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melit0n · 9 months

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Half-Starved

- Oneshot

- Obsessive! Ghost/Reader

- Word Count: 3.7k

- Warnings: Descriptions of gore, canabalism as a metaphor for love, mentions of past domestic abuse, implied past sexual assult, implied stalking

- Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/52474849

Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley was born hungry.

Born with a relentless nagging feeling curled up right between his oesophagus and the squirming muscle of his stomach. From the very moment Simon opened his eyes, he was hungry for something he would never have. Left to starve in the gloom of the locked cupboard he was shoved into for not shutting up. He spent fifteen-odd years greedy for any drop of affection he could get. Anything he could grasp and hold onto, no matter how many bruises it would leave him with. No matter how long he would have to spend chained up like a bad dog in the corner of his room licking his wounds telling himself that it was worth it. That the blood was worth it. The pain was worth it.

Anything to be acknowledged.

Now, once again finding comfort in the gloom of his home, he is still hungry. Even more so.

To him, touch is a fragile subject. A broken subject he hates talking about because of him.

Gunfire and stab wounds are nothing in the face of a father’s punch. Intimate, innocent digits can still feel like creeping, coercive hands.

Yet, a fasting man’s stomach still growls.

Fragile subject or not, he still craved it. Maybe too much. He wanted, wants, to be held tight enough so he doesn’t break. Wants to be vulnerable. But he’s still afraid he’ll end up being a scared kid looking into the slit eyes of a snake again.

He blames his younger self for the predicament he’s found himself in. Wants sit down with the kid and shake him by the shoulders and ask why. Why he put himself through that for that long.

Even so, he can’t blame him.

He knows how hungry he is now; feels the scraping like dull claws against the soft spot between his liver and his spleen. He can only imagine what it was like for him as a child.

He’s blocked most of those memories out now, though.

He sits through the tugging, the pulling, through each dull meeting. Each dark night spent alone in his bunk. Each evening he spends licking wounds that just won't close.

Unfortunately, this issue, this dilemma, is a hard one to fix. A hard want to satiate. His callsign is well earned, afterall. Sometimes even he blurs the lines of the dead man walking and the human being hidden behind layers of constantly taught muscle and scarred skin. Makes it a bit hard to gain attention other than fear and unease, let alone affection.

But then there’s you.

The first word that would come to his mind is kind.

Out of the blue, draped in moonlight and glimmering stars, you appear, seemingly out of nowhere. But, you’re here. And there. And everywhere, really.

He sees you in the local corner shop, holding tightly onto the sleeve of whoever you’ve brought along.

He doesn’t see their face. Too obscured by the dim lighting

He sees you on the train, and occasionally on the bus: brushing your hand, intently, against that of your work friend’s. You both take the same one into the city, bright and early hoping to miss the morning crowd but never succeeding.

He doesn’t see their face, either.

Bit by bit, he begins to notice things. Notice habits that shouldn’t be his to examine.

You use physical affection as not only a way to show affection itself, platonic or romantic–he isn’t particularly good at guessing unless it’s glaringly obvious–but as a form of comfort and encouragement as well.

In less than a month into his leave, you’ve managed to become a staple in his civilian life.

He sees you in the morning, always at the train station with breakfast and lunch in hand, looking quizzically around to see if you’ve missed your train like a doubtful deer.

He knows you know you haven’t. You’re like him; you’ve got an obsession with time.

While his is instilled by the harsh words of the military, yours is brought about by a tight work schedule. And maybe something else. He wonders what that something else is as you both board the already stuffed train, both standing in the same carriage full of warm, already tired bodies.

He sees you in the afternoon as well, sitting outside on a park bench with a friend and eating lunch. While you talk, you have a habit of taking tiny crumbs off of your sandwich, flicking them off to the ratty pigeons that flock around your feet like moths to a flame.

You always have the same lunch; the same sandwich bread from the same corner shop with the same filing. You have a thing with regularity, routine, as well, it seems.

Just like him.

Of course, he sees you in the evenings too. You both take the same train home, and almost always end up so close yet so far from each other on the carriage. Your work friend gets off at the stop two before yours and Simon’s; always leaving you with a pat on the shoulder and a closed eye smile, which you almost always return.

You have a habit of jumping, ever so slightly, when you get off the train. Simon finds it quite cute. It’s almost as if you’re actually afraid of the gap.

Of the fall.

Either way, you part ways without knowing you’re parting from him, leaving you missing from him, and head back to your home. Ghost has an impulse to follow you, spurred on by a mix of curiosity at where you live and wanting to make sure you’re safe.

From what, Simon doesn’t truly know.

