaw under his palm; the gentle resistance that meets you when you lower your chin, and hit the warmth of his skin.

"No," he says, and you fight back a smirk. "Are you finished yet?"

His question pulls your attention back to his swelling hand, skin already turning glossy from the tumescence of inflammation. Irritated. Pulpy. The knuckles are split in the valleys; a deep divot of plum red.

He has pretty hands, you think.

Peached-tinged ivory dusted in a fine layer of coarse, flaxen hair, and broken into streams of scars and welts in a mosaic on his rough skin. Thick veins in ballpoint blue run from his knuckles to his forearms; all intersecting rivers that cross and meld into a confluence near the bend of his elbow.

It's layered with fading charcoal ink pushed beneath his dermis.

The slide of his palm is rough with a patchwork of scars that cut through his life line. Jagged little marks from the sharp end of a knife. Pockmarks from cigarettes.

You like the way they feel on your skin. The weight behind them, the heat. The way they bend, and contort. Curling around the butt of a cigarette as he snipes game plans back and forth with Soap. Then the hilt of a rifle when he steadies it on concrete; playing God with gunmetal.

The way they curl into loose fists by his sides when he's displeased, tense and ready for the impending alternation.

How soft they are, then, when he slides the back of his hand against yours. Touches the small of your back, fingers curving around your waist when he pulls you close.

The way he sometimes holds your face between his palms.

You cover them up with the starchy gauze before lifting your chin to catch his gaze once again.

His eyes are stagnant seas.

You might think it's tranquillity that keeps the midnight blue surface from succumbing to the pull of the moon, and the tides; but that would be a fallacy. A death sentence.

There's nothing calm in those depths. Below the thin film sits an endless abyss torn up by currents that carry the same inescapable grasp as the churning hydrology of a waterfall. It'll snatch you the moment you plunge into the blue, ripped through the water until it suctions you into a crevasse.

But—

You hold his gaze as you lift your chin up, notching it higher until his hand slides down your jaw, palm now resting on the side of your neck.

—You've never been afraid of drowning.

"That's good," you murmur, tilting your head to the side until your neck is cupped in the palm of his hand. Algae blooms in those unfathomable depths when your pulse thuds against his thumb. "'Cause I was kinda thinking it would be nice to get your hands around my neck one of these days."

His hand twitches against your pulse.

The usual caustic, derisive barbs and brackish quips are bereft from his hidden lips. You might mistake him as unbothered. Uninterested. But you've always been good at scraping off the veneer people tend to wrap themselves in, burrowing under their dermis, and the flash in those murky eyes—widened slightly at your words until it's a pretty polynya: icy white around a puddle of midnight blue—gives him away.

His thumb slides down the column of your neck until it's pressed tight to the little jut of your jugular poking through thin, delicate skin. Ashen lashes flutter when you swallow against the soft press of his fingers; eyes flickering down, liquifying, as he takes in the way your muscles tense in his hand.

He could close the entirety of his palm around the convex curve of your throat, and—if he really wanted to—his thumb and middle finger might meet in the back, nestled just above your spine.

There's a heat simmering in your veins, stroked by the flex of his fingers as he mulls over what you're asking him for. The smooth, almost pensive way he brushes his thumb over your neck; an unconscious action, you think, with the way his lids dip, cresting over liquid black.

His silence doesn't last long. Whatever conclusions he draws in that brief lull are tucked away, hidden from view, when he shifts in the old wicker chair.

He leans forward a little—enough, you note, to hide the growing bulge in his slacks—and lifts his heavy gaze back to yours.

"That so, pet?"

It's rare you ever find Simon speechless, but you've known him long enough to know how to catch him off-guard.

You swallow when his fingers thread through the loose hair along the curve of your ear, scratching his short nails along the skin of your skull. His thumb presses against the spot below your eye, lower lashes spilling over the tip of his finger when you blink up at him, eyes lidded with the weight of your want. Despite the languid, almost kittenish, way you tilt your chin until it's plinthed into his warm palm, your eyes are razors. Sharpened on the whetstone of your conviction.

"Yes," you breathe. Your tongue runs across your bottom lip, as if chasing the words from lingering in the seam of your teeth. "That's so, Lt."

