Chapter Text
I. Johnny
In those last split seconds before it ends, there is intimacy.
In that shuddering gasp between stability and unimaginable force, a glance shared with another man - all those conversations you wanted to have but didn’t, all that useless yearning directed at nothing - his hand instinctively presses to the front of your kit in a pale echo of wish, of a boy’s last cry for his mother. Or a pat for a job well done; an impotent display of brotherhood at the edge of reality.
The last firing of your neurons will be like fireworks in the cold night sky, and then the world will tear apart at the seams. An inky black nothing will slam into place like an iron wall, and you will have served.
You will wish that you could’ve known him better; the man whose body parts will now finally know yours, slamming together against rubble like wet bags of meat - a deserved end, maybe even a desired one. Your blood will be as one as they dig your rotting remains out from under the rubble a week later - they won’t even be able to tell the two of you apart anymore.
It’s a good thought.
Nothing like the cold delirium of reality Johnny wakes up to five minutes after the world has shuddered and churned, splayed out upon unforgiving concrete like a ragdoll, every single nerve ending in his body alight with agony. His face no longer sits on him right. His vision swims and he can hear nothing but a high-pitched whine and a low rumbling from somewhere. He can feel his lungs compressing against shattered bone, against the raw fragments of the structure of him, and there’s something deeply wrong with his left leg.
Slowly, oh so slowly, Johnny manages to raise his head. He’s pretty sure he can feel something crackle and pop in his spine as he does so, but he needs to see.
The length of his left calf ends with an abrupt slope downwards, conforming to the weight of a massive slab of concrete crushing it to the ground like the body of an insect. There’s a jagged edge of bone jutting out from where it had given out under the pressure - snapped like a twig and burst through the skin that’s been torn like paper around the deformed inside of his leg. Blood and mangled flesh pools around the ruined limb, and Johnny struggles to perceive what he’s seeing as real. Because it can’t be. This has to be some fucked up nightmare that he’s going to wake up from - a dreamscape he can close his eyes to, drift away, and wake up somewhere else, safe.
Johnny squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again. Nothing changes. Reality throbs in his consciousness like a malignant tumour and he can hear something snap in his mind under the weight of it. His blood pounds through his head like it’s got somewhere more important to be - like it can’t wait to flow out through the crushed limb and leave him lifeless on the ground. He needs to act. He needs to act.
His next realisation hits like a crowbar to the gut - a muffled shout at the back of his head that turns into a fevered screech when he remembers he was not alone.
Somewhere to his right, another body lies. From amidst broken bits of concrete, the dark shape of Simon Riley stands out as a foreign mass within a crushing collage of what used to be someone’s home, one visible arm twisted in all the wrong directions.
There’s a piece of rebar sticking out from his temple, and he is silent.
Johnny’s fingers are numb. He raises a hand to his comms, only to find a broken wire and a ruined mess of tech.
”Simon,” Johnny tries - a wretched noise from somewhere in his throat - not quite a plea, not quite a threat. ”Simon. Get up. Get the fuck up.”
The man remains unmoving, as does the rebar in his skull.
And in the ruins of that soviet-era apartment building somewhere in eastern Ukraine, the battered body of John MacTavish struggles and jerks as he fails to unlodge himself. And in that horrible silence, he screams. Then sobs, like he’s not a hardened SAS veteran but a forgotten boy, lost and afraid.
Then, nothing. Nobody is around to hear as he slips away in pain and anguish, pale with blood loss and covered in tears and dirt, concrete dust underneath his fingernails.
II. Simon
This is how it’s supposed to end. How it was always supposed to, perhaps.
But when Simon Riley opens his eyes to the familiar sight of an unfamiliar hospital room two weeks later, he comes to the unfortunate conclusion that he’s not, in fact, dead. Something in his head feels wrong and his speech struggles to bridge the gap between thought and word, but his heart has stubbornly continued pumping blood into his broken body, despite all odds.
It takes a while to shed that blur over everything - a haze like someone has rubbed vaseline all over the lens of his consciousness. The hours and days feel like miniature eternities, variable in length and lucidity - it’s unpleasant, to say the least, teetering somewhere between wakefulness and unconsciousness, aware enough of his own body being alive but unable to make his mind go in any particular direction.
But when that, too, ends, and clarity comes to Simon like the glare of a halogen lamp directly into the light receptors of the eye, things get no more pleasant.