He almost does. Stands awkwardly in front of the station watching your figure turn into a small dot, but Simon urges himself to head home. To sleep.

You linger in his thoughts each time he walks back.

At first, he’s oddly amazed, a bit in awe, if he were honest, that you can give so much affection so easily, touch so easily, and receive it tenfold from the people around you.

Then, there’s annoyance, titering on the fine, chipped-away line of anger. Like a mantra, he asks why it’s fair someone can give, give and keep on giving, let alone receive something back, and he can’t? How can you hold someone so closely and not be afraid of a knife in your back?

Maybe that’s Ghost talking, he thinks.

Eventually, he falls off the flimsy line of annoyance and anger and into the muddied trench that is jealousy. Jealous not only of you, how you can give and receive so easily, but of the people in your life who get to experience the affection that you give to any warm body that passes by you. Said people who don’t understand how precious and rare that experience is to others.

To him.

He wants to taste it. Badly.

Then, it morphs. Twists and turns like a dying thing, all red with chunks of fur sticking at odd angles, into attraction. Turning from a want to be held, a quiet plea to the God they taught him about in primary school for you to keep him together for just a little bit longer, to a need. A need to kiss until both your lips are bloody and raw, bitten and chewed like a pomegranate, seeping your liquid life for him to drink as an elixir.

He’s seen the way you kiss, and God above he needs it. Needs you. He doesn’t care if it’s the fleeting, platonic kisses you gift to your friends on the cheek (he wants you to take a chunk out of his cheek. Wants you to chew on the fat like the gum you always have in your mouth), or if it’s the rough ones you give to the people you bring home. The ones that have them chasing your lips for more, which you always allow because you never stop giving.

Simon wants it. Ghost needs it.

Consequently, the dull scratching of the claws in between his liver and his spleen grows sharper. After years of the scratching, the pulling, the tugging, he’d thought his hunger pang’s talons had grown weary, thought he’d grown accustomed, but he feels them. Feels the sharp pang like a pistol’s bullet and it bloody hurts. Has him hunched over on his bed trying to claw out his stomach because, for the first time in years, it's hurting him.

And, for the first time in years, Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley decides to listen.

As more time passes, more time spent getting soaked outside your house in the rain waiting for you to come home because you’re oddly late for all the time he’s known you, it changes again. Writhes around in his stomach and the fat in his veins, to something much worse. Much more harmful, at least, to you. In all the pain of his hunger, he contemplates taking chunks out of you. Maybe that will satiate the creature that squirms in his bloody viscera, laying claim to all of his innards in an attempt to get him to feed for once in his life.

He wants, needs, hungers to feel the comforting weight of your blood in the bottom of his stomach.

Zoning out during meetings easily turns to daydreaming of taking one of his hunting knives to your flesh. Cut strips of skin, like you’re his sacrificial lamb to slaughter and devour, and finally put those butchering skills he gained to work somewhere other than on the field.

He promises he’ll be delicate. Promises he’ll be kind. Promises Simon, and not Ghost.

Promises Simon, who’s more corpse than he likes to think.

He can’t help but imagine how you’d cry when he’d do so. Fat tears dribbling down your soft cheeks and getting caught in the corners of your lips.

He hates hearing people cry.

In his dreams and his waking hours, he’s endlessly followed, stalked, haunted by the echoing sobs of someone lost to him in some distant sun-stunned, sand-smothered land.

But you?

He doesn’t mind one bit.

It’s another piece of you for him to consume, another piece of you that you can offer to him–gift to him–to bring you two together.

He knows, God knows he knows, how much it takes to be vulnerable. He doesn’t think he’d be able to describe what he’d do to taste your tears. To savour your salty sadness upon his tongue and be able to offer comfort. To lick your face dry and hold you in his arms; warm body against warm body just like he’s daydreamed about.

The more time that passes, the further he falls.

On slightly rarer occasions, ones where he’s alone in the leaden quiet of his room for longer than a human, a soldier, should be, he thinks about feeding your own lovingly cooked gore to you. Get’s him more riled up than he’d like to admit.

At first, it’s a blurry image. Murky and obscured by a civilian subconscious that tries to remind him of who he is. But, slowly, it dissipates. Becomes as clear as a mirror reflection: a candle-lit dinner, like the one’s his mum had in the pictures that used to hang on the wall. Warm lighting. He’s tried his hardest to cover up the smell of his cigarettes for you, a scent that clings to his walls like mould. Hopes that the smell of whatever he’s cooked for you overwhelms it.

Soup sounds good, doesn’t it, ey?