His fingers twitch at your words, eyes narrowing into those same contemplative slits as before. Then slowly, deliberately, he drags his hand down to rest once more over your jugular.

—sinker.

Your nails dig into the hard flesh of his bicep until the skin breaks: crescent moons pool beneath the tips of your fingers. Red, raw.

It makes him suck in a slow breath, the sound heavy in your ear.

"Keep that up," he rasps, a livewire pressing into your naked chest. "And I'll have to do somethin' about it, pet."

It's not an empty threat. You know Simon enough by now to know he never says anything he doesn't mean. But you still toss your head back, laughter slipping from your blood-red lips. High, you think, on the thrill of him.

"Yeah? Promises, promises, Lt—"

A flash in liquid black. Napalm embers.

One hand lifts, leaving the back of your knee. You know what's coming. Asked him for it, even, but it still takes you by surprise when his massive hand slips between your chin and neck, fingers curling until he has a perfect grip of your throat in his palm. Your head is forced back, pulse beats against his thumb; a frightened bird struggling in the grip of a predator.

He isn't squeezing—not yet—but the hold he has on you is firm.

You meet his stare, quivering in his arms.

"Lay back."

A slight pressure. You gasp. He feels the inhale under his hand, the thick swallow you take when he begins to push you down slowly. It makes him groan again when you lock up around his cock, tight and throbbing like the pulse under his fingers.

"That's it." He holds you against the pillow. You don't test his grip, but you know it's ironclad. You're shackled to the bed. At his mercy.

Tears burn your eyes. It's not fear, panic. The moisture leaking into the crease of your eyelids is involuntary. You want to tell him this, to let him know you want this, want his hand on your vulnerable neck.

You gasp quietly, the air barely slipping past the curl of his fingers—naked, warm, rough—on your skin.

"Simon—"

"Relax," his voice is liquid sin; velvet draped over a kindling fire. The crackle floods you until you're panting, breathless. "C'mon…you can take it."

Your fingers unfurl from his biceps, tips soothing along the irritated flesh, ghosting over scars—bullets, fire, knives, cigarettes: his flesh is a mosaic of history you're barred to ever uncover—but the way his muscles coil under the softness of your hands makes your chest lurch.

You trail them down until you reach the thick forearm bent over your sweat-slicked chest, nails catching on the throbbing veins until you hear the rasp of his breath under the mask.

Your palm is tiny, almost fragile, in comparison to his wrist. Wrapping your fingers around the thick of him is like holding onto the end of a bat. Your hands can only cup the width; a perfect crescent.

It's that—the immense power, the strength of him, buzzing under his storied skin that makes your belly burn with the fever of your want. He's so—

Massive.

Strong.

You can feel it, now. Fingers brush over the veins on the back of his hand, a seal around your throat, and you know that he's holding back. Has to. He could snap your neck with an ease that should terrify you. You've watched these same hands throw knives into men's throats. Watched them wrap around their necks, crushing the bones until the struggling ceased with a gut-wrenching snap, and they fell, limp, to the floor.

His eyes flutter when you swallow, when your small, delicate throat works under his clutch.

He has the capacity to ruin:

Simon—Ghost—can break your neck without a flinch.

And yet—

You meet his eyes, lips trembling, and then you slowly tip your head back.

Submission. You give yourself to him wholly.

(A toil—

come closer, pretty thing.)

Simon's breath stutters in his chest, his hand tenses. Eyes widened. The whites are stained with tendrils of red.

His next breath is a snarl that bludgeons into your core. He leans down, cock jarring something inside of you that has the cosmos burning into your retinas.

When he speaks, his words are raw. Scoured with sandpaper. It's almost animalistic when he growls your name, adds:

"So good for me, pet."

He matches the praise with a sharp jerk of his hips, sinking in deep until you can feel him throbbing in your sternum.

When you clench, spasming around him, his fingers flex.

It starts slow.

He readjusts his grip until you're a perfect fit in the palm of his hand. A little bird begging for respite in the claw of a hungry lion.

Ghost has never been a man of mercy.

(And you'd long learned to stop trying to barter with a hurricane.)

There is no rhythm to the way he fucks you. An interrogation expert, skilled in torture, he keeps you on the edge the whole time. Left to do nothing but cling to him, and take it. All of it. Whatever he wants to give you.

