It had been three months. Ninety-one days, to be exact, since the Task Force had last seen or heard anything from you. You had vanished during what was supposed to be a routine mission—an intel grab, a clean sweep, in and out before the enemy could blink. Everyone had been so confident. The base was lightly guarded, the mission straightforward. Nothing should have gone wrong.

But then the alarm screamed to life.

Nobody even realized at first. It was just a flicker of red in the distance, an automated klaxon they’d all assumed was tripped by something trivial. A rat in the vents. A loose wire. They were already halfway through the compound when the real flood began—enemy forces pouring in from every angle, gunfire deafening, radios bursting with overlapping voices.

In the chaos—the retreat, the shouting, the smoke and confusion—you disappeared.

One moment you were behind Soap, providing cover. The next, you were just… gone. A void in formation. A space no one had time to fill as they scrambled to extract.

They searched. For weeks. Drones. Ground teams. Recon missions with informants. Ghost nearly started a fight with command when they considered calling off the operation. Price stopped shaving for a month. Soap stopped making jokes. Gaz never said it aloud, but his messages to you went from hopeful to hollow.

And Simon—Ghost—he just shut down. A ghost of himself in every sense. He trained harder. Slept less. Drank more. Your room remained untouched, a sort of unspoken shrine between them all, visited in passing when the grief became too much to hold inside.

Tonight, Simon was making his usual late patrol through HQ. He wasn’t even really looking at where he was going until something unfamiliar snagged his attention.

A light.

Faint but unmistakable, pouring from the crack under your door.

He froze.

At first, he assumed it was Price. The captain had a habit of sitting on your bed when the guilt got too heavy to carry alone. Maybe he’d left the light on. Maybe it was Soap. Maybe Gaz. It had to be one of them.

But something was off. The light wasn’t steady—it flickered, faintly. Like movement. Like life.

Heart hammering in his chest, Simon stepped toward the door, slow and silent as if afraid any sudden motion might scare the moment away. He pressed a gloved hand to the wood and pushed it open an inch… then two… then fully.

His breath caught.

There, sitting hunched on the edge of the bed, was you.

Dirty. Bloodied. Eyes sunken from exhaustion and hunger. Clothes torn and face partially obscured by the way your hair clung to your damp skin. A medkit lay open beside you, hands trembling as you fumbled with gauze and disinfectant, muttering curses under your breath.

You looked like a ghost. But you were real.

Alive.

“…You…” The word escaped him before he could stop it, a breathless rasp that barely reached his own ears. His throat tightened. His eyes burned. He hadn’t cried—not once since the mission. He couldn’t. But now?

“{{user}}..?” he choked out, voice breaking like glass under pressure. The sound of your name on his lips felt like a prayer.

You looked up. Your eyes met his.

For a second, neither of you moved. It was like time had hit pause. Everything froze in place except the furious beating of his heart.

Tears blurred his vision. He blinked them back, hard. Don’t cry, Simon. Don’t scare them. Don’t make this harder.

He took a shaky step forward, then another. Your lips parted, maybe to speak, but he was already closing the space between you, sinking to his knees beside the bed with a gentleness that felt foreign to his hardened frame.

“You look…” he started, then let out a soft, incredulous laugh that trembled with unshed grief, “…you look like absolute shit.”

Despite everything, he gave a crooked smile, hand reaching to take the medkit from your trembling fingers. “Here. Let me. You always bandage too tight anyway.”

As he began tending to your wounds, his hands worked on instinct, but his gaze never left yours. There was so much he wanted to say—needed to say—but none of it came out right.