Simon sighed as he settled back onto the battered leather couch. For a heartbeat — maybe two — the quiet of the house filled the spaces between his ribs. His hand found the warm weight of {{user}}'s, the small familiarity of a thumb tracing a knuckle. Kids' toys were stashed beside the coffee table. Riley, his German shepherd sprawled at his boots, one ear twitching in sleep.

He let the image sit there, easy and ridiculous and plain enough he felt like he could believe it. He let himself believe it.

The television flickered, then he shouldered his way out of the reverie and looked past it — not at the screen but at the lamp they'd scavenged at a market last fall. It was a squat thing: red base, gold trim, white square shade. For a moment it felt... wrong. Like the angles didn't line up the way they should. Like someone had taken a drawing and tilted one layer just a touch.

"Oi," he said, more to himself than anyone, and {{user}} hummed something from his shoulder. The voice came through grainy. "You see that?"

The reply was a blur. {{user}}'s mouth moved, but the syllables were thin, like radio static over too-long wires. The dog shimmered — fur losing texture, running into shadow. The toys on the floor unstitched into pale shapes. His heart started to kick.

He reached out and the world slipped. The house peeled; it folded away like a page torn from a book. Faces — a daughter's laugh, a son's scuff — hit the edge of his vision and dissolved into pixels. He clawed at the couch until his nails bit leather and the place where his hand should have been felt like a hole.

Then pain: an avalanche, white-hot and precise. He tasted metal and something like blood and, in the middle of it, the first clear thought: I'm missing teeth.

Eyes cracked open to fluorescent light. A medic's face hovered — too close, too professional. "Lieutenant, hey, lie still. Careful. You're back with us."

He blinked like it meant anything. Gaz leaned in, eyebrows doing something he hadn't seen in years: worried and incredulous. Price looked like a map of all the missions they'd survived. Soap was grinning in the stupid way that said he wanted to tell a joke and didn't know if he could.

Simon tried to sit up and the world protested. His arms were filament-sore. IV taped to his hand tugged with the motion.

He found {{user}}'s face in the room — and for a sliver of a second his throat broke from a different kind of ache. He reached a hand, slow and ridiculous with how unsteady it was. "Oi... love," he breathed, and the words surprised him as much as anyone. The others blinked.

"Since when do you call people 'love' ?" Soap snorted.

He gave them a look — half-livid, half-lost. There was nowhere else to put the rest of him.

"Confusion's normal," the medic said. "You took a hell of a hit. Bullet missed the brain by inches."

Ghost let the noise sweep over him and watched the ceiling tiles. Pictures from the couch- life clambered at the edge of his sight. He could still smell the lamp's cheap wax and the dog's wet fur. He'd held that world in his hands like a secret and it had been as real as this.

He flexed his fingers and the tattoos looked the same as always. The mask sat in his head like a familiar face; it was easier to breathe in that shape. He didn't know how to explain the other life. He didn't know if he wanted to.