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dastardly-imbecile · 16 days ago

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DETRITIVORE

Something about the way you—as holy as anything could ever be—letting him, man of blood and ochre touch you, bask in your evanescence. Tear you down to Earth from your heavenly demesne, down to the frozen wastes of Hell and all below. The concept turns him on more than he’d care to admit, tightens the pressure in his pants. --- Simon finds an angel (or something better, something beyond) OR simon goes INSANE over a 6 month situationship with an otherworldly being

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Wordcount: ~8.8k

Somewhat inspired by this drabble by @quarterlifekitty!

You are a pretty little thing, fragile despite your radiance, a filigree chain and a thin glass bauble, so easily shattered, so easily crushed. Ghost looks at you and thinks of skewering butterflies to corkboards and ripping their wings off, thinks of many angels dancing on the heads of many pins.

Because that’s what you are, great grand wings spread out behind you, bright enough to blind him, colors he can’t name intertwining in the spaces between flat feathers as large as his head.

He’s bleeding, he thinks. Dully, something presses down on his chest, trying to staunch the bullet wounds. It might be himself. He can’t tell.

Slowly, you descend. No beam of sunlight from the heavens to spot you down, no tear in the sky, simply you, cloaked in white robes and ensconced in white wings, slowly dissipating at the edges in ephemeral wisps of light. Not entirely whole, not entirely three-dimensional.

You reach for him with a long hand, made of something that’s certainly not skin but instead looks almost to be stone, run through with veins of gray, slightly rough.

“Soon,” you tell him, hand curving to cup his chin, and for a moment, it is the most rapturous thing he has ever felt—even through his bloodstained mask, even though there is no rational way he’d be able to feel your touch. A warmth that radiates throughout his entire body, starts at his cheek and rushes through his torso, past the lethargy of his heart, into some hidden core that he had not known existed, not before this point. For a moment, he thinks of nectar in his bloodstream, golden ichor seeping out of the many ragged holes in his chest, and it is the saddest he has ever been. To imagine divinity wasted like that, soaking into the earth among the crimson bile that otherwise occupies his veins.

-And then, your eyes flit to something beyond him, hand withdrawing in a moment.

Hell is not hot, he knows, not pits of lava and blazing pitchforks.

Hell is cold. As cold as he is right now.

There is the strength of arms under him, wrapping around his back and his legs, breath on his ear, a muttered, “shit-fuck-goddamn-” and you flicker away in many snowy tatters of static and white and marble and a soulful gaze, disappointed, why are you disappointed?

He tries to summon the breath to ask, but it is rapidly leaking out of his chest, and you’re too far gone to hear, in any case.

—

When Simon wakes, it’s in the medbay, a dingy old room of wide white walls and small, uncleaned windows. Nobody bothers to upkeep it, because more often than not, their breed of missions leaves them dead, not injured.

With that stray thought comes all the others, all flooding in one-after-another, battlefield and bullets and you, thing from the sky, impossibly bright light at the end of a not-so-dark-tunnel.

“Simon,” Price says from beside the bed, hunched over on a chair almost comically small, and says nothing else. Nothing else needed, really. Polite formalities like you’re awake or how are you are time wasters at best, downright offensive at worst.

“I was shot?” He asks, moving a hand to run over his bare chest. Every muscle in his shoulder, from deltoid to trapezius, aches in a new, unique way. His chest itself is swathed in an expanse of bandages. White. His eyes catch on the color and half a memory manages to dredge itself up from the tar pits of his subconscious.

Price grunts out an affirmation. “Near bled out. Miracle you didn’t, according to the nurse.”

“Miracle,” he repeats. The word is dry on his tongue.

Miracle.

He almost says something to Price—the words fizz on his tongue, something about angels and something about death—but he swallows them before they can burst free. Part of it is the rational side of him, that of steely logic that recites stories of blood-loss-induced-hallucinations, of the inherent untrustworthiness of the human mind.

The other side that staunches the words in their path is, of course, the irrational. If you’re real. If he can still remember the heat of your hand, of your fingernails digging into his chin. To speak of you is to share, is to give someone else a taste of your mythos, and for whatever reason, he does not think he can bear that.

Worse, what if Price has seen you too, in those quiet moments clung to the thread of life? What if you’re not his, purely his?

