Burn Notice

by somethingintheblue

Summary:

Burn Notice. A nod to betrayal, covert ops, and being cut loose — scorched earth under your boots.

————

When you get captured by 141 after Graves grand betrayal — they recognize you. Soap has fought beside you. Price’s all but memorized your file before it was wiped clean. Gaz has heard all about you from Alex and Farrah.

But Ghost. Well. He looks at you like the dead has risen.

And maybe it has.

Because you were his. Once.

And now you wear the enemy’s brand.

OR.

The series where you and Ghost go from lovers to enemies to something worse.

Chapter 1: God doesn’t ask. He orders.

Summary:

Combat boots on tarmac. Silence in a warzone. Desert wind across the face of a traitor. Dead name, dead eyes.

There’s something that comes with being chosen that doesn’t quite taste like honour.

It tastes like iron. Rusted water. Like being held beneath the surface by the same hands that promise they’re here to save you — as if mercy can be offered through clenched fists. As if salvation ever sounded like orders barked through grit teeth.

There is no saving, not really. Not once you’ve crossed certain lines.

Leaving the official ranks — walking away from the neat, clipped salute of the United States Marine Corps — that’s one thing. UFL is another. But stepping into Shadow Company? That’s a different kind of surrender.

You don’t just forfeit an official, respected uniform. You give up your right to clarity. To conscience. To refusal.

Private ops. Off the books. No rules. No oversight. Just Graves at the helm — his smile always a just little too wide to trust, his fingers just a little too quick to curl around a trigger.

Following him meant learning how to run blind and call it purpose. It meant knowing there was a price.

Always, always a price.

—
You’ll never forget the day it happened.

The desert hadn’t even stilled yet. Jet fuel and smoke still clung to the wind. Red sand swirled in clouds around your boots, ankle deep, and the air — the fucking air was brittle with heat, with the sting of burnt oil and something copper beneath it — hot blood and scorched earth.

The DOD op was barely done. Debriefing still distant. You were standing in the open alongside three of your team, rifle slung loose over your shoulder — when Graves stalked up like he’d been waiting for you all along.

It wasn’t a conversation. It wasn’t even a choice.

It was a deal. A transaction. Your autonomy traded in for a folder shoved into your chest.

Transfer papers.

Your name wasn’t even fucking printed on them — just a blank line where it normally would have been, already signed at the bottom by someone else’s hand.

No argument to be had. Decided.

“You’ll do better with us,” Graves said. Words lined with gold foil. “I’ll keep you safe.”

There was a gleam in his eye. One you learned to read well and ignore even better, when necessary. But it’s still the smile that gets you. Metallic behind his grin. Coins for teeth. Promises sharpened like shrapnel.

“You’ll get used to not thinking so much. Got no need to go asking questions.”

You didn’t speak. Didn’t move.
There was nothing left to say.

He looked pleased anyway. Sounded it too. You could tell by the slippery hum of satisfaction beneath his words, in sync with the whir of the chopper behind him.

“I’ll see you soon.”

And then he turned and disappeared into the wind.

That’s how it started.

Not with permission.

Only orders.

———

Your name died the second you put on the mask.

Not a clean death. No flowers. No folded flags. Just Graves standing over you with a black balaclava in one hand and a new callsign on his tongue, smiling like he was orchestrating your rebirth. You’ll do better with us.

A baptism by fire. Something new. Something his. 

Wraith.

A thing with no face. No voice. No questions. He handed it to you like a weapon — not to protect, but to disappear behind. And disappear you did.

Shadow Company made sure of it.

No one could trace you back. Not to the Marines. Not to the UFL. Not to anyone or anything that ever looked like a life. The only thing that remained of you was muscle memory.

And the rifle.

—

A year passes. The oil rig mission was like any other. Loud. Hot. Fast.

You deployed at night, ropes burning through gloved hands, boots slamming steel grates slick with salt and blood.

You moved like you always had — like you were born for this. Like violence was something you wore well. Half of 141 was with you, already in the thick of it. You knew their names. Not from Graves, but from before. From long nights on joint bases and overlapping training grounds.

Soap and Ghost.

Neither of them knew who you were. Not behind the mask. Not with Graves’ reshaped callsign sat between your teeth and the Shadow Company uniform coating the scars. UFL feels like decades ago, now. Though torture does have a funny way of slowing time.  

You didn’t tell them. Didn’t speak unless spoken to. Orders.

That was the rule.

Shadow Company had taken the upper decks, and you were moving to the next when the comms crackled.

Just static, at first. Then Graves’ voice.

“Wraith. New orders.”

You froze, rifle halfway raised.

“You’re all to pull out. Meet near the convoy. We’re seizing Fuerzas Especiales HQ.”

You paused, eyes flicking to the others, but no one else reacted.

Your memory fails you in regard to what happens next. All you know is that you were all heading back to the checkpoint - Ghost and Soap in your sights. All was calm. That’s when you knew. 

“Give ‘em a chance to surrender, to walk away…” Graves again. Telling you how to betray the men unsuspecting. “…and if they don’t — you shoot.”

The silence in your ear after that was louder than any gunfire you’ve lived through.It didn’t sit right. His tone. Too casual. Like he was talking about a stray dog and not a unit of decorated operatives. You asked for clarification.

He didn’t give it.

And you didn’t know any better. But you knew Graves. Knew the curve of that smile, even when it was just a voice. Knew he’d already made his choice.

And you were part of it now.

——-

The cars parked just off the checkpoint. Desert wind still humming in the open air. You climbed out of the jeep, heart pacing hard beneath the Kevlar as you moved in. Covered flanks. Took positions. The men with you looked hungry. Greedy in a way that felt wrong. You offered Alejandro’s people a chance to back down. You gave the ultimatum like it was a formality. They didn’t take it.

So the shooting started.

You thought maybe — maybe this was some covert sanction. Some clandestine op that had to stay under the radar. Something Graves came up with on a whim. But it wasn’t — couldn’t have been — because you watched your own unit drag soldiers from hallways by their throats, watched them laugh as they looted offices, tore down flags, took hostages. Shadow Company rampaged Las Almas. There was nothing secret about this. They wanted it known. 

It felt like years before Graves’ voice came through again — sharper this time. More pointed.

“They’re running. Ghost and Soap. I want them dead.”

You didn’t speak. Couldn’t. Anything you wanted to say would’ve earned you a bullet too.

“You’ve seen their tactics. You know how they think. You’ll find them.” He paused. Just long enough to let it rot. “And you’ll kill them.”

You swallowed something dry and heavy — like gravel. Like regret. Graves handed you torn coordinates. A fragment of a map, burnt at the corners. Red ink smeared across the letters.

“I trust you, Wraith. Don’t make me regret it.”

He said it with a grin that didn’t reach his eyes. The kind of grin men wear when they’re holding a knife behind their back.

You didn’t ask why. But part of you already knew.

You left in the quiet hours before sunrise, boots crunching on sand, the sky gray like washed-out bruises. You didn’t get far before the killing began.

Las Almas burned.

Shadow Company flooded the streets. They dragged civilians from their homes. Tied hands with barbed zip ties. Executed anyone who so much as flinched wrong. You saw a boy get thrown to the ground for holding a phone.

And still — still — you believed you were doing the right thing.

You thought 141 had gone rogue. That Graves was cutting off a cancer. You didn’t know you were the infection he’d planted. You didn’t know he’d tossed you into the field like kindling, hoping you’d catch fire and draw them in.

You didn’t know it then — but you were already dead to him.

Just a match he struck and left burning.

Chapter 2: The Middle of Nowhere Has a Mouth.

Summary:

Graves sends you after 141 under the guise of a kill order. As his men take hostages in Las Almas, you’re hunted. Captured.

Notes:

content warnings: slight gun violence. depictions of blood, injury. 141 is pissed and mean (rightfully so)

 “Ki—fuck—Kilo.”

Your voice broke on rubble. Words tarred, dragged up from somewhere beneath where the dust had buried them. Each breath was a splinter. Smoke bleeding through collapsed vents, blood pooling hot between your legs with a mouth full of dirt and copper. You knew it then — when the world came down and left you breathing — that mercy was a fickle bitch, one who had just passed you by.

“K-Kil—Farah.” A cough. “Fuck—Echo 3-1, it’s Onyx, I’m—down—”

Static. Stone. The gnawing lilt of your own heartbeat.

You knew what it meant when nothing came calling after something like this. Knew it in the bones that hadn’t broken but wished they had. This wasn’t the honourable, immediate death of body. No, that’s too kind for alleged war criminals like you. This was the slow, ugly death of identity. Of faith. Of whatever thin humanitarian thread you had left to cling to.

That human part of you bled out quietly in the half light with only the cold as company and the rebar seated through your thigh. You blinked grit from your lashes and bit back death of physical form with barred, bloodied canines — because there was no one coming to save you.

Not UFL. Not Farah. Not Alex. 

You didn’t die in that collapse — but something did. Alongside the bodies belonging to teammates never found. And whatever rose from that grave was quieter. Harder. Cut from stone found on the devils doorstep after you’d  clawed your way out of it for days — chipped away rock slats with fractured nails, dug until your palms split and bled and scabbed. You came out different.

Gaunt. Hollow-eyed.

Empty. 

It was two weeks before you found the outpost. Desolate. Dust-filled. No extraction team. No rescue search. The UFL hadn’t abandoned you out of malice — they’d just pulled the fuck out of there when they had the chance. Because cross-border recon doesn’t come with the adequate funding for confirmed death counts. Most times it comes with closed files and goodbyes pled into video cameras at gunpoint.

You let them continue to think you were dead.

And when the DOD quietly opened their arms again, you walked in and said nothing. Just that you wanted a new start. Graves found you like that — bloodless, breath warm against a muzzle — hardly a few days later, first mission back. Stalked up with that goddamn smile. Paperwork already drafted, his leash already looped around your neck. 

Didn’t offer a choice so much as a collar — knowing you’d never protest. He was right.

The dead don’t get to switch their coffin.

————————

PRESENT DAY. 0803:

The desert feels different this far out.

Miles and miles of not-quite-sand, not-quite-soil — just pale grit tamped hard as fossil ash, sun-bleached and lifeless. You wonder if the land has spent years grinding its dead into dust and scattering them to the wind — because the silence here carries a pulse. A whisper. Like it’s trying to say something as it hisses through rusted rebar and coyote tracks. 

This is the kind of place bodies go to vanish. No marker. No grave. Picked clean before the sun rises again the next morning. 

Which, you suppose, is the point at a time like this.  

You’ve been following coordinates since before dawn. Ditching the jeep a few miles back when the path became more ghost trail than road. The map is tattered and sun-warped, but you made do — northeast of Las Almas, past where the satellite signal cuts. No outposts. No town. Just a rotting farmhouse with a collapsed roof and empty feed bins, the bones of some long-dead livestock drying in the heat.

After a while, it starts to feel less like a mission and more like a eulogy. 

Still, you clear the place. Room by room. Shadow by shadow. Breach every rusted door and check under every splintered beam. When it’s clear, you post up in the loft — rifle drawn to shoulder and elbow pinned to wood. 

You exhale the tension from your lats. There’s no one here. 

Maybe this was a misdirection? Maybe Graves made a mistake and handed you the wrong map, maybe you’d laugh about this later — radio in, get clarification, make a joke about the heat frying signal and brain cells alike. 

You almost do. You could have. 

But it’s already too late. 

The first shot misses — cracked wide left, a warning. The second doesn’t. 

The second shot sings through flesh and sets your nerves alight like a christmas tree. Your shoulder blooms red. Searing. It’s just a graze, but fuck does it sting like worse. You move without grace — tumbling off the post through hay and split wood, rifle still in hand, adrenaline rattling your vision and pain bleeding warmth down your ribs. 

You suck your teeth in vain and push on. Pain is a familiar friend you’ve learned to shove aside more than once in attempt to save your own life. They’re closing in — quick and practiced and clean — which narrows the suspicion down rather significantly.

This isn’t cartel. It isn’t some roving militia, either. That type of precision can only come from the decoration of seasoned operatives who’d long caught you on their tail.

You curse under your breath, press a palm to the wound, and bolt for the back ladder, moving fast. Fast enough to make it to the north side of the barn, where the dirt’s kicked up and soft enough to leave your weight behind. You duck under a broken beam, shoulder your rifle, and disappear into the side corridor — aiming not to run but to flank.