You suck in a breath, but it is stopped when his hand squeezes. Tighter, now. The air in your lungs is compressed, forced out until they're empty.

His pulse beats against your throat. His heat is an inferno, a fever; he presses into you until you're panting, head soporific and gummy under the intense blaze of his body. Hard, firm: there is no give when you notch your knees to his ribs, pressing your caps into his flesh. He's unmovable. Unshakeable.

Liquid pleasure spumes from that unfathomably deep place he batters into with his cock, and the tips of his fingers as he burrows both into your flesh.

It's too much—

His hand drops from your knee, resting on the pillow beside your head. It brings him closer—now, almost chest to chest—and smothers the air from your lungs completely. His eyes, however, steal the last wisp of your breath away.

Standing on the edge of a singularity, gazing into the event horizon. Black holes ready to swallow you whole.

Bereft of oxygen, you begin to crumble in his hold.

"That's it," he rasps, fingers tightening. "Fuck—you're so tight—gonna strangle me, pet—"

Your breath is clinched by the palm of his hand. Futile gasps, hiccups, spill from your lips as he shifts inside of you, bracing his knees on the bed, and driving forward until you see stars. Until you claw at his wrist, back arching like a bow.

The cosmos tastes of gunfire. Smoke. The heavy scent clogs your throat until you're choking on the embers that seep from his skin.

"I'm not done with you, pet." His timbre pitches, low and sultry; a rough graze. A scraped knee. "I could do this for days."

It makes you whimper. Makes you thrash. He means it, too. Always. Always. He'll hold you down until you're drowning in it.

Your head swims. Hypoxia bleeds into your eyes.

"Simon…" you whimper when his hips slot into yours. "Simon. I'm—"

The words are swallowed down when he ruts into you again, driven mad by the clutch of your body, and the vulnerable way you look at him. His head drops, moussed hair tickling your nose.

"Fuck, pet—," it's chiselled out of him. A warning, perhaps. Don't. Don't say any more. Don't—

His voice is polar when it drifts over you. The chill alone freezes the words in your throat.

"You like this, don't you?" Detached. Distant. He can't let himself feel the quiver in your voice, the ache in your throat. If he lets himself have this, even a meagre amount of it—

You don't think he'll be able to let go.

The words are tucked back into the pocket carved out in your ribs just for them. They'll sit until he's ready, until the storm in his Rorschach eyes dissipates—if, of course, it ever does. You'll wait for however long that might be, even if it lasts a lifetime.

(closer, now—)

Your fingers spray wide over his skin, soothing and gentle—calm pets over a ruffled plumage—until you feel the tension bleed from his coiled muscles; softening back into the pliancy you've come to expect from him.

He'll run if you're not careful. Flee. Disentangle himself from the weaved knots spooling between the fibrils of your bodies, atoms merging and moulding together in a joined entity. Severe himself even if it means losing limbs.

You think of old dogs, strays. The ones that weave through the villages with matted fur, and battle scars; the wizened, grizzled muzzles from a short lifetime on the run. Wild, feral. Touches that don't cause hurt are bewilderingly foreign—the idea of a hand that doesn't maim, doesn't break is as unfamiliar to them as living inside of a home.

The only way to gain their trust is patience. Perseverance.

And so, you pull back. Let him breathe.

"I love it, Simon."

The breathy utterance falling from your lips makes him twitch deep inside of you, a groan spilling out of the cage of his chest when he feels the vibrations of his given name against his naked palm.

"Fuckin' hell, pet—," you might call it a snarl, a growl; a mangled curse in your likeness dipped in the palpable ache of his pleasure.

He says nothing more. A man of little words and heavy actions, he shows you what he won't say, what he can't.

His cock hits something deep inside that makes you see white; a nebula of bliss pooling deep inside of you until you're spasming over the absurd thickness of him.

Ghost holds it for a moment, and it's that—the midnight hour pooling in black, covered in grease paint, and clothed under a thick balaclava—that, the subtle way he takes, takes, that makes you all too aware of who is fucking you right now.

You're not fucking Simon. It's Ghost. Deadly. Dangerous. His eyes gleam in the light; dark and empty. Black holes pulling you in.

He drags you to the edge until your eyes cross—hazy and unfocused, slipping into that blurred realm of semi-consciousness—and it's when you begin to slip down that precipice, head numbed and full of him, he pulls back.

