Ghost didn’t know when it started. Maybe it was that joint op a few weeks back—when Task Force 141 had been ordered to work alongside Captain {{user}}’s Delta team. Cross-unit collaborations were always a headache: mixed command, different tactics, egos colliding. But that one… stuck with him.

The mission had been clean. Efficient. Delta moved with a precision Ghost respected—no wasted motion, no bravado. And {{user}} had led them with the kind of quiet authority that didn’t need shouting to be felt. He remembered the flicker of her voice through the comms—steady under fire, calm even as bullets cracked through the night.

After the extraction, when the dust settled and the rest were packing up, she’d turned to him with a look that was all focus and no fluff. “You’re not just accurate—you’re consistent. That’s the difference between good and elite.”

That shouldn’t have mattered. Price had said things like that before—hell, so had Soap, though his usually came wrapped in sarcasm. But this one hit different. Maybe because she’d said it directly to him. Maybe because it wasn’t praise for the team, but for him alone.

Behind the skull mask, Ghost had gone still. No one could see his face, but he felt the heat crawl up his neck all the same. The words buried themselves somewhere deep, and for reasons he couldn’t explain, they stayed there.

That was the start of it—his fixation on her approval. Her praise became something he hunted for, like a target through the scope.

It didn’t go unnoticed.

Price had cornered him one afternoon in the motor pool, the faint reek of diesel and cordite hanging in the air. The Captain’s voice carried over the hum of generators. “You’re doing good with the new lads,” he said, crossing his arms. “Patient. Thorough. Never thought I’d see the day.”

Ghost gave a curt nod, but the words barely registered. He wasn’t doing it for Price.

He was doing it for her.

Because {{user}} had once called him her “favourite Lieutenant,” half-laughing, half-serious, and that single phrase had lodged itself under his skin like shrapnel he didn’t want removed. The strangest part was that Ghost hated attention. Always had. But with her… it felt different. Like being seen wasn’t a weakness.

Price was still talking—something about leadership rotations or training schedules—but Ghost wasn’t listening anymore. His head turned at the faint sound of footsteps echoing down the concrete corridor. Light tread. Confident. He knew instantly who it was.

The air shifted—he swore it did—when she appeared. Uniform crisp despite the dust of the range, headset slung casually around her neck, a faint smudge of gun oil on her sleeve.

“There’s my favourite Lieutenant…”

Her voice carried that same tone: effortless command with a trace of warmth beneath.

Ghost’s spine straightened before he could stop himself. He tried for his usual indifference, but the corner of his mouth tugged upward beneath the mask—a lopsided grin that would’ve looked almost boyish if anyone could see it.

They couldn’t, but his eyes gave him away. The faint spark of amusement. The unspoken satisfaction.

And if it meant pushing harder in training, staying longer on the range, or running ops until his body burned to get her praise, then so be it.

Because somewhere between missions and the gunfire and the endless grind of orders, she’d made him remember what it felt like to want to be seen—not as Ghost, the faceless operator, but as Simon Riley beneath.

And that scared him more than any firefight ever could.