It’s a macabre yet intimate fairytale that finds its way into his thoughts when all else is quiet. Leaves him tossing and turning in his bed because the scraping just won't stop. He swears he's bleeding out from the inside, and he’ll break his own kneecaps from how long he’s been on the floor at your feet begging you to make it stop. To stop the scratching, the itching, the nagging feeling. For you to clean and stitch up his wounds, new and old.

Quickly, he finds he’s utterly enamoured with the thought. Obsessed with it the way Price does with his plans. Fixated on the idea of being that close to another human being. To be able to physically intertwine each other’s cells through mutual consumption. To be sewn into the quantum patterns of your being. For you to feed him a proper meal like his parents never could.

He remembers being taught in his History class–the one with the old hag of a teacher who, with her droning words alone, convinced him not to take it for GCSEs–that in some old, archaic civilisations, people used to eat each other as well. Cooked an arm or a hand for their lover as a promise. A promise that in life, and eventually in death, the two of them would share an utterly unique bond. Eternally linked to each other's souls.

If he were honest, he didn’t listen for shit in those lessons. Only really paid attention when they had a sub, and even then half the class was too rambunctious for anything to really get taught. The only reason he remembers was because his mates joked about Victorians eating long-dead mummies like it was a five-star meal for weeks after that lesson. The joke got old quickly, but it stuck with him.

Even so, Ghost decides he could die happy on the field–layered in mud and blood that wasn’t his–knowing that a part of you was anatomically intertwined with him. That, even when he was dead and gone, probably much earlier than he should be, you two would still be connected. He would have a piece of you, and you him.

And you, him. It’s another idea that stays with him, plagues his mind and every meal he eats: mutual consumption.

He decides he doesn’t mind extra scars, extra wounds, because he knows you’ll lick them clean for him. Knows you wash them, stitch them up and check on them so they heal properly.

In the end, that is the intimacy he dreams of. The affection he wants from someone. Wants from you.

His body is yours, as yours is his. So let him be yours. Give him that chance. Let him feed. Let him fulfil you.

The idea leaves him with a small smirk on his face, one he doesn’t do well to hide. One that has Soap nudging him in the ribs for with a prodding grin of his own.

So, he makes a decision. For once, Simon and Ghost agree on something and work together as one, instead of turning the other off for the greater good.

The decision? To feed.

To finally know what it is like to be full instead of half-starved.

The scraping, the nagging, only grows stronger.

He makes it a point to bump into you as much as he can before his next mission.

Anywhere is a dinner table to him. On the crowded train, brushing his rough hand against yours to ease the hunger for even a second. In the artificial lighting of the run-down corner shop, grabbing that bag of snacks that are just out of reach for you. ‘Accidently’ bumping shoulders with you on the pavement. That one allows him to talk to you, too.

If only for a moment.

All he wants is anything. Anything will do. But it only temporarily satiates the pang, doesn’t satisfy it. He just gets hungrier and hungrier and hungrier.

He knows you’ve begun to notice him. You’re getting hungry too. He just hopes it’s in the same way he hungers for you.

He hopes you’re hungry for him, and him alone.

At first, you attempt to offer him platonic comfort, which, God above, tastes so sweet. You offer soft touches on his shoulder. You gift fingers intertwining with his own as you cross the street to his home because he’s gone off on another bender trying to stop turning over in his bed and seeing the inside of a coffin that he has to dig his way out of again.

‘N you’re just some poor night owl who’s trying to be kind.

It becomes a routine. Both for you and him. You know he’ll come out of the pub at quarter to one and you know he’s expecting you. You’ll walk the same walk to his home, fumbling with his keys as he looks at you with the softest eyes you’ve ever seen on a man, hands intertwined. You’ll still carry him home and close the door softly with your foot as you lay him on his couch and get him a glass of water and whatever painkiller he has lying around. You’ll still stay as he chats, drunkenly, to you. You’ll take care of him and he’ll be whole, for just a moment.

At least until the morning comes, anyways.

He begins to hate the sunrise. Hate the light and the work and the people which drag you away from him.

He hungers for your touch the same way water hungers for the cavities of people’s lungs. Hungers for your skin like he hungers for the nicotine in his cigarettes. Hungers and begs and pleads until you both fall like Icarus; wax melting and dripping off your backs as you try and crawl your way back to the sun, back to the light, while he drags you down into the depths of the deep blue. Keeps you tight in his embrace so you can’t disappear into the blue again. Disappear like the moon and the stars that hide their fires and fade away when the sun comes up.

It's almost poetic.

In the midst of your drowning, the front door opening startles you out of your stupor.

You do that a lot, Simon notes. You’ll black out and stare at a wall blankly for hours, either in dead silence or to some piece of music too quiet for him to know the name of. He doesn’t question it. Verbally, at least.