His cock bludgeons into you, seated deep, and when the head kisses the deepest part of you, grinding sharp, and intense, his grip on your neck eases.

Air floods your lungs so quickly it hurts.

His name rushes out of you on the deep exhale, a wrecked, aching plea. It sounds like a hymn when you breathe it out, and the reverence of it makes him shudder. Makes his hand clench, and his cock throb.

You feel it all. The deep twitch inside of you. The spasm of his knuckles. The way the air clicks in his throat, catching in his larynx. A thick swallow. Another spasm. You take it all. Everything.

His hand lifts from your thigh, reaching down to snag both of your wrists in the wide expanse of his palm. He drags them up, arched high above your head on the pillow stained with your sweat. The brassbound grip of his hold, locking you tight in the cup of his hand when he presses them into the pillow steals the last vestiges of air from your lungs.

The hold on your neck eases. His long, thick fingers brush over the smooth column of your throat. You suck in a deep breath, letting it fill the vacancy of your lungs, and take the rich, dewy scent of him in until it clots to the fibrils inside.

Filled, you think, to the brim with him.

He smells of chemise, tonyon, and dried hawthorn. Wet chaparral after a wildfire scorched the thicket to cinder and ash.

With him perched above you, now drenched in the fullness of him—his smell, his touch, the way he sounds when he fits deep inside of you—you find the once unutterable words again.

They've been buoying up and down for months now, maybe even years. Always left to rot in their esophageal prison, but as your airways open up, as this moment of utter vulnerability and underlying trust brims inside of you, hotter than the bliss burning through your core, they slip out, tangled up in the way you breathe his name.

The orison rings with the palpable weight of your wants, oiled in the gossamer of your pleasure. It lingers in the scant space between you.

Simon shudders as it tickles against his skin. A featherlight whisper over naked flesh stained with the brine of sex.

You gaze up at him, burning the sight of him arched above you like the fruition of your yearning carved in flesh and bone, and a part of you selfishly hopes the barbed hooks of those words you're barred from saying sink into his pale flesh. Piercing deep enough to sink into his bloodstream.

Infectious. Incurable.

It's dark, and awful, and full of that ugly longing that makes your teeth ache to mark him up for the world to see, to know, that he's been conquered, claimed. Stupid. Silly. Infantile. You can't own a person, can't chain them to you through ichor and offerings, and yet—

Ghost groans when your teeth find purchase in the meat of his shoulder, a rough noise that rattles through your empty bones, and fills the barren space where humanity once beat.

—You spill his blood on the altar. A sacrificial offering. Yours to keep.

"Fuck," he rasps, the word sticking to the side of his raw throat. "Tryin'a give me a new scar, pet? Don't got enough already?"

Despite the weight of the words, they're uttered with a caveat that's almost indiscernible had you not the wherewithal to know him as intimately as you do. Equivalency bleeds in the vowels.

It comes as no great surprise, then, when he huffs in your ear, dips his chin, and then sinks his teeth into your pulse point, just above the place where his thumb rests.

(Matching offerings. A tangled web.)

The sharp sting condenses into a blistering pleasure: a damnable bliss. It's the victory of your acquisition, the satisfaction of your merger. Your release bludgeons into you—a mix of euphoria and pain—and the world around you wobbles, narrows. There's a pinpoint where only the hazy shadow of ashen hair fills your periphery. The dark silhouette of a man you itch to pry open and burrow inside.

A muted noise spills from the back of your throat. His name, maybe (Simon, Simon, Simon), but it's swallowed by his wet groan—blood-drenched and bitter.

Maybe it's the bitter tang of you on his tongue, or the dribble of red on the corners of your mouth, caught when he flickers his gaze up to your own, catching the smear of his blood staining your lips, but he shudders above you. Rumbling like an earthquake. The clash of plates grinding together. It splits you down the middle, and shakes the chill from your bones until you're a molten mess of liquified limbs: polymer bones, bubbling blood.

You melt into the mattress below with a hymn of his name—a blasphemous orison that has no place amongst the debauchery of sex-soaked sheets, and blood-stained teeth, but fits like a second skin when it brushes past your lips.