Better not to know.

“Better get some rest,” Price says, puncturing those errant thoughts. He stands and reaches a hand up, as if to give Simon a pat upon the shoulder, brings it back down just as quickly when he remembers the wound.

He does, eventually, when he can’t hold his eyelids up against the march of sleep anymore. Dreams, rather predictably, of white as pale as snow and a hand scraping its way down his jaw.

—

A week passes before he’s cleared to walk, another before he can sleep in his own quarters. It passes in a blurry sort of delirium, punctured only by the occasional visit. Johnny brings him an obnoxiously large bouquet of flowers and what must’ve been the girliest get well soon card he could find, and Kyle smuggles in a bit of real chocolate—to offset the medbay mush, worse even than their common fare in the cafeteria—and Price sits heavily by the bedside while sharpening his knife.

Still, the moment he’s able to kick his feet over the side of the bed, make his way back to his quarters, the fog clears. There is a single goal in mind that drives him to boot up the shitty laptop tucked into his drawer—his personal, untraceable one, not the one military-issued—and stare at his blinking cursor, trying to think of what to search.

He starts, eventually, with Wikipedia, feeling more than a bit like a grade school boy trying to cheat on a school project. Scrawls first through Angel, jumps from there to Valkyrie, and then Apsara and Uthra and Elioud, a dozen mythologies and a dozen tales of beings from the heavens. Considers himself, for a moment afterwards, and then switches to a different tab and types out, is it normal to have hallucinations before dying. Deletes it after only a moment.

You were no hallucination. He knows that as well as anything, as well as he’s able to touch his hand to his chest and push his fingers into the gnarls of scar, trace his tongue over every tooth in his mouth.

With the same tab, he searches, guardian angel, and buries himself in that research. Moves from webpages of folklore to the deeper, smaller parts of the internet—ends, finally, on a small, unmarked forum. No logo, only a small, off-center title that reads, angel watch.

Below that, a small tick counts off, 121 members, 13 active, 1 guest.

The rest is locked off behind a sign-in box. Members only. His hand hovers over it for a moment before he clicks the create account button. Sends the confirmation email to one of many burners—suitably generic, but not too generic, less John Doe and more Arthur Davies—and watches the site open up to him like a flower. By now, the ticking clock in the corner of the screen displays a time that’s more than a stone’s throw past midnight, but the bluelight burns any exhaustion away.

That, and fascination. That, and obsession. That, and the desire not to dream—every night, these past two weeks, he’s been plagued by you—and you make his dreams so warm that it’s painful to wake up.

Clicking through the threads reveals far more interesting information than those previous clinical, detached webpages. He navigates from post to post, and surprises himself by finding more than a little entertainment in reading the little blurbs. Most of them pluck at his sense for falsehood, simply fabricated stories, and others no doubt come from the minds of people who probably shouldn’t have their delusions fed into. He quashes the thought that he’s one of those immediately.

It’s not like he only saw you on the bottom of a four-day bender—as one poster—or, quote, doctor told me I have schizophrenia but my angel told me not to take the meds. He’s different. You came for him, and no matter how much he scrubs at his chin with lye soap, he’s incapable of erasing the feeling of your touch.

Here and there, though, he finds hope. The occasional post—one in a dozen, in two or three—that has him enraptured. Stories of having a NDE—site lingo for near death experience, a car crash or a mugging or a sickness—and seeing a figure of white and wings. Moreover, it’s in these threads that he begins to notice the common question.

How can I see them again?

The consensus emerges by the time dawn claws its way up the horizon and even enrapturement can’t keep him from rubbing at his eyes.

It’s the experience that draws them, draws you, down to the mortal plane. It’s the sliver between life and death, it’s those moments of balance on the tip of a knife, on the head of a pin.

The only way to see you again—to ensure that you are real, to find some way to truly talk to you—is to tear his own heart from his chest, is to talk to you in the seconds before he must shove it back into place.

—

It’s for that reason that, three months later, his hands twist at each other in his lap as they sit upon the plane. Fully decked out in gear, Soap to one side and Gaz to the other, on their way to some distant Northern country under the pretense of defending the peace. He’s not sure whose peace they’re defending, but he’s never really cared. Go in, go out, as smoothly as a needle through thread. Or, not always so smoothly—sometimes, it’s rough as a serrated knife sawing through bone—but the fact remains that it’s his job to stay unscathed.