They think you’re cornered.

You let them.

Boots move soundlessly around the west wall. A blur in the dust, staying low, eyes sharp through the iron sights. You hear them now — voices, clearer.

“We’ve got movement.”

“Could be a decoy—watch your angles.”

Then another: “One’s bleeden’. Willnae’ get far.”

The voices are a match, and it makes your stomach knot. Though the additional confirmation was unneeded. You’ve seen enough of them to know how they move, heard how they strategize. The few times your paths crossed — 141 working with UFL, in the dust between missions — it was mostly under comms and callsigns, given your lower rank. Which, quite frankly, is the only thing bringing you even a marginal amount of peace at the moment.

They didn’t know your face then, aside from fleeting glances. There’s no way this could ever be traced back to you now. To them, you’re just another Shadow in a black vest and mask. Just another bullet in their backs.

Which is exactly how you’d want it to go, if it comes down to it. You don’t want to kill them — Christ, you don’t want it to come down to this — but it’s clear that, right now, it’s either them or you.

Regardless, you keep moving quick — trained muscle and fire-worn instinct — pushing through rusted wire fencing, making a sharp arc behind a tractor chassis. Dust kicks up in your wake but you’re a blur in it, nothing more than motion and blood and focus.

In your pause, you hear their voices again — clipped and quiet. Controlled chaos. “She’s runnen’. Cannae’ be far.”

Another: “You get eyes on a unit?”

“No. Jus’ the one.”

“Could be bait.”

A pause. Then:

“Aye. Could be a trap.”

Good. Let them sweat. They still don’t know you’re alone. You keep that card close.

In their trepidation you take the shot — low, fast, grazing the one you know as Gaz along his side left thigh. A warning of your own, just to make them hesitate before you disappear again — slipping back through broken livestock pens, breathing like a freight train as you fight the way your ribs feel like they’re caving in. A creak of metal draws your attention — chain dragging, somewhere west — and then you see him.

The skull.

That painted mask. Black on bone. Silent as ash. He steps through a rusted doorframe like he’s walked out of a grave. Tall, brick built shoulders, every inch of him drawn tight like a noose.

You don’t know him personally, but you know all too well what he’s capable of. Saw the proof of it in numbers.

Ghost.

And within seconds he’s already seen you — you know it by the way his rifle doesn’t tremble. He doesn’t flinch — doesn’t speak. Just watches, like he’s waiting for you to make the first move. You suck in a breath and then level your weapon at him — half from instinct, half from pride — and he doesn’t even blink.

You take a shot, and then you run.

Pain lances white-hot down your side but you shove through it, outpacing them just long enough to make it to the shed behind the barn — one with a sloped roof and rusted trough — slamming the door shut behind you and bracing it with a nearby barrel. Every breath feels heavier now. Shallower. Your head swims, but you stay upright.

You reload, and glance around. 

The shed is dim and full of rot. An old chicken coop turned storage. A grave with a roof. You press your back to the wall and raise your rifle again, finger on the trigger. Listening. You count the seconds in the dark. Each one loud in your ears.

The wind slithers through a crack in the tin siding. It whispers — stupid, stupid, stupid.

You know better than this.
You were trained better than this.

Never corner yourself without an exit route. Never box yourself in. The barn was too open — high ground, sure, but they have strength in numbers. There was too many vantage points. You needed something with cover. Shadows. Something tighter.

You figured the shed might buy you a minute, maybe two. Enough time to breathe. Enough time to think.

But now? Now it’s a coffin waiting for a nail.

You suck a breath. Your shoulder screams with every blink, blood drying sticky down your side. It’s an open gash — going to need stitches. You can feel them outside. Three of them, maybe four. Circling. Coordinating. One steps close, his boots soft over sand, weight calculated. You’d guess Ghost — the way the air stills around him. The way he doesn’t need to speak to be feared. 

A thud hits the door. Test pressure. Not full force.

A warning.

You tighten your grip on your rifle. You know your angles. If they breach straight through the door, you’ll have the drop on the first one in — but not the second. Never the second. You’ll eat a bullet to the chest before you even see who fired it.

You need to shift the odds. Change the rules.

You scan quick. Shelves. Tools. Oil cans. Rusted chains. Rope. A prybar — your hand ghosts toward it, but then everything stops. They go still again. You wonder if they’re waiting to see if you’ll just bleed out on your own.

Wouldn’t that be easier?

You shake the thought.

You’ve survived worse. A fucking weapons tunnel collapsed on you and you dug yourself out. You were buried alive and still came back breathing. You left your name and face in that rubble and didn’t look back. Became something else. Graves gave you Wraith, but the truth is — you were already a ghost long before he branded you with it.

Another sound.

Boots again. Then voices. Muffled.

“Ye’ see movement?”

“No. Quiet.”

Another pause. Then the door shudders again — harder this time. Metal screams. You shift your stance a half step to the left. Weight off your injured shoulder, rifle raised. You know how they breach. Know how you would breach. Flashbang first, hard and fast, one-two sweep. They’ll move like floodwater — force from all angles, leaving no inch unturned.

You count it down.

One breath.

Two.

Then—

Whump.

Not a flash, not yet — they’re smarter than that. Just a calculated bang at the wall behind you to make you flinch.

”Why donye’ jus’ save us all some precious fucken’ time, and come on out,” 

You don’t. You can’t.

Another hit — this time at the hinges. Metal wails, an old scream ripped from rust. They’re testing the structure. Calculating your reactions.

Then—

Crack.

The door buckles, swings wide, and they move in. Not one at a time — all three at once.

You clock them instantly.

Ghost in front, unmistakable in that death’s head mask. Soap flanks left — mouth gritted into a snarl, weapon drawn tight to shoulder. And Gaz comes in rear, suppressing fire control, scanning for hidden shooters. Cover man.

They’re not fucking around.

You react on instinct.

Your first shot hits the frame just as Soap rolls in — he ducks, curses, pivots. You fire again, grazing the metal near Ghost’s arm, enough to make him shift. That’s all you get. One heartbeat of disarray.

You use it.

You drop the rifle, shoulder screaming, and dive behind the shelving. Close quarters now. Less retaliation, more survival. You grab the prybar as you roll, swing it wide just as Gaz clears the doorway. It connects with Ghosts’ thigh. Not clean — not enough to down him — but enough to stagger him. Enough to piss him off. He groans and shoves a shelving unit out of his way. You catch the glint of his eyes behind the mask as he does.

No fear.

Shit. 

Then Soap is on you.

You throw the bar again, harder this time. It knocks his rifle sideways — gives you just enough space to kick him back into a wooden bench and sprint through the corner gap, barely dodging Gaz’s line of fire as you shove a shelf down onto the Scotsman, pinning his right leg at the ankle — hard enough to make him yell out. There’s no turning back as your feet hit dirt outside. You run wide — zigzag, disorientated, bleeding — adrenaline muting the pain.

Boots thunder behind you. Not reckless. Tactical. They don’t shoot, which makes everything clear to you now. They’re herding you — not killing you. 

You know if they wanted you dead, you’d already be six feet under.

This is something else.

You vault a low fence, clip your heel, stumble just enough to hit your knees. You rush to move, but before you can even push up, weight crashes into you — ironclad arms clamp around your torso, shoulder digging into your ribs as you’re slammed sideways — spun and crushed into the earth in a bloom of dust and copper and white-hot agony.

“Fuck.“ You fight it. Instinctual. “Get off—me—“

Fingernails claw for purchase, boot toes driving into dirt, teeth grit and barred as your lungs scream for breath — but the man on top of you doesn’t give. He’s a wall. Brick-and-mortar built, all shoulders and forearms and years of trench-born muscle. You try to wrench free — slip an elbow, get under his weight — but the arm he’s got around your neck doesn’t budge.

Tightens, even.

“Don’t fight it.” He barks — voice depth chewed by a decade of warzones. “You’re ours. You’re all fucken’ ours.” 

Price.

He checks your radio. Dead line.

“I’ve got er’.” Hissed into his own. “She’s alone. Dead comms.” 

Fuck.

He pins you in the dust, forearm to your spine, heavy as concrete. You twist, claw, elbow back, catch him in the ribs. Doesn’t even make him flinch. You shove harder — but your breath’s gone, and the world is ringing, and you know the moment your advantage dies.

It’s done.

The rest catch up. Soap drops in beside him, crimson coating his leg. Rips the sidearm from your thigh holster. Gaz flanks, rifle still trained. And for a second, the only sound is the wind and your heaving lungs.

Then—

“Jesus,” Soap mutters, shaking his head as you snarl against the hold. “She’s a wee fucken’ jackal, this one.”

“She’s bleedin’ like one too,” Gaz grits as he limps in — your earlier parting gift carving a welt in his thigh.

His expression is all teeth as he shoulders his weapon anyway. The barrel’s aimed square at your chest.

“Like you’re one to talk.” It slips out before you can stop it, teeth blood-slicked and curled into a grin that doesn’t quite reach your eyes. Half-spite, half-swear. “How’re those legs feeling, gentlemen?” 

Price jams his knee sharp into your spine, forearm locked across your shoulder blades like a steel beam. Dust chokes the air between you. The weight of him crushes your ribs every time you speak, but you talk anyway. Because if you can’t win, you sure as hell won’t go quiet.

Soap pets at your jaw with his gun, pulls out a switchblade and brings it to the gash on your shoulder.

“Better than ye goddamn arms goona’ feel after I fuck ye wound right open.” 

His blade bites against raw flesh — not deep, but enough to twist a breath from your lungs and leave it trembling in your throat. Your mouth clenches against the sting, jaw tight, the taste of copper hot on your tongue.

You swallow it.

“Do it,” you rasp, staring up at him, blood in your teeth. “See if I scream.”

Soap’s eyes flash — a crackle of something vicious behind the blue, fury dressed up like discipline. His grip shifts like he might drive it deeper, just to see, just to feel something after all of this, until—

“That’s enough.”

A command. Captain's orders.

Despite his obvious desire to slice you open, Soap pulls back, tight-lipped and muttering something low under his breath, something bitter. You don’t catch the words. Doesn’t matter. You’ve already won that round — or lost it, depending on which way you want to bleed.

Your eyes follow him as he stands — squinting through blood and dust, vision blurred by the sun’s hellfire cutting down from above. It sears everything golden, too bright to see their faces clearly. Just silhouettes and rifle barrels.

“Good pet, aren’t you?” You rasp, dry as bone. “You always sit when Daddy says?” 

Soap jerks, but Ghost moves before he can.

A click. The sound of a safety sliding off — and suddenly the muzzle of Ghost’s rifle dips toward your skull, like he’s waiting for one more word. You give him nothing. Just meet that hollow-eyed mask with a look narrowed and still.

No fear in it. No apology, either.

Price cinches plastic ties around your wrists, slicing into skin already slick with sweat and blood. You bite down on the groan it draws. You’ve screamed before — in tunnels, under rubble with rebar lodged through limbs — this doesn’t even come close to making that list.

Then you’re hauled up and flipped over. Dust kicks up in your face as you’re rolled onto your back — eyes squinting again against the blaze of desert sky, white-hot above the shadows towering over you. Price crouches beside you, pressing his knee to your ribs just hard enough to hurt. The barrel of his pistol settles against your temple, steady. Not shaking. He’s not angry in the way Soap is — not loud, not twitchy.

He’s angry like an old wound. Slow. Rotten. Deep.

“Why?” He doesn’t shout. “Why’d Graves do it?”

You stare up at him, breathing shallow against the weight on your chest. Say nothing.

“Why’d he betray us? Try to kill Ghost, Soap — take Las Almas?”

Still you say nothing.

“Why’d he send you?” The gun presses harder. “Just one little lone shadow, yeah? Was that the plan? You were going to take us all down? Burn the evidence?”

At your continued silence, he reaches for your mask. You jerk, but it’s too late. The desert air washes over sweat soaked skin, and the silence that follows is deafening. 

They just stare.

Price first — his brows furrow, jaw twitching. You can see the way he’s flipping through mental files, digging through past ops and intel decks. Trying to place the curve of your jaw, the eyes, the split in your lip.

When he remains silent, you suppose nothing sticks.