Simon follows. He says your name—a rough and gritty howl in the back of his throat—and then he's burying himself so deep inside of you that something breaks apart, gives, and the consuming hole, the vacuum he wrought, is filled with him. Him, him. A void. A cenote.

A gaping chasm of rot, need. Unquenchable.

"Fuck—" he snarls like a beast, the words crushing your ribcage, and leaking brimstone in your empty marrow. "Feels so fuckin' good, pet—"

There's something alluringly victorious about catching the biggest predator in the pen. A man made of death now bowing at the knees with just a flash of vulnerability; the slightest tilt of your delicate neck.

A string coils around your finger, pulling taut when you tug.

Bones ache when you move. Muscles scream when you swallow. Still, you lean forward, and syphon the heat from his skin, the blood from his veins.

Your spoils to keep, wrapped up prettily inside a diaphanous web.

Your nails rake across his flesh when you pull him close, curling around him in a spooled knot. When you grin, you feel the thick film of blood on your teeth. Vicious, victorious. "We match now, Simon."

He might run.

But you've always been good at running: a long-distance sprinter in perpetual motion.

(You'll catch up, no matter where he goes.)

And when he breathes your name through the wet fabric of his mask, trembling with his release, you know that some things are worth chasing after.

"You, uh… got anything to tell me?"

Gaz can't keep his eyes from straying to the moulted bruise on your neck—a startling smear of charcoal, flaxen, and indigo, broken in a perfect crescent of teeth—and each glance feels like a physical touch to your sensitive, inflamed skin.

It's childish. Immature.

(You wear it proudly, flaunting your win to the world.)

"Not really," you shrug, body buzzing with heat. It simmers in your veins now. Syphoned warmth that spools in your bloodstream, leaks from your marrow. "Just tamed a stray over the weekend. You know how it is."

There's a strange cut in melted brown. A look you're much too familiar with. One might mistake it as condemnation, scorn, but you know Gaz. The quirk of his lips gives him away.

"A stray, huh?" He intones contemplatively, timbre breezy, light, as he was mentioning the weather in Birmingham. Light drizzle, should clear up in the aft'. "Don't come aggin' to me when this backfires on you, yeah? Some never learn to stop biting."

Gaz pointedly looks out toward the table where Ghost and Price pour over another set of documents—shoulders drawn tight as they toss ideas and plans back and forth—before turning back to you.

"But I guess you know all about that already."

The barb in his tone—equal parts admonishing, and scathingly facetious—prickles against your skin. You offer a small smile, a languid shrug, and let your gaze drift, dragged back to Ghost.

His hands are wrapped in white, his mask pulled over his neck, hiding your mark from the world. Another scar on top of a storied history of others, but far kinder than anything else he'd ever received.

It prickles in your gums when you see him, and makes heat fill your chest when his eyes list to you, to Gaz, as if he can feel your stare, even when you're tucked away in a hidden crevasse, watching, waiting.

He won't come closer. Not when everyone else is around, but you catch the hunger in his gaze when you tilt your chin, exposing the soft, vulnerable curve of your neck, baring the bruise for him to see. It's rough, abrading. His eyes scrape over the varicoloured smear with a rapacious greediness that burrows under your skin.

"I'm learning," you murmur, words muted, heavy with something that tastes like triumph when it slips out. "Baby steps, right?"

Ghost turns away first, tearing his gaze from the bruise on your neck, muscles tensing as he ducks his head, and forces his attention back to Price.

In the corner of the room, a spider reaps the spoils of its fruit: a webbed sarcophagus around an exhausted fly that has long since given up on the struggle to get free.

It opens its maw, fangs glinting in the jaundiced light.

Vicious, victorious: it feasts.

(You drag your tongue over your warm lips, and feel the stirrings of hunger gnarl inside you once more.)

#simon ghost riley x reader #simon riley x reader #simon ghost riley #simon ghost riley x you #simon riley x you #i'll come back in the AM and edit it when my eyes aren't sick of reading about purgatory and spiders and prey #HAHHH dunno what this is #what mythological fable was used in the making of this #who knows #i got my hands on Yorgos' scripts and i've been Inspired #this is probs as close to my unedited nonsensical and barely english notes as we'll ever get but #kindaaaaa okay with how it turned out #i'm def not proud #but like #it's finally 18 and can GTFO y'know??#simon riley #cod simon riley

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