Breaking doesn’t always look like glass shattering. It isn’t fire and fury, no cinematic storm of screams echoing down a hallway. Most of the time it’s quieter, so quiet it almost goes unnoticed. It’s the weight of years pressing into the bones, the slow drowning in a tide that rises inch by inch until one day it folds you under without ceremony. To the outside world, nothing seems changed—you walk, you breathe, you answer when spoken to. But inside, the waves have already taken everything down with them.

That was how it had always been for Simon. He had been taught early that softness was a liability. A cracked voice, a tear, a moment of fragility—those things were met with slammed doors, with punishments sharp enough to scar skin and memory alike. So he learned to silence himself. He built walls where children should’ve built dreams, taught himself to choke back the cries that threatened to slip free in the dark. He carried pain the way soldiers carry rifles: strapped to his body, an extension of himself, something he couldn’t set down without consequence.

And when Johnny MacTavish died—God, his Johnny, all laughter and smoke and sketches in the dirt—Simon reverted to what he knew best. While the others wept openly, arms around one another, voices raw in their grief, Simon stood apart. He couldn’t weep. Couldn’t scream. Couldn’t even say the man’s name without feeling the hollowed-out echo in his chest. So he swallowed it. The way he always had. Buried it under endless missions, under exhaustion, under the illusion that if he kept moving, the silence in his head wouldn’t become unbearable.

But silence always finds a way back in. Even Simon Riley has a breaking point. And when he finally met it, it was not with rage, but with despair so sharp it carved into him—twin scars across his wrists, proof that even the strongest man can turn his violence inward when the war inside grows louder than the one outside. He survived, but only just. And survival didn’t feel like victory. It felt like punishment.

—————

The bell above your tattoo studio door chimes as morning light stretches pale across the floor. You glance up, coffee still warm in your hand, and see him. A tall, broad shadow in the doorway, shoulders nearly swallowing the frame, hood drawn low. He doesn’t move at first, just lingers there, hands buried deep in the pocket of his hoodie as if unsure whether he belongs.

You clear your throat softly. “Come in,” you offer, voice gentler than you realize.

He does. Step by step, heavy boots against the tile. Up close, he seems even larger, a presence that fills the air without trying. His face is half-hidden, but his eyes—God, those eyes look like they’ve carried lifetimes of storms.

“You do cover-ups?” His voice is gravel, unused, each word dragged across stone.

You nod. “Yeah. Old ink, scars… depends what you need hidden.”

He studies you for a long moment, as though measuring whether you mean it. Then his hands emerge, trembling almost imperceptibly, pulling the sleeves of his hoodie up to his forearms.

Two scars. Clean, deliberate, mirroring one another like some cruel symmetry. They cut across his wrists in pale ridges, healed but unhealed, a secret brand that speaks louder than words ever could.

Your breath catches, but you keep your face steady. His gaze flickers up to yours, hard and fragile at once.

“Do you cover these?” he asks, and though the words are plain, the weight behind them is unbearable.

For a heartbeat, the studio is silent except for the hum of the fluorescent light above you. You want to reach across the counter, to hold those scarred wrists in your hands, to tell him he doesn’t need to hide—that you see him. But you know better. This man has spent his life swallowing pain. He isn’t here for pity. He’s here for something that might make the mirror easier to face.