Soap leans in, squints. Shakes his head. “Who the fuck—?”

Gaz just frowns. Rifle still up. Still watching you like you might turn into a threat again if he blinks too slow.

All safe reactions, you’d think. Aside from one.

Ghost doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. But his hand tightens just slightly on the grip of his rifle. Subtle. Like if you hadn’t spent so long reading body language like scripture, you might have missed it. But there’s no mistaking it now. The way his throat bobs in a swallow. The gleam in his eyes as they dry out under the sweltering sun. He hasn’t blinked once. 

If you didn’t know any better — if you didn’t know it was seemingly impossible, you’d think he recognizes you from somewhere.

“Take a fucking picture.” You spit at him.

But he says nothing. Not a word.

It feels like years before Price leans back, slowly holsters his weapon. The suspicion doesn’t leave his face. Just settles deeper.

“She’s not just a grunt,” he mutters, mostly to himself. “Not with that look.”

He stands, nods once to the others.

“We’re done here. Drag her back. She’s got answers. We’ll get them out.”

Soap grabs you under the arm. Gaz takes the other. Ghost lingers a heartbeat longer, eyes locked as you’re hauled to your feet — maskless now, bleeding. Caught. 

Chapter 3: The Bones Remember.

Summary:

You’ve made peace with dying. Just not without a fight. And preferably not to soldiers who are only out for the blood of your badge because of a man who kept you in the dark just as much as he had them.

Notes:

taking the enemies trope to the furthest degree. you’ll have to excuse me, it’s the masochist in me😭

cw: blood, same injury from last chapter, many threats, soldiers being soldiers am i right (i have no idea)

There is a particular silence in a trunk.

Not absence of sound per se, but the compression of surrounding. Muffled senses. Like being swallowed.

They’ve been driving for a while now. Tires, soft against loose gravel. A military jeep by the way it kicks. Suspension stiff. No interior lining. You can taste rust in the air. Every dip in the road sends your gashed shoulder screaming against metal, every turn throws your knees into the ribbed interior — but you don’t move. You’ve long since learned that stillness is not always surrender.

It’s calculation.

The dark is whole. Blindfold tight. Arms twisted behind your back, wrists zip-tied too close to bone. 

Not their first rodeo. Not yours either.

Your head lolls to the side, breath steady through gritted teeth. Everything smells like blood and sweat and the aftershocks of fear.

The kind you were trained to ignore.

Navy SERE training. Survive. Escape. Resist. Evade.

They taught you in the dirt outside Pendleton. Sand in your throat, black bag over your head. Taught you how to wait out the pain. How to lie still when water filled your nose. How to dislocate your thumb with a single sharp twist if it meant slipping a binding.

You’ve been in trunks before. Survival isn’t theory to you. It’s blood-work. Bruised muscle memory.

Even Graves made sure of that.

You start with the forearms. Flex and swell. Pull the muscles tight like you’re prepping for a deadlift, then suddenly exhale — force the tension out, make the wrist narrow, get the plastic to slip on sweat slick flesh. You wince through your teeth at the scream in your shoulder. Work the angle of your thumb until it pops, chew blood from your lip to keep from crying out while pressing your hands together behind your back until one wrist slides under the other.

That’s the trick — wedge and rotate. Left wrist. Then right. Then both, until your skin is raw.

It takes minutes. The plastic doesn’t snap. It yields.

Then, you are free.

But you don’t move. Not yet. You breathe, slow and deep, lungs depraved. Feel the blood flow back into your fingers. You raise your hands timidly, test the joints. Wrist rotation intact, thumb dislocated — temporary pain. Numbness receding.

Good.

The blindfold is standard-issue. Cotton, tight at the temples, knotted hastily — they didn’t take time to double-wrap or tape it down. You inch one hand forward, fingers tracing the line of your cheek, finding the edge of fabric by feel alone.

Peel it. Barely. Just enough to bleed in light.

You blink. The setting sun leaks hot against damp lashes. Through the slivered view, you catch movement — fencing, low scrub, a shimmer of heat on rusted sheet metal. Desert terrain. Faded signage. No civilians. The kind of place men go to make others disappear.

You’re being moved. Transferred. Somewhere off-grid. You clock the turn they just made, the dip in elevation. An airstrip, maybe. Remote.

No convoy escort. No chatter on comms.

They think you’re docile. So much so that they still haven’t noticed you’ve unbound yourself. 

Idiots.

Your legs are cramping now. You shift, subtly, knees flexing, and that’s when it comes to you. Consciousness curling around a quiet memory.

The knife in your boot. They missed it.

You were counting on that.

Folded into the seam, sheathed in canvas — not a combat blade, nothing grand. Just a three-inch KA-BAR with a matte-black finish and a chipped handle. Your last fallback, the one Graves told you to keep even when training command said it was unnecessary.

“Always have a way out,” he said.

You wonder, rather pathetically, if he knows where you are. If you failed. If he ever meant for you to get this far. But those thoughts die as your fingers brush leather. Grip. Pull. Tuck it up your sleeve, along the bone of your forearm where it won’t show unless you want it to.

And you will want it to.

Because the engine is cutting now. You feel it before you hear it. The vehicle slows, the tires bow over a patch of gravel, then settle to a stop. Voices pass — muffled, low.

One of them slaps the side of the car twice.

They’re coming for you.

You lower yourself just before the latch groans, keeping up appearances until it pops open in full. Light floods in. Not the clean kind — no, this is dusk-bled and dust-choked, the dying rays of sun caught in the frame of Ghost’s silhouette as he lifts the trunk door with one gloved hand, the other already reaching to drag you out.

But you’re faster.

Your hand slams upward, blindfold half-peeled and eyes barely adjusted — but instinct is sharper than sight. One arm snakes around the back of his skull, the blade tucked in your sleeve sliding free in the same breath. You press it to the soft give of flesh just beneath his jaw — a whisper away from the carotid.

A breath and a half, maybe, from making a graveyard of this strip of land.

He stops.

“You touch me again,” your breath is a rasp, close enough to warm the edge of his mask. “And I’ll bleed you slow.”

He blinks down at you. A heartbeat. Maybe two. 

Then everything goes to hell.

“She’s armed.” Weapons rise — Soap’s first, too fast for his own good. “Fucken’ hell.” 

Gaz shouts something you don’t hear over the sound of your pulse. You surge up from the trunk, dragging Ghost with you, one arm across his neck, blade held steady. It’s a bad angle. You know it. So do they. But the message is clear — you’re not playing.

You’ve made peace with dying. Just not without a fight. And preferably not to soldiers who are only out for the blood of your badge because of a man who kept you in the dark just as much as he had them.

“Back off or I’ll slit him open before you even clear your safeties.” It’s directed at the two men in front of you with sites trained on the spot between your eyes. “You let me walk. And I’ll think about letting him breathe.” 

Price is the last to round the corner of the vehicle — and it’s his presence that turns the whole desert to glass.

He doesn’t speak at first. Just looks.

You’ve felt that stare before. Back in Jebel Ali, years ago before you’d even run your second op with UFL. You’d seen him make a grown man practically piss himself in a hangar with just that look.

It hasn’t lost its edge. Makes you remember you’re made of flesh and bone and very breakable parts.

“Drop the fucking knife,” he says. “You’ve got five seconds to choose a smarter hill to die on.”

“I’m choosing just fine. You, on the other hand,” you tighten your grip instead. ”Have five seconds to either let me go, or let him die.” 

Ghost doesn’t flinch, yet you feel the shift. The flex of tendon, the calculation in his breath. He’s waiting for a break in your stance. Counting on it. You’d do the same.

“She’s got it against the artery,” Soap makes an outstanding observation. “Real damn close.”

“Favouring her right side,” Gaz adds. “Shoulder’s fucked. She’s compensating.”

Price circles until you can see him full. He’s assessing angles, wind, your footwork, the set of your shoulders. You can feel it.

“You come near me,” you hiss, voice shaking from blood loss or fury or both, “and I take the mask off with the skin beneath it.”

“You’re in no position to bluff,” Price snaps, easing closer. “You think we haven’t dealt with your kind before? Shadow Company rat. You lied. It’s all you’re good for.”

He’s trying to provoke. You don’t take the bait.

”Oh I’m good for a lot more, Captain. Come any closer and you’ll find out.” 

Someone, you think Soap, laughs at that — the breathy kind that’s more growled exhalation. The kind that says he’d tear you apart, the second he got the chance.

“Think this through,” Prices’ cadence changes. The type of tone reserved for calm. For soldiers biting back death at their throats. “You’re injured. Surrounded. One wrong move and we’re scraping you off the pavement. Don’t let it come to that.” 

You smile. The edge of the blade sinks in, crimson pearling against black fabric.

Ghost doesn’t blink.

But Soap snarls. “Captain—“

”Easy.” Another step. “If she wanted any of us dead, she’d have done it in the truck.”

His boots grind gravel underfoot. Four paces now. Close enough to shoot. Close enough to hit point.

“I should put one in her other shoulder just to be sure,” Gaz grits.

“You wanna take chances?” You spit. “Bet his life on it.”

“You’re bleeding out, Wraith,” Ghost speaks, before anyone else can.

You freeze. The world tilts.

“That shoulder’s not gonna hold much longer. Knife’s tremblin’. I can feel it.”

Wraith. 

That single word lands deeper than any bullet ever could. Cuts through the heat, through the trembling pain in your shoulder, through the blur that’s been dragging itself like smoke across your vision. And for a moment, you don’t hear the boots drawing in, or the way Soap sucks in a breath through his teeth. You don’t see Gaz inching to your blind spot or feel the heat of Price’s eyes, still calculating the shot.

You’re somewhere else entirely. Back in the  silence of Fallujah when you still had half a conscious in your chest and your hands were clean enough to shake. Back when Graves gave you the name and mask with a serpentine smile.

“You’re a corpse now, sweetheart. A ghost, and you’ll stay that way with us. You vanish. You kill. You don’t ask questions.” He pet your cheek. Saccharine sweet. “Got it, Wraith?”

And hearing it now, on the lips of the man you hardly know — it’s the last thing you ever expected because you were trained to be invisible. Unmemorable. Your blade wavers — not because you’ve given up but because dread’s hand has just slammed hard across your spine.

The briefest tremor of something human cracking through the calcified shell of training and blood and lies. How the fuck does he know that name?

It was never meant to be known outside of the unit. That name was a burial marker. A smokescreen. A lie you agreed to because the truth — the person you used to be — had already been written off. Graves made sure of that. Shadow Company was never your team. It was your mausoleum.

The voice that leaves you is a whisper. “Who told you that name.”

”Y’thought we wouldn’t remember you?” He keeps going. Even as the rest of them blink. Watching as he leads you down a road they don’t recognize. He shakes his head, scruff scratching against a half bloodied blade. “Hard t’forget Graves’ lapdog. ‘Specially when you’re this well trained.” 

You slam him backward into the SUV, fury igniting through the bone-deep ache in your shoulder.

“Very few men have had me in their lap, Ghost. But plenty have died trying.” It’s more growl than words now, your knife pressing tighter under his chin, enough to paint the blade further. “Who told you that fucking name.” 

“Coulda’ fooled me.” Soap cuts in before he can answer. “I seem te remember y’barken every time he clicked his fucken’ tongue.” 

Bluffing. Following Ghost's lead, you’re sure of it. The irony isn’t lost on you. 

You spit a dry laugh. “Keep talkin’ boys. All I need is one twitch.” 

“Drop the fucking knife. Or so help me—“ 

You ignore him, cut him off. 

“What a pity,” you murmur, tilting your head against the white of Ghosts mask. “I never thought the infamous Ghost would go down this easy.” 

He exhales through his nose. “I’m letting you have this moment.”

“You won’t get another.” You smile.

“Neither will you.”

The words are a fuse, and you both hold the match. Ghost moves just a fraction faster — and you know it before you feel it. One thick, gloved hand latches onto your dislocated thumb just as he shifts his body and pulls — yanking your bad shoulder with it and forcing a scream so loud it chokes you. It takes all but three seconds, and suddenly the air is gone and the sky is spinning.

You hit the dirt hard. Metal skids — your knife thrown clear  —and Ghost’s boot pins your arm to the sand just as your lungs remember how to work. Soap and Gaz move in, and then—

“Stand down.”