From how easily you dissociate, he’d say it’s something you picked up a long time ago. He’ll find out when, eventually.

He knows the face of it, afterall. The blank eyes that see nothing and everything. He isn’t wrong to wonder what you’re thinking about, or what memory plays on loop that keeps you a temporarily vacant statue.

Sometimes, something small in him wonders if he's the cause of it.

Then he remembers he’s human. He’s human and it’s normal to seek affection, and he carries on eating.

Carefully, you get up from the couch, approaching him as he walks over to the kitchen counter. The blue plastic bag he has rustles loudly in the spotless kitchen.

“What’s that?” You ask, gently, placing a hand on his shoulder to get a better look.

Please give me more.

He lets out a knowing grunt and pulls out two round, red fruits. At first, you mistake them for apples, but the star-shaped top throws you off.

“Pomegranates?”

He nods, looking into your eyes for some sort of approval.

Gingerly, you take one of the pomegranates out of his hand, his fingers twitching as the pads of your digits brush against his.

I’ll take anything you give.

Your eyes dart back and forth between him and the fruit as you do so, careful to earn his compliance as you inspect the fruit.

Just please give me more.

They’re a deep red, almost crimson, and the shine reflects your face on its vermilion skin.

“Chopping board,” He pauses. “Please?”

Nodding absent-mindedly, you place the fruit back into his cupped hands.

You open the drawer behind the both of you and pull out an old chopping board, red soaked and stained into the wood that Ghost just can’t seem to get out. You place it on the counter next to the pomegranates, along with a clean bowl he didn’t even hear you grab, and then find your way to the knife block. Hearing the subtle shink of a blade against wood, Ghost turns and scrutinises you as you try to remember which knife is the fruit knife.

Choosing the shortest one, you hold it by the handle, facing downwards just like Simon taught you, and place it on top of the chopping board with stitched-up hands and missing fingers from all the times he’s begged for more. From all the times you’ve said you have nothing more to give, but he knows you always have more. Knows you’ll always keep giving.

I’ll take even the spare and broken bits. The parts you don’t even want.

You watch, intently, as he delicately cuts the top of the pomegranate off, slicing through the thick skin.

Just look at me.

Gently, he peels the layers of the pomegranate back, kissing each one with the tips of his fingers, letting it stain them something beautifully violent.

Touch me.

He reveals the soft viscera inside, glancing back over to you again and again. Looking for something in your eyes.

Let me be full.

Then, he cuts it into quarters–continuously surprising you how gentle he is with it–but not down to the skin. Leaving it in a filleted star-like shape, he turns it upside down on the bowl, and, using his hand, slowly shakes the seeds off of the fruit into the bowl.

Once he’s finished, sure he’s got all of the seeds off, he moves onto the next. Repeats the same process. Maybe he repeats the same thoughts, too.

After he’s done, he sets the empty corpses aside. The red spills out onto the counter. You’re worried it’ll drip down onto the tile.

He’s staring. Not at you, but at the bowl of red. It’s almost eerie, how still, how quiet he can become.

The silence is deafening. You want to fill it.

Suddenly, he takes a bloody scoop of the red viscera with his hands.

Be full.

Lets the pinkish liquid dribble down his hand.

Let me fill you, and in turn, you me.

Then his forearm.

Feed on me until there is nothing left.

Then down onto the immaculately clean counter.

Let us decompose, intertwined.

The kitchen smells like bleach. It makes the back of your throat itch.

He offers his hands out towards you, like an olive branch, like some lurid type of eucharist, and, like the obedient dog you are, you feast.

Please. Please. Please, please, please, please-

“I love you.” He mumbles, fondly watching the muscle of your tongue dart out to catch the pinkish juice dribbling from your frothing maw.

-just say you love me, too.

You’re eating, and you begin to repeat it, but Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley has taught you well not to speak with your mouth full.

-------------------

I've spent the past week hearing 'Abbey' by Mitski at every turn, so it's safe to say that was the main force driving me to write this lmao. I'm pretty sure that if I heard that song or saw something about bloody pomegranates one more time I would've started chewing the flesh off of my own bones.

Cannibalism as a metaphor for love is an incredibly profound, and, in some ways, poetic literature device for the sheer destruction a toxic relationship can cause, so, I wanted to try my hand at it! And also to stop myself from clawing my face off from hearing anything about this cannibalism metaphor from literally everywhere on the internet.

Do tell if this feels too out of character for Ghost. I originally planned this for König, but I ended up changing it. Overall, thank you for sitting down and reading my work! It means a lot <3

I'll leave it up to you if the metaphor is really a metaphor in the end.

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