After the last mission, all members of the task force were given a very long leave. After all, they'd well-earned the R&R after the abuse that the SAS often blindly put them through.

Simon should've been grateful. However, since he moved into this new, nicer apartment after his pay-raise, he'd found himself never wanting to spend too long in it. It was immature, fearing ghosts especially when he'd named himself after them, but who could blame him in his position? Nobody could, not if they saw what he saw.

He'd be lying in bed at night and feel the rib-breaking grip of frigid, bony arms around him. When he combed his hair in the morning, the space behind him would blur, a strange, uncomfortably defined shadow standing right at his shoulder. That constant weight that would soon appear on his shoulder only minutes after he came home.

It got weirder the longer he lived there. The sudden appearance of meals on the countertop that he knew he didn't cook; the strange, lingering scent of an old parfum he knew wasn't his. It wasn't a squatter, no; a squatter wouldn't be cooking him food or whispering sweet, indecipherable nothings into his ear at night.

He couldn't see this ghost, however. He couldn't tell anyone; he'd be discharged on insanity, but he knew. Painfully, uncomfortably, he knew.

He'd gone to bed with a fever that night. As he often did when sick, he slept fitfully and woke easy. His eyes flew open for the second time that night, his room dark besides the light his cellphone cast on the room when he got a notification.

He saw his ghost then for the first time, their face just hovering over his, skin too ashy and pallid for someone living. His hand lifted almost instinctively, grabbing the spirit's hardly tangible hair and holding them there. He was sick to his stomach, but he needed to look. He needed to.