Price is there. 

He doesn’t hesitate. Just grabs the front of your vest, pulls you off the ground and slams you back into the side of the jeep — head ringing against metal, stars swimming behind your eyes. You feel your knees buckle, but he keeps you pinned with one hand and reaches for cuffs with the other.

Your mouth tastes like copper. You spit to the side — more defiance than blood — and grin at the man holding you.

”Took you long enough to act, Captain. You’d think after the first time we tried to kill—“

Price cuts you off with a hand around your throat. Cuffs locked tight. “You say one more word and you’ll be unconscious the rest of the way.” 

The restriction of air supply is brief — just long enough to make your body lurch into stillness, eyes dragging upward to catch the narrowed fury in Price’s face, eclipsing the Atlantic of his eyes to midnight blue. Not rage. Not quite. Just the promise of violence from a man who never needs to yell.

“If it means getting away from you, I’ll take it.” You suck your teeth as cuffs bite when he shoves you forward. “You’re wasting your time with me.” 

It’s a weak retort, but you’re grasping at straws now, even as you move with your chin held high — blood soaking your entire half side, sticking fabric to muscle in the hot desert wind. It’s the pride in you that keeps you fighting, even when you’re unsure what it is you’re fighting for. These men are going to want answers that you know you don’t fucking have.

You’re starting to think that, at this point, them killing you would be best case scenario.

Price grips your arm and drags you along, the others close behind. You can’t shake the feeling that comes with Ghosts’ stare. That pointed look from a man you don’t know, but one which screams you used to. 

When you meet his eyes, he doesn’t blink. Just tips his head, the barest tilt. 

A warning.

“You’re getting real lucky. It’s entertaining at best.” Price grits in your ear, words fading out under the dull roar of rotor blades whirring somewhere beyond the hill. “But you’ll find your luck won’t last forever. It’s in your best interest that you give me a reason to keep you alive, or the next time Soap all but begs to split y’open — I won’t fucken’ stop him.” 

And there it is. The silent fury of a CO who knows he’s got the world in his hands. You would reply, but then you think better of it as the Helo comes into view. Blacked out, sleek and wolfish in the sun. You don’t recognize the man at the foot of the ramp — but you clock the accent when you’re shoved up to it. 

“Captain.” Deep Russian. Clean. “She bleeds on my seats, you clean it.” 

The hatch closes after everyone files in. You’re blindfolded and bound to the seat until you land.

Chapter 4: Your Closet Hosts a Graveyard.

Summary:

Everyone has secrets.

Notes:

a/n: this chapter and the next are huge. bare with me. the slow burn is killing me

Blood has dried down the inside of your arm.

Not enough to kill you — not yet — but enough to remind you that you’re dying all the same. The shoulder’s a mess of fire and ache, crusted black at the seam of your gear — every breath needling beneath the ribs. They didn’t patch it. Didn’t clean it. Didn’t care. Just cuffed your wrists behind a chair and kept you blindfolded. A body bag with a pulse.

No mercy for the merciless. No fault but your own.

The room is cold. There’s a dampness to the air that doesn’t belong to weather — not moisture, but breath. Someone else’s. Steel lungs humming low in the walls, exhaling heat and stale oxygen through vents high above. You can hear them now.

The air is breathing with you. 

They’ve kept the blindfold on too long for men supposedly desperate for answers, which means they’re trying to figure you out first. Get their stories straight. The fabric presses hollows into your eyes, and now the darkness isn’t just cotton but bloodless pressure blooming behind your sockets. Your head throbs from it — or maybe it’s from when Price bounced it off the side of the jeep.

Again, no fault but your own.

Time has unraveled. Your body knows only the pressure points: shoulder screaming, wrists raw and thumb dislocated, thighs aching from sitting too long. The rest is a slow leak — you’ve lost track of the hours, but you know that’s the point. Interrogations aren’t measured in minutes. They’re measured in silence. And silence has become your only companion.

That, and your thoughts.

Graves.

Soap.

The blade that missed Ghost’s throat by a breath.

The look on Rodolfo’s face when the HQ lights cut out.

The slow, rising sickness of not knowing why.

They haven’t spoken to you. Not since they dragged you in, clipped your wrists and told you to think real hard about what you had to say. Then they left. The hinges of the hangar door groaning shut behind them, leaving you with nothing but your heartbeat and the low hum of a screen powering on somewhere across the room.

It’s massive in here, that much you can tell. With vision stolen, your other senses rise to fill the void — reading the echo of the space like sonar. The way the footsteps scatter and dissolve. The way your breath doesn’t bounce back. The cavernous stillness. This isn’t a holding cell.

It’s a command center. A war room. A place made for conversations that never see the light of day. 

Maybe for executions, too.

You’re losing it, and you know that’s the point. Know it even better when the door sighs open. A quiet hiss of hydraulics. You don’t look up. Not yet. Just keep your head lowered until someone rounds behind you, loosens the knot of the blindfold, and tears it away — the world flooding around you in a blur, making the pounding in your skull multiply as you blink through it until blurred lines focus into walls of concrete and steel. The matte glow of monitors and a large screen behind them.

All that, and a man.  

One set of boots. Heavy. Tactical. Steel toes. Confident in their cadence — not rushed, not eager. The kind of stride that doesn’t need permission to enter a room. 

Captain. 

You lift your chin, just enough to meet the eyes of the man they call Price as he takes you in — unreadable, like he’s trying to decide if you’re a fucking threat or a tragedy. Not quite mercy and not quite menace. Just a long quiet calculus of who you are and how much of a problem you still might be. 

You swallow the dread in your throat.

His beard is greying, but his eyes aren’t. You blink once, slow, and he moves forward. Pulls a chair out from near the wall, turns it backwards and sits down facing you. Forearms braced along the backrest. 

“Wraith, huh.”

The name falls off his tongue like an insult. You eat it like one. You’ve bled for it. Killed under it. Let it replace everything else.

You don’t answer. Just stare at him — at the way the light from the monitors casts long shadows across his face, carving the years into fine lines at the corners of his mouth. You’ve heard many things about Captain Price, and so far they all hold true. A man who doesn’t shout unless he’s already decided it’s war.

You wonder if he’s decided yet.

He leans forward, just slightly. Not enough to seem threatening — that’s the thing with him. He doesn’t need to press the knife to your neck. He knows you’ll offer your throat willingly soon enough.

“You’ve been awful quiet,” he says, tone easy. Like it’s a conversation over beers and not a battlefield drawn between your heartbeat and his. “Long time to sit in silence with a wound like that.”

His eyes dip briefly to your shoulder. The one that nearly took a bullet. The fire’s gotten worse. Every breath fans it.

Still, you say nothing.

He studies you — hums after a moment. “You’re not here by accident. That much I know.”

From behind him, a scoff. Soap, you think.

“She’s here because ye didnae’ let me kill her.” He mutters, pacing along the side wall. “If it wasnae’ fer fate, Ghosts’ head would be on a slab right nae.” 

Price doesn’t look away from you. “You believe in fate. Don’t you?”

You lick your lips. Taste iron. Burned desert air. Regret.

A forced smile. “Everything happens for a reason, Cap.” 

“So tell me the reason for this.” Price says. “We’ve worked with Shadow Company a long time. There’s got to be a good goddamn reason why you all suddenly went rogue.”

You exhale slow through your teeth, trying to keep the tremble out of it.

“There wasn’t time,” you say.

“Bollocks,” Soap snaps from behind him.

But Price stays steady, eyes on yours — not angry, not accusatory, just watching. “No time for what?”

“For questions.”

It falls quiet. Pathetic in its weight. Thick with everything that lays beneath it. The hum of the bunker feels louder in the pause that follows — steel lungs in the walls exhaling recycled air through vents that whistle. Like wind in a collapsed tunnel. You exhale the past. There’s no point in hiding it now. You either give them something, or they give you nothing.

Indefinitely.

“I was told you two were running,” you continue, nodding vaguely toward Soap. “That it was Ghost and Soap on the move, hostile, armed. Kill on sight.”

“And you didn’t think that was odd. You just listened.” Price says. “Graves gives you a name and you just go huntin, yeah?”

The ache behind your eyes spikes. You blink once. Twice. The edges of the world blur. You think of that moment — boots in the dust, the flash of a torn map in your hands, Graves’ voice, the brush of his thumb over yours.

“I trust you, Wraith. Don’t make me regret it.”

You were still shaking from the ambush when he said it. Still not breathing right. The desert stung your eyes and your ribs had barely set from the last mission he’d sent you on, and he still looked at you like you were the only one who wouldn’t crack.

And you didn’t. Because you owed him.

You’d clawed your way out of a fucking tomb. Buried alive for two weeks without contact. Dirt packed in your teeth, nails bloodied and fingers broken from digging. When you surfaced, starving and half-mad — the world had moved on. The UFL abandoned the site. Declared you KIA. Left your name off the next manifest.

When you made it back, the Department of Defense accepted you for one reason and one reason only. Convenience. No one knew you were alive, the foundation was already laid for them. Were set to deploy you where they didn’t dare send the valuable. Black ops laid in redacted threads. Suicide missions buried beneath political fog. You were a ghost with a pulse.

You would have been dead, indefinitely this time, after two missions. By the time you realized you regretted the choice, it was already too late.

Until Graves found you.

Plucked you from that purgatory like your saviour — said you were too good to waste, said they didn’t know what to do with someone like you, but he did. Said he would keep you safe. And you believed him. Because he didn’t give you any other option.

When he cut a deal with DOD, erased you from every file that ever existed and said, “trust me.” You did. 

And now here you are.

“You think I had a choice?” You hiss. Your voice cracks a little. You don’t correct it. “I was given orders. My job was to follow them, not to ask questions.”

Price tilts his head. “Don’t play the victim.”

You lift your chin — that familiar bite returning, the last shard of spine you’ve got left.

“I’m not.”

He nods, slow. “Then who are you?”

Who are you. The question lands soft — softer than it should. That’s what brings the ache. It’s not asked with the venom of interrogation. It’s asked like he really wants to know. A hand reached out toward the pit you’ve been sinking in. Like maybe he sees it too — the absence.

The hollow shape you’ve been carved into.

You press your tongue to your molars. Swallow the heat rising up your throat. Your eyes fall to your thighs, to the dried blood crusted along the fabric, the bruises blooming purple beneath the dirt. You can’t answer.

Because there is no name for what you are now that doesn’t taste like rot. Like smoke. Like ash on a battlefield already lost.

Price leans back. Crosses his arms. “You’ve no fucking clue what you’re involved with, do you?”

You don’t respond. Don’t breathe. 

Then — the hiss of the door.

The rest of 141 swallow the silence as they enter, bringing the weight of what you’ve done with them. Your eyes flick over instinctually — and it all hits you tenfold. Gaz with a slight limp, blood on his thigh dressing and disappointment on his face. Ghost — your eyes freeze there — at the gauze taped beneath the line of his jaw, where mask edge meets skin. A wound you hardly remember giving because you were too busy fighting for a life that isn’t even yours. 

And maybe, the worst part isn’t even the injuries. It’s the fact they’re still standing. 

You didn’t even finish the job. 

After the hunting, the tracking, the firing and fighting — almost doesn’t quite cut it. You almost killed them. Without even knowing why. And now you have to give answers you don’t own as they stare at you like they almost pity you for it.

“She’s nae talken’.” Soap mutters towards them as they approach. “She’s stallen’.” 

A pause. Price exhales. Then—

“No. She’s breaking.” Ghost.

He walks to the terminal without another word. Fingers flying across keys. The monitor flickers, then hums to life with a reel of raw footage. Las Almas — but not the version they show the world. This is the cut you’re never supposed to see.

A city soaked in gunfire.

People screaming. Bodies dragged from homes. Mothers shielding children behind broken doors. Chaos without aim. Without mercy. The sky bruised by the smoke of your own artillery.

Something inside you caves. Your vision tunnels. A static hiss rushes behind your ears.

Ghost turns. Looks at you like he’s watching a memory. One that hurts. You can’t meet his gaze. “Ain’t you, Wraith?” 

The silence that stretches is bone breaking. All the blood from your face pooling somewhere on the floor beneath you. You see it now. Clearer than anything. The wrong side doesn’t feel like evil — it feels like confusion. Like silence after an order you were never allowed to question. Like a trigger pulled because someone said go.