Except, not this time. This time, he will find some way—he doesn’t know which one, not yet, but it will come to him in the heat of battle—to throw himself before a spray of bullets, to let the slash of a knife brush too close to some vital artery.

See you. Grab you. He wonders what your wings would feel like beneath his fingers, wonders if you’d burn as hot if he stuck his hand down your throat, if there is a molten core at the nape of your spine that powers you like some miniature sun. He’d like to place his palm over it and let it scald him to the bone, burn his blood black and sticky as tar.

“Nervous?” Soap pipes up from beside him. When he stares at him blankly, he sheepishly gestures to the wringing of the hands. “Usually, yer right still. What’sit?”

“No,” he replies. The heaviness of his voice must be enough indication not to prod, though Soap doesn’t turn away without a knowing sort of tilt of his head. He must think it’s because of the near-death he suffered, must think that some monster of nerves has Ghost’s head clutched in its claws.

Well, one monster does. If you could be called a monster, which you can’t. The metaphor sort of falls apart if you examine it for too long, but lucky for him, he’s too distracted to do that.

—

As it turns out, things never really go by plan. The mission itself is belly-up from the first moments they touch the ground—supposed to be an easy insertion, an ambush, but the gunfire greeting them beyond the helicopter sparks of a mole. Probably some desk jockey two levels down, who’s going to be court-martialed and shot in a month or so when they find the crumbs leading back to his desktop, but that thought doesn’t comfort Ghost much when he’s dodging flarefire.

Still, the idea of self-sacrifice hangs heavy in his mind, but that plan was made under the assumption of an easy mission. This—with Soap cursing up a storm ahead of him, crouching around the side of a wall, and Price’s voice screaming through his headset, doesn’t really cultivate that sort of mindset. He’s slid easily into the slot made for him upon the team—that of one conjoined unit, of step and fire and you watch my back, I’ll watch yours.

It’s only through attrition that they manage to whittle the enemy corps down. “Split,” Soap murmurs to him, after the sound of gunfire has died down. They do—around the side of a brick building, down two winding roads, and he spots the enemy soldier before he even consciously shoots—a blur of black that darts out from behind an outcrop of crates, trigger, press, boom. The gun kicks back in his hand, but it doesn’t even shake him. He doesn’t even spare the body a glance—the art of killing has been hardwired into his skull, runic commands etched into every square inch of bone, routine as a computer executing the thousandth line of code.

It’s only when the air shivers that he stops. Pauses. Would’ve been able to excuse it as a heat mirage in any other weather, but here, it’s cold enough that, even through the many layers of combat fatigues, chill licks its way down his skin.

In any case, after a moment passes, it’s no longer excusable as any sort of mirage at all.

Your wings are the ones that form first—the air crystallizes, brightens and darkens simultaneously, forms first a vague silhouette that carves itself into an expanse of feathers and light. Then, the curve of your robes, the impression of a body with stumps for arms, a flat plane for a face. From there, the smaller details make themselves known—hands folding out from the air, eyes and lips and the folds in your clothes. He imagines this is what watching Michelangelo carve David must have been like, how he would have felt watching God smooth Adam out of riverbank clay. Eve might be more accurate—pull out a rib and let the body fall in place around that, the curves of someone feminine and lush.

Wonder hits him first, but it only lasts a moment—vindication swiftly swallows it, he’s seeing you and he’s not even half-dead, so thus, he cannot be insane. Before that even has a moment to settle; however, there is the bright burn of betrayal.

Because there you are—in front of him, vividly delicate, real as the clouds curling above—but you are hunched over another, over this man with a bullet in his head.

His angel, his guardian, except…

Except, when he traces over the words from that forum, over what he knows of your presumably-type, the label fits less and less. What first comes to mind is the look of disappointment on your face, that day three months ago, when Soap scooped him from the mud. If you wanted to save him, why would you be disappointed? Ecstatic is the correct answer, perhaps beatifically peaceful.

And…

And, that’s not the first time he’s been so close to death, had his head trapped in its guillotine. He remembers the feeling of a wooden casket, remembers a dead man’s skin, softer than you’d think, after so many days in the ground.

