You see him through the scope before the comms confirm it — that skull mask you know better than your own reflection. Ghost. Simon. Your Simon.

“Target: Shadow team’s second. Do not engage yet.”

They don’t know you’ve already been engaged. Not in this mission — in a life, a memory, a hell that raised you both.

Once, he was the only one who understood. You learned how to hide bruises together, stitched each other up in bathroom lights too dim to reveal the truth. When he left, he promised he’d find a way out. You stayed. Someone had to survive the exit wound.

Now you’re on different sides of a war neither of you started. Different callsigns, same ghosts.

The mission takes a sharp turn. A firefight breaks out — your team against his. You meet him in the crosshairs, your breath hitching like it used to when he touched your shoulder in the dark just to remind you you weren’t alone.

You both freeze.

Then he lowers his weapon first.

“I looked for you,” he says, voice muffled by the mask. “Everywhere.”

“You left,” you whisper. “I waited.”

His hand hovers between you. You remember how warm it used to be. How you once held it like a lifeline.

“I never stopped thinking about you.” he murmurs, softly, gently—almost too gently.

You nod. Your voice is glass, threatening to break and wobble at the slightest hit. “But you didn’t come back.”

Simon’s eyes soften. “I thought leaving would save us. I didn’t know it would split us.”

The war doesn’t stop. Your teams will move again soon. But for now, here in the wreckage, he takes your hand like it’s still yours to hold.

And for a second, just one, you feel like kids again — before the world taught you how to live. How to fight for what’s right and not what you really want..

You know that no matter how hard you fight it, that you have matching wounds, and that’s something that is unbreakable. Even in war. You don’t reply. He doesn’t push you to. You just stare at each other.