Price leans in, hand gripping your jaw to grab your attention.

“You still wanna protect that bastard?” He spits. Your stomach is water. Your mouth is dust. “Or do you want to let us help you?”

You try to shake your head but his grips too firm. 

“You can’t fucking help me.” You hiss, cuffs biting into your skin when you move. You can feel the skin break. A perfect echo of the inside of your chest. “You can’t help me because I can’t help you. I don’t know anything. I do what he tells me to because we — we had an agreement. I—“

You stop. Bite it back. It’s a fault line and you feel it quaking. 

“An agreement,” Price repeats, like he’s heard this song before and hated the dance. “Was it professional?”

You blink. Your tongue catches on the edge of your teeth.

“What?” 

“The agreement.” He leans in closer, fingers tightening at the hinge of your jaw until the ache blooms raw. “Professional, or not quite?”

If you could move your head, you’d snarl at that. Spit at him, maybe. Instead, you laugh — low, bitter, and all bite.

“You better not be asking if I fucked my way up the ranks, Price,” you snap, words tearing your throat open. “Or God help you—”

“So it wasn’t sexual, then.”

Ghost’s voice again. Now from the dark corner he’s folded himself into. Quiet. Almost careful. Not an accusation but a question. Spoken like someone afraid of the answer.

Your eyes cut to him. Shaking. “Do I fucking know you?”

You want to break something. Maybe him. Maybe the part of yourself that doesn’t know why that fucking question tastes like déjà vu. The part that doesn’t understand why he looks at you like he remembers something you can’t — like he knows something you don’t. 

The thought is spiralling, but Price doesn’t let you chase it. 

He moves in a blur — the scrape of his boots, the sound of his chair clashing against the far wall. Then he’s in your face again, hand twisted in your collar, yanking you forward until your spine arches and your wrists burn as hot as his eyes.

Oceanic and dark and filled with the kind of fury that comes from betrayal without a name.

“These men think they recognize you from somewhere, so we tried to ID you.” He’s not yelling, but he’s seething. So close you can taste his breath more than feel it. “Ran your prints off that knife you damn near carved Ghost open with. You know what came back?” 

He’s not expecting an answer. You know he’s past that.

“Nothing.” Exactly. “Not a goddamn thing. You don’t fucking exist.”

You don’t dare to breathe — not even when he drops his eyes to your mouth. Looks you over good.

“There’s only one way that happens,” he continues, releasing you with a shove that rocks your frame against the restraints. He starts pacing now — slow, measured, teeth grit between every word. “You don’t just vanish off the fucking grid like that. Not unless someone up high—real high—scrubbed your file clean.”

His boots stop just beside you. His shadow swallows your lap whole.

“We’ve all seen it before. Soldiers who end up on the wrong side of the fight thanks to a little leverage. Couple skeletons in the closet. But you?” You’re holding his eyes. You don’t even realize it. “You’ve got a whole fucking graveyard in yours.” 

Ghost moves in your peripherals, Soap and Gaz straighten. 

“What is it.” Footsteps stop next to Price. You feel the heat behind the mask warm your skin in a way that feels familiar. Like summer sun and easy days. Youth. “What does Graves got on you?” 

Dampness kisses your lashes.

You want to answer. You want to scream it. That it started with transfer papers already signed. That he isolated you out in the field and handed you a contract at the perfect time, like it was salvation. But instead it was all subtext and silence. Orders. That he never said do this or die — but he never had to. He made it so there was no other way. You couldn’t go anywhere but where he told you. He made sure of it.

You want to say all of it, but the only thing that comes out is breath. Thin and shaking. And before you can attempt to lie or spit or break again—

The door hisses open a second time. It’s not like before.

No boots scraping. No slow, deliberate rhythm meant to rattle you. Just quick, clean steps. Like someone who belongs here. 

“Laswell,” Gaz says, and the whole room pivots. 

You’ve seen her before — back in UFL going over archived files, dusty briefings on old intel over comms. She walks like she already knows the ending. There’s steel behind her eyes, the kind that learns to read lies by their temperature.

And she stops dead when she sees you.

Not like the others did. Not like Price, clinical. Not like Soap or Gaz or Ghost, stunned by the sheer dissonance of what you are. No — Laswell stops like she’s seen something impossible. Like her past just sat up and bled in front of her.

Recognition is a fist. And hers just landed in the centre of your chest.

Whatever it is she remembers, it’s got teeth, and the whole room notices. You hold her stare. It costs you something — something low in your gut where you’ve kept the truth caged for too long. Your shoulder burns. Her eyes drop to it, just for a second. A flicker. Then back to your face.

She swallows, digesting whatever thought she’s clearly having. Then she looks at Price. “I’ve got Shepherd on.” 

The room snaps back to life — everyone shifting to make sure you’re out of frame of the camera. Price looks at you, then at Ghost, then back to Laswell, and nods.

“Put him through.” 

 

Chapter 5: It Speaks In Omission

Summary:

Better the devil you know, until he partners with the devil you don’t.

Notes:

ITS HAPPENING. EVERYONE STAY CALM ITS FINALLY HAPPENING.

(sorry for the wait. i rewrote this chapter 10 times because it’s so monumental for the story and SO much happens here oh my god im sorry)

Silence shifts — a soundless tide, swelling in the hollows of the room. Then static. The laptop hisses itself awake in jagged pixels and ghostlight until—

“Captain Price.”

You lift your chin. The ache behind your eyes pulses with the rhythm of sleepless nights and eroded conviction. You taste that voice like rust in your mouth — blood and dread, the bitter aftertaste of loyalty curdled in the sun. You’ve been swallowing it since Las Almas.

“General,” Price replies, even.

The screen fractures him — Shepherd — across a vein of static and moral disrepair. Mahogany desk gleaming off the badges he wears, eyes heavy-lidded with the exhaustion of a man who’s made peace with pulling triggers on guns he never has to hold. You see the death in his eyes through the fractures, feel it when he blinks—

Nothing good can come from a call like this. 

“I hear you’ve got one of Graves’ operatives in custody.”

Price nods once. Noncommittal. “We do.”

“Alive?”

Price nods a second time. A twitch pulls at the side of the General’s eye.

“She give her name?”

A pause. You find it in the stretch of the silence — the moment when a normal man would rush to fill it.

Price doesn’t.

“No.” He finally says. Nothing more.

Shepherd exhales — that signature sigh — the kind of quiet, patronizing sort that only men with too much power and too little conscience can perfect.

“She’s loyal. Can’t fault her for following orders.” He leans back, almost indulgent, and temples his fingers. “Graves runs a tight unit. You know how it is.”

Price doesn’t dignify that with a response.

You breathe through your nose. Force the air steady. Your teeth find the inside of your cheek and bite until iron pools on your tongue. There’s something so quietly brutal about Price. You’ve run with many soldiers. Many leaders. And it’s a certainty that almost all of them, in a moment like this, would have exploded halfway to hell by now.

After betrayal. After near-death. After almost losing the team he’d bleed for without hesitation — he still finds it in himself to hold the line.

It’s strategy.

He doesn’t tell Shepherd he ran your prints. Doesn’t mention that your file was a black hole — no history, no chain of command, no living proof you were ever born. Doesn’t ask why a Shadow Company operative sits here like a fucking ghost.

“You don’t just vanish off the fucking grid like that. Not unless someone up high—real high—scrubbed your file clean.”

He knows. He’s waiting. For Shepherd to get comfortable. For the noose to tighten itself.  

They exchange a few more words that you miss, hollow type talk. Questions Price already knows Shepherd won’t answer. Answers Shepherd already knows Price won’t believe. It’s a performance now. For Laswell, for the trace, for the gods they don’t pray to anymore. You almost tune it out completely until the feed shifts, and out of the corner of your eye you catch it — another face loading up on the screen.

Graves. 

“Well, well. Ain’t this a sweet little family reunion.”

That grin — crooked, cocky, teeth too white for the filth in his mouth — registers in your veins before the rest of him does as he leans into frame, sitting down at some desk in some dark room. He smiles as he settles, and the fucking air turns sour — your muscles clench, spine locks. Pavlovian. 

Soap’s reaction is immediate, animal. “What the fuck is he doen’ here?”

Graves laughs. The kind of laugh that makes you want to crawl out of your own skin. He loves this. There’s dust on his sleeves and sin under his nails and he wears them both like laurels.

“Makin’ your life easier, Johnny boy.” He drawls, tipping an invisible hat. “I’m doin’ my fuckin’ job. You should try it sometime.”

“My job’s killen’ the enemy.” Soap spits. “Guess what you are.”

“All right. Let’s take a breath.” Shepherd interrupts, smiling like a snake. Nothing inside the eyes, everything behind the teeth. “Clearly this is just a misunderstanding.”

Your jaw shifts until your teeth grind — a spasm of restraint reserved for stealth ops and interrogation chairs. A misunderstanding. You think of Las Almas. The burning rooftops. The civilians. The screaming. The fucking audacity. As if murder could be so conveniently labeled — as if the innocent lives stolen by Graves’ greed would politely excuse their own lawless executions.

It’s a lie rehearsed to sound like reason. And your Commander plays along with a grin.

They’ve practiced this.

“That’s right, fellas. Just a little misunderstanding.” He tilts his head — and there it is. That look. “Now where’s my girl?”

The blood stills in your body. Everyone looks at you like you’re something pathetic. They’ve never been more right. 

And before you can even open your mouth to beg him not to, Price is adjusting the camera. Turning it just enough to frame you — half-lit, half-delirious, cuffed back in the chair with your shoulder leaking and dignity bled dry. Graves drinks you in with a look that’s far too familiar — cataloguing your pain for future use. Like you’re still his and he’s made your worth a bloodsport.

“Well fuck me. You’re alive.” He rakes a hand through his hair, leaning back. “Wasn’t expectin’ that.”

You don’t blink. But inside — something caves in. His voice always had hands. They find your ribs again now, wrapping around old cracks. 

“You had to hurt her just to get her in that chair?” His tongue clicks, tutting like you’re some misbehaving mutt. “Damn, Captain. You could’ve just asked. She likes the rough play.”

That makes you look away. For a moment, you’re not here — you’re back in the briefing room, his hand ghosting the nape of your neck under the guise of camaraderie. The skin there burns even now.

Boots scuff, a hand slamming the table.

“This fuckin’—”

“Easy,” Price settles the room, though you can hear the fury bridled beneath his voice. “Looks like we found something of yours. Out in the desert.”

Graves tips his chin. “Yeah? What was it — a conscience?”

Your shoulder screams. You’ve seen this act before. Everything’s a fucking joke to him when he’s certain he’s above consequence.

“Fuckin’ us over is one thing. I almost get that.” Price‘s tone doesn’t change. “What I can’t figure out is why her. Alone. A mission fucking impossible.”

Graves looks at you then — really looks. You watch as the smug slides off his face, eaten away by something darker. Meaner. There’s calculation in his eyes now. 

“Wraith,” he says, soft. Too soft. The kind of softness he reserves for coercion. For putting something down. “You forget what I told you?”

You swallow the hate in your throat, but it claws its way back up in seconds. 

I trust you, Wraith. Don’t make me regret it.

You hear it for what it is, now — now that it plays in your head in tandem with the gleam in his eyes. It wasn’t a compliment. Wasn’t motivation, either. It was a fucking threat. 

“Fuck you.” You spit.

“C’mon now. Don’t tell me you ran into my boys and folded.” His voice takes on some syrupy condescension to drown the corpse-smile he’s always worn. “You had one task. One.”

“You sent her to kill my team,” Price doesn’t give you time to reply — no inflection, just fact. “Almost put a bullet in each of my men. Almost gutted Ghost by the throat. And why? She doesn’t know. Was just following orders.” His eyes narrow on Shepherd. “Sorry, General. Wouldn’t exactly call this a misunderstanding.”

Heat crawls down your spine. A fever of shame you can’t sweat out. The voice is Price’s, but the guilt is yours.

Graves scoffs. 

“Yeah, darlin’? That what you’re goin’ with?” He looks from you to Shepherd. Back again. “Poor little soldier. Didn’t know nothin’. Just a dog off leash.”

Something in The General’s face hardens.

