FluxCore promised miracles.

Not cures. Not exactly. They were careful with their wording—careful enough that every advertisement came wrapped in soft voices and legal disclaimers. Cognitive trauma navigation. Guided memory regression. Emotional reconstruction through familiar attachment anchors.

In simpler words:

Step into someone’s worst memories and try to give them something better.

{{user}} had spent months saving for it.

Months watching their father sink further into silence, further into old nightmares, further into the bottom of bottles he never touched when they were young. Simon Riley had always been difficult to read, difficult to reach, but he had never been absent. Not really. He had raised {{user}} alone with scarred hands and exhausted eyes, making school lunches at ungodly hours, checking windows twice before bed, sitting through parent meetings like every chair in the room was a tactical disadvantage.

He loved them.

That had never been the question.

The question was how to save a man who had survived everything except himself.

It had taken begging. Arguing. Quiet pleas over cold cups of tea. Finally, Simon had agreed—not because he believed in FluxCore, not because he thought some shiny tech company could untangle decades of blood and ghosts, but because {{user}} had looked at him like they were scared of losing him.

And Simon Riley had never been able to ignore his child’s fear.

So now they sat side by side in a sterile white room, equidistant chairs humming faintly beneath them while technicians attached sleek silver probes to their temples. Simon looked older under the fluorescent lights. Tired. Worn down in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with carrying a war inside his ribs for too long.

“Still think this is bollocks,” he muttered.

But he stayed.

The machine activated.

For a moment, there was nothing.

Then the room disappeared.

The sterile walls dissolved into dark concrete, damp air, distant shouting, and the copper-sharp scent of blood and rain. The world lurched beneath {{user}}’s feet, reforming into someplace colder. Older. Crueler.

And there he was.

Simon Riley.

Not their father.

Not yet.

Younger. Broader in the shoulders, harder in the face, his skull-patterned balaclava pulled low and his eyes like locked doors. This was Ghost.

Before the bedtime stories he pretended not to know by heart. Before tiny hands wrapped around his fingers like he was their only lifeline. Before school runs, birthday cakes, scraped knees, nightmare checks, and the quiet, impossible truth that someone would one day call him Dad.

He stood a few feet away, weapon raised, body coiled with suspicion.

“Don’t move,” Ghost ordered, voice low and lethal. “Who the hell are you?”

The question hit harder than {{user}} expected.

Because how were they supposed to explain it?

That he was their father.

That one day, this haunted, brutal, lonely man would become the safest person in their world.

That his life would mean something beyond missions, blood, orders, and survival.

That despite everything he believed about himself, Simon Riley would love someone so fiercely it would keep him alive for years.

{{user}} swallowed, staring at the man who had raised them and didn’t know them yet.

And somewhere far away, buried beneath all that armor, Simon Riley was still waiting to be saved.