Two weeks in a coma, the nurse tells him. Too much time in between that collapsing building in Ukraine and this moment, stretching out like a bloodstained canvas between here and then. There had been a foreign object lodged in his brain, they tell him, but not deep enough to kill him - just enough to have him teetering on the edge of brain death for a good few days. And god, Simon wishes he’d have slipped to that other side - he doesn’t want to think about what being alive right now means. About his own body, about his broken limbs, about his skewered brain - but also the body of another.
He thinks back to that house, those last moments before the explosion. What comfort that sense of finality had brought him.
He’d have gone out with Johnny. Together. None of that bereavement bullshit, no grief, no nothing. Just the pitch black pit of death, endless and empty. Maybe not what Johnny would’ve deserved - but it sure as hell would’ve been what Ghost deserved. It would’ve been what they’d both been prepared for. Trained for.
But now? He doesn’t want to look too hard at that feeling. At anything. At the possibility of pain. If Johnny’s…
No.
It’s all bullshit.
“And Soap?” Simon finally manages to ask Price a while later when the slow words agree to come with the pain and rigidity of a steel pipe pushing through his vocal cords. “Did Johnny make it?”
Price’s nod is small - there’s a but there. Relief and trepidation claw at each other in the pit of his stomach, two snarling dogs fighting for a bone.
Alive but what? Paralyzed from the neck down? Still in a coma?
“He’s had to undergo a lot of surgery,” Price tells him quietly, frowning at the railing of Simon’s hospital bed. “They couldn’t save his leg.”
Simon swallows dryly. Nods.
“Discharged, then,” he utters.
Price nods again.
“And me?” Simon asks.
There’s a moment of silence - one Simon wishes would last longer, since he doesn’t really want to hear the answer he already knows.
“We’ll have to wait and see. We don’t know the extent of your brain damage yet. But I’ve had to declare you unfit for service for the time being.”
III. Johnny
It’s all very fucking unfair.
The glaring hospital lights when he wakes up even though he shouldn’t have, the sympathy from the nurses. The pittance of pension he receives upon an honourable discharge - a pat on the back and out the door he goes, one leg short and a head full of broken thoughts.
There’s now a jagged, foreign expanse of skin on the right side of his face, where they had to graft new tissue to replace the bit of his cheek that had been torn off by flying debris. It pulls at the remainder of his face painfully - a constant reminder of how he’s no longer the bright, ambitious Johnny who had snuck his enlistment in one year earlier than was legally allowed. He can’t really feel much on that side of the face anymore - ironic, considering he still has that side of the face; not like his leg, which he constantly forgets he no longer has and can swear he still feels.
What is society supposed to do with a disfigured, crippled soldier? What is he but a broken tool that’s well beyond repair, no longer of any use for anything?
At least Simon’s still alive.
Tough fucking bastard.
He’d seen him exactly once at the hospital. He’d finally managed to get up and “walk”, hobbling around his room and the hallways with crutches, trying to stay upright in spite of the pain squeezing brutally at his ribcage and back.
There, through one of the windows to the rooms, he’d seen Simon on his bed, conscious and eating a plateful of hospital slop.
It’d been a strange moment - Johnny standing there behind the window with his crutches, staring at the eating man he’d shared so much but also nothing with, strangely bare and small in spite of his size, maskless in his hospital gown and a shaved patch on the side of his head. Strikingly human, somehow. He’d been entirely focused on his bland meal, shovelling it down with as much of his usual disregard towards flavour as he could manage.
Johnny had wanted to cry, then; he’d wanted to weep at the sight of Simon stuffing shite food into his mouth with single-minded focus, just like he’d always done back on base.
He’d seemed fine. Normal. Both legs and an arm in casts, but fine - still in possession of all his limbs.
Johnny hadn’t been able to bring himself to approach. Simon probably wouldn’t have wanted to see him like this - no longer useful to him. Or anyone else. Beyond their few years of service together, what would they even have to discuss? Football? Politics? Outside of the SAS, Johnny would be nothing to Simon. Just another civvie to brush out of the way. A strange burden.
After he’s discharged from the hospital, Johnny collects his things from the base and leaves. Gaz, a box of Johnny’s belongings in his arms, regards him with sadness in his eyes, tells him they’ll keep in touch, but somehow Johnny doubts it. He knows how high octane and secretive his life was - how their life will continue to be. He knows there’ll be very little time for anyone who falls off the bandwagon.
It’s just the sad reality of it. They will continue to serve, and he will not. And Simon… Simon is a puzzle he no longer feels like a piece to.