“You know what hurts most, sweetheart?” Graves sucks his teeth. “Ain’t the bleedin’. Ain’t the way you’re sittin’ there spillin’ your guts to the enemy. It’s that you still have the gall to play innocent.”

Gaz shakes his head. Soap snarls. “Dogs learn from their owners.” 

Graves leans back, shrugs like this a conversation about the fucking weather. Ghost moves — rests his shoulder against the wall, arms crossed and fists clenched.  

You’re staring. 

“Look—full transparency, compadres. I didn’t mean no harm to 141.”

“You sent someone to kill us.” Gaz reminds him.

“Nah,” he says. “I sent someone to find you. Said if you didn’t come in peaceful, then put you down. Tell me that ain’t generous.”

You shut your eyes. He’s lying. Through his sin bleached teeth. You’ve heard him lie before — mission briefings, casualty counts, all the little half-truths he spit daily. But this isn’t just misdirection. This is theater. A one man show with blood-red curtains and your name carved into the fucking stage.

And yet — Price doesn’t twitch. Doesn’t speak. He’s letting Graves talk, letting him dig his own grave with that silver-plated mouth. Because he knows.

You all do.

Graves clicks his tongue, amused. “Truth is, I knew it’d go sideways. Y’all were never good at followin’ orders.” He gestures lazily toward you. “So I figured — hell, let her do it. If she pulls it off? Great. If not…” he shrugs. “Call it a lesson in natural selection.”

That’s—

Your mouth opens. Nothing comes out.

Ghost steps closer. “So you’re admittin’ y’used her.”

Graves doesn’t flinch. “I mean…yeah. If y’all’d done your fuckin’ jobs, she’d be six feet under by now and we’d all be movin’ on. Nice and clean. Balanced.”

Balanced. That word turns your fucking blood blue. He says it as if your life was ever part of some moral equation. Like your death would’ve evened the scales he imbalanced the moment you put on that uniform. He tried to kill you with a smile on his face and now he’s laughing in the fire you crawled your way out of.

The pathetic part of you wants to believe this is a mistake — that somewhere under the indifference, there is regret. But his eyes are dry. His mouth smiles easy. He never even mourned you.

“You were in on this,” Price says, turning on Shepherd. It’s not a question. “You knew. You signed off. That right, General?”

The room flatlines. Shepherd doesn’t answer. Doesn’t defend himself. Doesn’t so much as shift his fucking weight.

“Why?” Gaz almost hisses, leaning over the table to take weight off the leg you shot. His eyes flick to you. “Something about her we should know?” 

Still nothing. Not even a goddamn breath.

Price watches for a moment longer — then bares in teeth in something that hardly constitutes a smile. Shepherd’s silence said more than any words ever could.

He shifts to Graves again. Lethal. “You sent her to die so we wouldn’t come after you.”

“Well why the fuck not. You kill her, I call it even. You get your pound of flesh, I keep mine.” He rolls the words around like good whiskey, drinking in the fury building behind Price’s eyes. “Guess you boys went soft. Who woulda’ thought.”

The oxygen burns. You blink once. Twice. Your fingers twitch, phantom-pulling a trigger with a bullet big enough for both of them.

This wasn’t an order — this was a purge. The truth screams in the silence. In the eyes that look through you like you’re already dead. This wasn’t just Graves going rogue. You weren’t just bait. You were expendable inventory. The kind corruption likes best — off-books, no records, already presumed dead.

You used to think betrayal had a sound — gunfire, shouting, explosions. It’s worse. Quiet. Bureaucratic. It speaks in omission, in the way Shepherd doesn’t ask why Graves destroyed everything, doesn’t ask a single one of the million questions he should be asking as Graves admits to murder, to treason, to the systematic erasure of your life.

Soap’s eyes find yours. Not pity. Not anger. Something else — something listening as Price whispers to Ghost. It’s become obvious to everyone.

Graves and Shepherd are in bed together. And they just tried to bury you under the fucking mattress.

“Graves,” blood loss makes his name come out croaked, “I will fucking burn you for this.”

“That’s enough.” Shepherd finally finds his voice, all control, like a man calling time on a match he started. He looks at you, then Graves. “I’ve let you all bicker like goddamn schoolgirls long enough. Let’s not confuse personal feelings with professional oversight. Wraith will remain under my authority until further notice.”

The words snap into place with a mechanical click, the second your callsign leaves his mouth. 

It’s not new to his tongue. It’s preloaded. Remembered. 

Price scowls, raises a hand. “If you think—”

“Let it go, John.” The General glares. “This one’s above your clearance.”

And there it is. The cage. You see it lock around Price — around all of them. The reminder that no matter how much ground they’ve covered or blood they’ve bled, there’s still a line none of you can cross. A line Shepherd drew in democratic ink.

And now the way he won’t meet your eyes makes more sense than if he did.

“She’s not your problem to solve. She’s mine.” Shepherd exhales through his nose, looking back to Graves. Then, almost offhand: “And if she wants to keep breathing, she’ll remember that.”

The air goes dead, your soul along with it. Graves nods like he’s just confirmed a meeting time.

“We’ve wasted enough time here. There’s something bigger on the table,” he says. No warmth. Just utility. He doesn’t see a US operative bleeding in a chair. He sees a liability. A contingency. “You want answers. I want results. We all want something. The world’s burning and you’re all pissing on the edges. So here’s the mission: bury the grudges. Bury the questions. Do your jobs.”

The screen splits. A picture pops up. 

Makarov.

The scar. The eyes. The legend in the flesh.

“This man doesn’t care about your betrayals. He doesn’t care about mine. He’s moving weapons faster than we can trace them, and if we don’t neutralize him now, we’ll be digging cities out of radioactive ash.“ No one speaks. The General seems pleased with that. “You want your names cleared? You’ll work together. You’ll do as you’re told. You’ll keep your mouths shut. That’s the only way this ends with any of us walking out clean.”

Everyone stirs at that word. Clean. As if any of you could be considered anything remotely close to clean.

Price turns his back to the camera, shaking his head. 

“The enemy of your enemy is your goddamn coworker boys,” Shepherd finishes, eyes finally finding yours. “Get her patched up, Captain. She’s not here to make friends. She’s here to finish the goddamn job.”

Soap scoffs. Bitter. “This what ye call righteous?”

“This is what I call war. From this point forward, you’re all on the same leash. Bite each other, and I’ll put you down myself.” Shepherd’s voice holds no apology. “Intel’s with Laswell. Accept the mission by midnight.”

The screen cuts to black. He disconnects. Yet you still hear it. The finality.

You were never meant to come back from Las Almas. You weren’t just sent on an order, you were sent as proof.

Proof that there are people who can kill you without firing a shot. Proof that a ghost could be reborn in shadow, used, and quietly erased. Proof that Shepherd’s rumoured version of control isn’t a myth. It is practiced. Institutional. Burned into paper and buried under seal. And now — now that you’ve evaded death, again — they don’t know what to do with you except aim you at another fucking target and hope everyone’s too busy to ask questions.

Graves lets out a low whistle, admiring the scene before him like he’s painted it himself — Soap still vibrating with rage, Laswell’s jaw locked, Price stone-faced, Gaz pacing like the floor might fall from under him if he stands still too long, and Ghost somewhere in the corner, a negative space more than a man. 

His attention finally lands on you. Still cuffed. Still bleeding. Still very much alive, which, evidently, wasn’t the plan.

“Well. That went well.”

That smile — it hasn’t changed. It’s the same one he wore when he handed you your new callsign like it was a compliment. Shadow suits you, he’d said. I’ll keep you safe, he’d said. You believed it. Thought it meant security. You didn’t realize it meant disposable.

“You hear that boys?” He tuts. Too easy for a man who just admitted to proxy murder. “That wasn’t a warning. That was a fuckin’ funeral dirge.”

And something in you — something that survived every gunshot and buried scream — begins to turn. Not break. No, breaking would be kinder. This is worse. This is the part of you that knows.

Knows what corruption looks like. What it sounds like. What it wears when it walks into your life and calls itself salvation.

“Price,” you say. “Put the headset on me. Please.”

Ghost twitches — fingers itching like he wants to reach out, grab those words and shove them back into your mouth. But you don’t look at him. Don’t look at anyone.

You’re watching Graves. And you’re not blinking.

”I’d like a moment with my Commander. Alone.” 

Price watches you for a long beat. And when you finally glance at him, you see it. A man who doesn’t have all the pieces but desperately fucking wants to — a man who recognizes the storm in your eyes and knows this isn’t about revenge. It’s about answers. 

He breathes once, then nods. A soldier’s nod. One you recognize. The same one a man gives before he sends someone to do what he can’t. Then, Laswell moves, a silent agreement passing between them. The call will be recorded. Traced.

If Graves slips — even an inch — they’ll catch it.

“Well now,” he cooes, the moment the headset slips over your ears. “This is just like old times, ain’t it?”

Old times. Sure. The God smiling over you as you bleed out from wounds he inflicted.

“Graves.”

You don’t put softness in it, but still he purrs. That same smug cadence that came when he talked the guilt out of your eyes, the shake out of your hands — had you thanking him for the blood in your mouth.

“There she is.” He hums. “Say that again.”

“You sent me to die.”

He sighs like you’ve disappointed him by skipping the foreplay.

“I sent you to finish what you started.” 

You blink. Your jaw aches with the restraint it takes not to scream. 

“It’s just us. You can drop the act.” 

His breath leaves him in something that might’ve been a laugh, but falls short.

“Oh, come on now,” he tuts. “Don’t act like I never gave you anythin’. You knew what you were doin’. I remade you smart. Gave you instinct and a fuckin’ flag to bleed under.”

Your teeth sink into rage. “You gave me targets without reason. You had me kill for personal gain.” 

“I gave you a cause. You gave me results. Fair fuckin’ trade.” He pauses, sucks his teeth as he looks you over. “I know. I know you’ll love to hate me, darlin’. Shit, I’d scorch earth just to kill me too if I were you. But you aren’t seein’ this straight. I gave you a reason to keep breathin. I gave you purpose.”

“Purpose?” You choke. “You used me like a fucking coal mine canary.”

That makes him grin. You don’t have to see it to feel it. 

“And you sang, didn’t you?” He croons. “You always do.”

That one hits where it hurts. You think of the bodies. The quiet kills. The orders whispered instead of written. The silence he turned into weaponry.

“Jesus Christ,” you spit the blood from your chest. The cuffs bite your wrists raw as you lean forward. “What’d he offer you? And was it worth? Selling out everyone who ever fucking trusted you?”

He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t have to. You hear it anyway. The shape of the words he doesn’t say.

Money. Names. Blood.

“Don’t make it personal. This is war. Everyone’s got blood on their hands. Only difference is—I don’t lie to myself about where mine came from.” You blink, watch the dark spin slow in the depths of his eyes. “I got the fuckin’ order, Wraith. Coulda’ handled it myself. You wouldn’t have even seen me comin’. Woulda’ been over before those pretty lungs even filled to scream.”

Another pause. The static claws at your skull.

“But I figured you deserved a little more than that. So I played the angle. Knew there was a chance they’d hesitate. And that—” he leans in slightly, flashing the gleam in his teeth. “—that was the best I could offer you. A window.”

You stare. Through the screen. Through the haze. Through the year you spent convincing yourself he was the one person who never did wrong to you. There are a thousand things you could say, but only one makes it out—

“I trusted you.”

Graves tilts his head, eyes settling like dust.

“You did. And that’s the problem, ain’t it?”

The words don’t come after that. Just the churn of grief and rage and betrayal clawing through your ribs. You try to swallow it down.

”I’m going to kill you.” It tears out anyways, hoarse and blood-wet. “I fucking promise—“

He laughs, just like you knew he would.

“Can’t fuckin’ wait, darlin.” The camera shifts closer, his voice a hot hiss against your eardrums. “I know your merry lil’ task force is listenin’ in. So do yourself a favour—when the blood stops buzzin’ in your ears, when your pulse stops drownin’ out the fuckin’ truth—play this back. And listen close, cause I ain’t sayin’ it again.”

You see it, then — the snap. The way the smirk sloughs off his face and what’s left behind is the thing that made you flinch behind your teeth for months. The thing that made men disappear without blinking.

Graves — stripped of charm and cruelty’s costume, staring down the barrel of everything he thinks you owe him.

“Next time I see you, it won’t be a window I’m offerin’. It’ll be a goddamn grave. But you got options now, Wraith. That’s more than most. Hell, it’s more than you earned.” He spits. You feel the silence that follows. The stares that pulse. Price behind you. Gaz. Soap. Ghost. Laswell. “I’m a bettin’ man, remember? I bet on instincts. On history. On old wounds that don’t close.”

His eyes flick to the side. “I knew he’d recognize you if he got close enough. Knew it’d stall the trigger. Maybe give you time to think.”

The room goes still.

Graves tilts his head. The light in his irises fades to black. 

“Looks like it did, didn’t it?” 

Before you can even question that — he says it.

Your name.

Not your callsign. Not the ones you burned through in the desert or the tunnels or the blood-slicked backrooms of places no one remembers. Your real name. The one buried in a casket beside a family that cried over a folded flag. The one sealed into a classified file stamped KIA.

And Ghost — Ghost twitches.

Not much. Just a flicker. A breath caught on exit. A fracture beneath the mask.

But Graves sees it. Of course he does. You see it too.

“Oh,” he croons. “Now that’s a reaction. Been a while since you heard it, huh, Riley?”

Your brain lags. A second. Two. Then—

Riley.

You don’t breathe. Don’t blink. It splits your spine open from the inside. A noise catches in your throat — not a gasp, not a word, something closer to a wound. You don’t know where you are for a second. Don’t know who you are. Because that name — his name — was never meant to touch your ears again. You were sure of it.

“Riley?” You choke on your tongue. “Did you just say—“

The room folds in on itself. 

Gaz stiffens beside you. Soap doesn’t move. Price goes still, sharp eyes cutting sideways — but it all dissolves behind the roaring in your skull. You look at Ghost — and he is still. A shadow in boots and bulk.

Graves grins wider. The devil in him dances.

“Thought you buried her, huh,” he murmurs. “Guess you weren’t the only one.”

Click. The feed cuts.

 

Chapter 6: Even The Parts That Hurt.

Summary:

141 need answers. They ask you where it hurts so they know where to dig.

But the truth doesn't come out clean when it’s been buried this long. Not when the chain of command doubles as a noose.

Ghost sees it now. Where they broke you.

Even worse — where he let them.

Before the military. Before the mask. Before the wars turned everything to ash and smoke —

There was Simon.

He lived two doors down in that narrow brick terrace that always smelled of motor oil and toast halfway burnt. Manchester rain never quite washed the grime from the windows — but it did wonders for the lavender his mum planted in old dented paint cans scattered across the porch.  There was a cat, Millie, always asleep on the sill like she owned the house and everyone in it. His brother, Tommy, kept a radio in the garage turned up loud enough to rattle the dust off the rafters — Black Sabbath, mostly. Said it helped him think.

You never asked what about.

Simon was quieter. Didn’t need noise to hide behind. He was silence made lucid — sharp-eyed, soft-spoken, the kind of boy who saw too much and said too little. You always wondered if he’d been born with his jaw clenched, like he came into the world already bracing for the worst of it.

You were seventeen when he kissed you. Maybe younger, in the ways that mattered.

It was after a match, behind the pitch. The lights had all gone out and the city hushed like it, too, had run out of things to say. He wore that threadbare hoodie you used to steal when the air got cold. Smelled like cigarettes and pound store soap as he held you like he was afraid you’d disappear between breaths. 

You were shivering — maybe from the weather, maybe from the kind of wanting that didn’t have language yet — and he cupped your jaw like it was a promise.

You didn’t say I love you that night. But it was there. In the breath you held between kisses. In the ache neither of you had names for. In the scars marring the both of you that life caused young. He didn’t tell you about his father. Didn’t speak of the nightmares that woke him even when he pretended they didn’t. But you knew. You always knew.

Same way he knew you, too. 

Knew how your house wasn’t a home, just four walls full of closed doors and louder absence. Knew how your mother left, and your father never quite came back. Not all the way, anyway. Knew how sometimes, you cried in the dark and pretended you didn’t.

He saw it. All of it. Never made you explain it.

That was the thing about him, even then — Simon didn’t need the truth handed to him. He just read it in you. Waited and watched until it all made sense.

It was everything, those nights. Sacred in a way you didn’t have the words for back then. Hope, before you understood how cruel hope could be. You never asked him to stay. He just always did.

Until — school ended.

———————

Everything left in you, now, is shaking.

You feel it in the choke behind your sternum. In the throb of your wrists — raw and split beneath the cuffs. In the heartbeat pulse of your shoulder where the bullet skimmed too close to bone. In the hush that’s fallen over the room and the buzzing of static still screaming in your ears.

Riley.

The name detonates behind your eyes — again and again and again. Not a word — a tolling bell. A ghost story you stopped telling yourself. One you buried with a bottle and three dozen burned polaroids, only to find him here now.

Masked. Breathing. Alive. And looking at you like you’re the one who died.

Your vision blurs, but you don’t blink. You can’t afford to. The weight of his name is still pinning your spine to the floor. You can’t fucking think.

“Take them off,” you rasp, shaking the headset from your ears. “The cuffs—just—fuck. Take them off, please—I won’t do anything.”

It’s not a lie. You’re not fucking around. There’s nothing left in you to fight with.

You’d bleed out right here on the floor if it meant someone would just see you — not as a threat, not as a soldier, but as the woman who crawled out of a grave just to land head first into another.

Soap is halfway to Ghost when he speaks again.

“How do ye know her?” His voice is quiet for an accent that thick. “Why’d the fucken’ snake say tha’?”

You can’t look at him yet. Not directly. Not without falling apart in a way none of them would understand.

So you hold your eyes on the wall. On the floor. On anything but Simon. Because the second you meet his gaze, you know the years will break open like a fucking landslide.

And you’re not sure what you’ll say when they do.

Gaz crouches beside you — careful not to step in the blood pooling near your boot — and lifts the headset off the concrete.

“She’s not bluffin’,” he mutters, eyes tracking the sweat slicked along your jaw. “Look at her. She’s bleedin’ out in front of us.”

You spit out something dry, and then — crack.

Price’s palm slams the table so hard it startles the metal and your nerves along with it — shoulders hunched and eyes closed as his breath comes hard, ribs hitching beneath his tac vest as he works to wrestle that feral part of himself back into its cage. He’s losing it.

You doubt he’s the type to lose often.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, straightening. Then slowly — slowly — he turns to Ghost. “What the hell was that?”

The silence that follows is not empty. It’s dense. You can feel it expanding between them, molting from confusion into suspicion and then into fury. The kind of fury that turns into reckoning.

Ghost doesn’t move. But something in the way he stands makes it worse. Rigid. Like if he even breathes wrong, the truth might rip its way out of his throat and tear the room apart. Price’s boots scrape the concrete. One step. Then another. Heavy. Intentional.

He stops just shy of Ghost’s chest — close enough to breathe in his exhale.

“How long,” Price asks, quiet now. “How fuckin’ long, Lieutenant.”

Ghost swallows. His voice doesn’t shake, but it dips. “Not long enough t’change the outcome.”

Price forces out a breath like it cost him something — pushing that storm back into a bottle.

He turns his head to Laswell. “Kate.” 

“It’s wiped,” she answers. Her eyes flick to you, and they soften in a way that doesn’t match the blood or the cuffs. “Scrubbed from every official system I could breach. This has Shepherd’s fingerprints all over it.”

Soap scowls. “Wha’ does any of this mean?”

You try to sit straighter, but the pain’s a rising tide and you’re already waist-deep. Something black and festering is climbing up your throat — thick with grief, betrayal, and the stench of all the versions of yourself you were forced to bury to make it this far.

It’s the knowing.

That this is it. This is the end of the line. Whatever version of yourself survived up until now — she’s bleeding out in real time, cracking open in a bunker full of men who think you’re something worse than the enemy.

Alongside Simon. The dead man walking.

“The fuck is goen’ on,” Soap says again, louder this time. Looking between you and him like he’s watching a building collapse in slow motion. Not angry. Uneasy. “LT—”

Ghost shifts — barely. A slight tilt of the head. Enough for Soap to step back like he’s been slapped. You’re blinking slow now, breaths shallow and sticky — each inhale sanding the inside of your ribs raw.

“It means I’m a walking liability.” Your head tips back against the steel chair. The ceiling above you blooms outward in water-stained bruises, jaundiced light pulsing from a tired bulb that hums like a dying insect. Your vision tilts. The cuffs bite deeper when you breathe. “Whatever you think you know about me was written by the men who’re trying to kill me.” 

It’s all flooding before your eyes — not in images, but a raw 3D rendering of suppressed memory. You try to push it all back but the dark doesn’t dissipate. Every breath that got you here. Not just what you did, but what you became. Everything you were. Everything you were told to be.

None of this makes sense — but guilt doesn’t need logic to live in your bones.

It’s six months ago. Rooftop in Balochistan. Sun bleeding over rusted corrugated steel, Graves lighting a cigar with the same hand he used to pass you the coordinates.

“I got a job for you,” he said.

“Graves, I’m not—”

“You are now.”

His breath was bourbon and blood and you should’ve known then. Should’ve run. But you didn’t.

Or there’s before that — your first op under Shadow’s badge, muzzle pressed to some hostage’s head while Graves watched from the truck. Devil at the wheel wearing those mirrored sunglasses he never took off. Always had you staring at yourself. His crafted reflection. 

“Follow orders, keep your head down, don’t ask questions.”

And you did. You learned silence. You bled your morality into the dirt and let the mask do the rest.

And now? Now the shaking won’t stop.

“Shit.” Laswell murmurs, dragging you from your thoughts. “I found it.” 

Her fingers are trembling.

Not visibly, not enough for the untrained eye to catch — but you see it. The quake as her thumb hesitates over the trackpad. A half-second stutter before she clicks — leans closer to the screen — then clicks again. And again.

Her brows furrow, mouth tightening in that precise, practiced way that tells you the dots are connecting. You know exactly what she’s looking at. 

“Joint UFL operation. Classified under Tier-One discretionary black. Never saw the light of day.” Her fingers move faster now. “Southern corridor breach outside Veracruz. Intel was scrubbed halfway through the mission, her name mentioned once, then redacted. That alone should’ve set off red flags.”

You lift your head slightly. Laswell exhales like she’s fighting her own stomach. 

“About a year ago command greenlit a silent entry for weapons recovery. Mid-exfil—full structural collapse. No survivors reported. Listed all twelve operatives as KIA within twenty-four hours and pulled everyone still alive out before the sun rose. No rescue attempt. No satellite recon.”

”Why the hell not?” Gaz inspects the screen.

“Cross-border violation. They wiped the whole thing. No follow-up. Just—” she flips the tablet toward Price. “A retreat order.”

Her eyes flick to you, but she doesn’t look at your face. She’s looking at the blood on your boots. The split on your shoulder. The way you haven’t stopped shaking since Graves said Riley.

Price’s jaw locks — his throat moves once, slowly. “Whose signature’s on that?”

“Shepherd’s. And Graves countersigned it six months later to lock the file.”

Price mutters something under his breath. The kind of word that doesn’t belong in sunlight. 

Gaz lifts his head. “Why would Graves need to—?”

Laswell cuts him off. “To bury it. Entirely.”

Something inside you lurches. You want to flinch, to look away, to crawl straight back into the earth they sealed you in — but you don’t move. You hold it. Barely.

“Fucken’ shite. UFL.” Soap mutters, scrubbing a hand down his face like he wants to wipe the whole situation off with it. “That’s why ye look familiar. We ran together. I knew your eyes, I just—” he trails off, the words choking. “Christ. I’d no idea.”

Your gaze slides to him, but there’s no strength left for diplomacy. Your limbs are lead. You can’t even nod. 

“You knew,” Laswell turns to Ghost. 

He doesn’t respond. Not when the silence begins to gnaw — not even when Price shifts forward like he’s about to explode.

“You should’ve said something,” the Captain growls. “The very fuckin’ minute you realized who she was. She never should’ve been on camera.”

”She was dead.” He finally spits. You taste the grief in it. See the ache in it. “This story ain’t mine t’fuckin’ tell.” 

“So why now?” Gaz doesn’t let that statement find an answer. “Why bring her back into the field at all? Why didn’t Graves kill her, if that’s what Shepherd wanted?”

No one knows.

“He could have killed me. Easily. And yet.” That worms a smile across your face. It isn’t kind. “Graves always was a fucking coward.”

Price starts pacing. You don’t follow him.

“So what were ye’ te him?” Soap steps in — closes the distance until he’s towering over you, staring down. “A merc? A plant? …Somethin’ worse?”

Worse. That word laughs at you. 

“What do you think, Johnny?” You meet his eyes. Blue like Easter mornings and borrowed springs. “I’m dead on paper. You think I was working HR?”

Gaz rips off his hat, runs a hand through his hair. “You should have said something to us. You let him turn you into a fuckin’ reaper.”

“What choices are the dead owed?” The words rip through your teeth. “I’m poisoned from the top down. Shadow doesn’t ask for loyalty. It erases the alternative. You follow orders. Say no, you vanish. You hesitate, someone else does it for you.”

Laswell straightens beside the console. “That tracks.”

Soap scowls. “How?”

She doesn’t look away from the screen. “I knew Shepherd had off-the-books teams. Black files. Untraceable. Wiped when convenient.” Her voice hardens. “But I didn’t know they were conscripting.”

“Wait—” Gaz tilts his head, eyes narrowing at you. “After Veracruz. How the hell did y’end up with Shadow?”

The question doesn’t hit your ears — it sinks straight to your chest. Roots there. Buries itself alongside all the things you tried not to remember. For a moment, it’s not steel and screens — it’s dirt in your lungs and a sky of concrete rain. You blink and you’re back there. Hands raw to bone. 

You breathe like you’re tasting blood again.

“You ever been buried alive?” The words crack. There’s no hiding behind them. You don’t need him to speak to know the answer. “I—I wasn’t thinking straight. Two weeks without food and clean fucking air will do that to a person.” 

Soap blinks. “So ye called Graves?” 

That hits you like the taste of lemon.

“Fuck no—I’d have sooner died than call him—or any goddamn PMC.” 

Another blink. ”Then what?” 

“I made it out of the tunnel, made it to the abandoned outpost. No comms but the phone still worked, so I called someone I knew at the DOD. He sent a few guys to get me—they took one look at me and called it a fuckin’ miracle.” You swallow. It hurts. “I was pissed. At UFL. At the world. Didn’t know then that there were bigger things in motion than just a shitty op gone wrong.” 

You glimpse the room. Not much pity, a hell of a lot more intrigue. 

“I let UFL continue to think I was dead. Thought I could just start over—new assignment, new unit—but some Deputy under Defense Intelligence took one look at my file and made a call. No next of kin, no attachments, no family—said I was perfect for black ops. Was all they could offer me.” You swallow. It hurts. “Two missions, maybe three. That’s all I was meant to last. Graves found me during my first one out.” 

Tension slicks through the silence. Laswells’ lips purse before she nods. 

“Graves didn’t rescue her. He intercepted another black team. Probably made a deal.”

You can’t help it. You laugh — it’s tattered, broken.

“He bought out what was left of me.” Your breath fogs in your throat. “Handed me transfer papers already signed. Told me it was safety. I was too tired to ask what it would cost.”

You don’t realize your head has turned until you see him — Ghost. Shoulders squared. Jaw locked like the truth is a thing he’s holding in his teeth. He’s looks at you like he remembers everything, now. The details. The voice under the mask. The footwork. The twitch of a trigger finger that used to tap his wrist under cafeteria tables. The depth in eyes that pulled him under years before either of you had learned how to swim while drowning.

“She ain’t at fault.”

Price stops mid-step. A full halt.

“No?” He barks. “Then what is she, Ghost? Because everyone seems to want her fuckin’ dead—and that doesn’t happen by accident.”

Ghost hesitates. It fractures a little more of your sanity.

“I didn’t have a choice.” You say it to him. Like he’s the only one who sees you. “They scrubbed my fucking existence. Took whatever I had left, gave it a mask and a callsign and called it mercy.” 

“Wraith.”

Laswell says it like she’s reading it off a headstone. You almost wish she was.

“Wasn’t far off.” The admittance stings. So does everything else. You drag your eyes to Ghost again. Takes all your energy to keep them there. “I was dead to everyone else.”

He offers no reaction but there’s tension in his shoulders. In the curl of his fingers around his biceps like he’s trying to hold something back.

Something like memory, you think. Because you can feel it too.

Manchester streets in the rain. The cracked alley wall where he’d press his back, offering the last of his sandwich because you hadn’t eaten that day. Your fathers arguing over drugs in your backyard. Your mother’s silence echoing down a hallway she never returned to.

His bruises, your split lip. Two shadows in a world that never made space for soft things.

”Sim—Ghost.” It scares you that his name is still second nature. You take a breath, feel the broken shards of your heart in your lungs after correcting yourself. “You think I would’ve pulled that trigger, if I knew who the fuck you were?”

Soap looks like he wants to interject but swallows it down. Ghost doesn’t reply. The aftermath pecks at your neck, the bird of a paradise you can only hope for. 

You meet his eyes. In them is a hundred different lifetimes between yours. 

“You said I was dead—but what about you?” You choke, remembering the stone-cold earth in Manchester. The funeral with three caskets and one flag. “There was no body to bury, but I cried over an unmarked grave all the same.”

Silence spills the truth across the floor and they all stand knee deep in it as it fucking drowns you. The waves crash against the walls — you see the way it ripples over them, soaking them cold in knowing. 

Even Price — immovable, steel-eyed Price — exhales like there’s water in his lungs.

“Christ. Alright. Let’s all take a breath.” He turns to Laswell. The depth of his stare could bruise bone. “What do we do with her?”

“Well. She’s Shepherds currently. Which means she’s supposed to be in. Quietly.” She glances at the door. Her jaw ticks. “But I already made contact. Keller’s on route.”

Ghost turns. “You’re bringin’ Keller in?”

“He was in Veracruz. If anyone can confirm—”

“She’s not lyin’.” He cuts her off without looking at her. His eyes are back on you. “She doesn’t need t’prove anythin to Keller.”

Price steps in. “How do you know?”

“I know her.” Ghost says.

You inhale, again. And for the first time in days, despite the pain, it doesn’t feel like breathing through a closed fist. That’s the first time he’s said it. Out loud. Like he’s admitting you’re not a trick of the light or a nightmare that won’t end.

Laswell looks at you, then. It’s hard, but not without sympathy.

“He’ll be here within the hour. You’ve got until then to figure out whatever plot holes we have.”

Ghost comes closer to you — eyes on the blood at your shoulder, the steel still biting your arms back. He crouches in-front of you, elbows on his knees, and suddenly you forget what your lungs are for. 

“Tell em’ everythin,” he says, low. “Even the parts that hurt.”

You look at him good. See the white skull of his balaclava and the dark death of youth in his eyes. Your hands twitch like they long to touch him.

As if you’d even have that right anymore.

“They all hurt.” You whisper.

He nods once. “I know.” 

There’s a pause that you get lost in, until there isn’t.

“Right. I want everyone out.” Price says. His eyes drag to Ghost. “Except you.”

Hesitation stalls the room, for the millionth time in the last hour. Ghost stands, and takes a few steps back. 

The others don’t move.

“Now.” Price adds. “Debrief on Shepherds intel once Keller gets in. Give us some time here.” 

Soap opens his mouth, one foot half-turned like he wants to say something — but Ghost cuts him a glance. Not here. It ends with a nod before he follows Gaz out into the corridor. 

“Hell of a reunion.” You hear him say.

“Bloody understatement.”

Laswell’s the last to go.

”For what it’s worth, Ghost. I believe her too.” She says as she closes her laptop. “Just covering our bases. She’s good at what she does.” 

He nods, and she crosses the room. No fanfare, just footsteps, until the door hisses shut behind her. Price exhales, slow and tired, then shifts a half-step back, only to rake his eyes across both of you — gutting ghosts with a glance.

“How deep does this go?”

Silence. It drips from the ceiling. Pools in the corners. You tilt your head back against the chair again — breathe once. Twice more. Until you can swallow the grief back into your ribs and find your voice through it.

“You want it in inches or miles, Cap?”

The corner of Price’s eye twitches. He doesn’t look amused. “You think I’m jokin’?” 

“No,” you say, and it comes out hollow. “I think you’re late.”

That does it.

He moves.

Not loud. Not quick. Just all at once — like gravity’s lost its hold on him and found its way into his hands instead. He’s in your space before you can brace for it, hand at your jaw — not cruel, but crushing all the same.

“Look at me. Right in the eyes,” he grits, drawing your chin up until your vision is level with his. The noise that leaves him is deep. “That’s it. Feed my appetite. This bloodthirst needs a fuckin’ source.”

As does yours. 

So you humour him. Stare through him. Past him. Into him. His pupils dark wells in blue winter. The red coal within them. Not fire — but the kindling that births it. The buzz of war right before it burns.

“Price. I know you see it.” You rasp — calloused fingers scuff your cheek. “The brass buried me breathing. There’s only one man with strings like that.” 

“I see it.” His tone never rises. It doesn’t need to. “But someone got to Shepherd. He ain’t in on this alone.” 

You shift slightly, your ribs groaning beneath the movement. The weight of it all — months, years, lies — still settling like sediment in your lungs.

Simon is beside you before you can blink.

“He buried her file. Ordered the retreat. Knew she was still breathin and made sure no one else did. Probably had the DoD shove her off-books when she didn’t die fast enough. When she survived, he gave Graves the green light t’clean up.”

Price lets go of you. Runs the hand over his face like the words dirtied him.

“How are we supposed to fight that?” Your voice fractures against the steel of your throat. “He’s not just high up the chain—he is the chain. Every op, every asset, every backchannel runs through his office. You think he doesn’t already know what we’re planning? He’s always been ten steps ahead because he built the fucking staircase.”

“The iron still fears the rot,” Price says, unflinching. “I don’t care how many stairs he built. If he’s really behind this, I’ll pull him down every fuckin’ one.”

Breath leaves you like it’s running from something. Simon’s gaze drops. To you. There’s something unspoken there. Some sorrow that doesn’t know where to sit. Guilt in the hands of a man trained to hold nothing but a rifle.

Price catches it. Reading the unsaid words in the glass of your eyes.

“How long?” he asks, quiet. Too quiet. “How long’d you two know each other?”

The air stills. You blink once, slow. Not sure you heard him right.

“What?”

He doesn’t repeat himself. Just waits. Simon looks to the floor. Price doesn’t look anywhere but at you.

You force steel into your shoulders and words past your molars. Someone has to. “Almost all our lives.” 

Price raises a brow. “Almost?”

The silence ticks once. Twice. The muscle in Simon’s jaw clenches — hard. Like he’s biting back time. 

“He lived two doors down from me. In Manchester. Our dads were friends.” 

“And you two?” He asks.

You hesitate. Then say it the only way it ever made sense.

“A lifetime ago.” It aches. “Until we enlisted.”

Silence folds around the room again. This one a million times heavier than the all the others before it.

Price doesn’t let it linger. “Is there any chance,” he says slowly, “that someone could’ve known? About you. Whatever it was you were to each other.”

Simon finally looks up. Meets Price’s eyes.

“No one who’s still breathin’,” he says.

The answer is quick, but you feel the exception before he says it. His lashes flutter like he’s just walked back through every year that’s passed.

“Maybe her old man. If he remembers enough through the pills and the whiskey.”

Your chest tightens. You haven’t thought of him in months. Maybe longer. You made a career out of forgetting.

Price clocks the exchange. “Your father still alive?”

You nod once. It barely qualifies. “Last I heard. He was still in Manchester. Same street. Same filth.”

“Think anyone would be able to get to him?”

You don’t answer right away. You’re not sure how.

Simon answers for you. “He’d be easy t’find. If someone was lookin hard enough.” 

Price nods, then takes a step back. You almost ask what this has to do with literally anything at all — but your thoughts die off with the movement of the key to your cuffs being placed in Simon’s palm.

“You two clearly have some catchin’ up to do.” Price says. “Patch her arm up. You got til Keller gets here.” 

Notes:

HEHEHEHHEHEHEE ?????

(i live for your comments thank you all so much for reading oh my god slow burns HURT)