He knows now, more certainly than he’s ever known anything. If some higher deity’d thought it fit to assign him a celestial watcher, it would have manifested then, six feet underground.

So that means…

What are you?

He takes a step closer. You do not even look at him—instead, you reach out both hands, cupped. The solidity of meat apparently means nothing to an extradimensional being like you - you dip them into the dead man’s chest, and they sink in as easily as if it were water. Spend a moment in stillness, wrists twitching as if you are rooting about within, and then pull.

In your cupped palms is a pool of liquid silver. Long strands of it stretch between them and his torso, both solid and liquid at once, like melted spidersilk or cold honey. Where the sunlight hits it, it gleams with streaks of impossible color that match your wings.

Doesn’t take any lessons in theology to know what it is—the notion comes as bright as instinct. Perhaps it’s hardwired into the human brain to recognize it, to know itself in third-person. The soul. He takes another step closer, enough that he could reach out and touch you, if he wished, and he does wish—but curiosity wins out.

You bring your hands up to your lips, tilt them, and drink the liquid down. Your throat bobs with the rapid movement, and he fixates on it, on the idea of something just beneath the skin, on the strange imitation of humanity in that small movement.

For a moment, you solidify—you were nowhere near translucent, before, but you were lacking some aspect of dimension. An item in a videogame without proper lighting, an untextured model still within the project viewport. Now, though, now, he feels like he could see you in any pub—minus the wings and robes and stone-gray skin.

Just as his hand twitches, begging to give in to the temptation of reaching, of letting your warmth engulf him once again, you turn.

Look at him, hand half-extended, and scramble back. Not scramble—your limbs do not move, there is no graceless flailing, simply the blink of a shutter, and you are standing two steps back, no longer kneeling. His teeth clash together in instinctual frustration.

“You can see me,” you say softly. Not a question. A statement.

“What are you?” He asks, instead of answering, all too aware of his limited time—the notion that his teammates will soon be searching for him, that his comms will crackle to life—and, so, he embellishes his question with, “an angel?”

You tilt your head. “No. I… I remember you. Man of the skull.”

He can feel the ugly grin creeping up his lips. Covered by his masks’s own vicious leer. The face of death, looking at its mirror.

“What, then, huh?” He takes a step forwards, towards you, stepping over the dead man’s body, and you flicker back in an equal motion, still utterly still.

“A…” you glance around, as if looking for an escape route, but there’s no real urgency in the movement. He gets the feeling that you could leave entirely, if you wished, vanish from existence as easily as you came into it. No, you’re entertaining him, for a reason he’d quite like to get his hands on. “A scavenger. Carrion-eater.”

“The dead. You eat that? What is it, th’ soul?”

“Something like that,” you reply. “Has to be fresh; dissipates in thirty seconds, vanishes entirely after a minute.”

Ghost, Price says through the com, Ghost, you copy? Area cleared. Return to the chopper.

He paws up at his helmet, caught in the instinctual urge to turn it off. But no—he has to make it back. Time ticking, one, two, three.

“I can get you food,” he says, hefting his gun, letting the weight bring his hands down a touch, “fresh as you need.”

You blink at him with wide eyes. Listening quietly. Maybe you sense the second part of the words, the stick behind the carrot.

“Let me touch you,” he finishes. Instantly, you draw back, already tearing apart at the edges—preparing to flit out of existence—so he hurries, the words stumbling over themself, “the hand, just the hand.”

Your disintegration pauses. A moment of consideration—he’s acutely aware of every second that passes, waiting for the next crackle of Price’s voice—and then, you say, “you’ll kill them?”

Again, he smiles. His cheeks ache with the movement—it’s more action than they’ve seen in months. Useless gesture too, considering the mask, but he’s hoping you can intuit in some way.

“Fresh as can be, luv.”

Slowly, you reach out a single stone-clad hand. He grasps it immediately, before you’re even fully done moving, and the warmth floods through him immediately—starts at his palm and rushes up through his veins like and concentrates in his chest, in the small of his back, in the area behind his eyes. It comes with not exactly a memory, but a feeling—the idea of safety, the idea of a childhood he never had, of an adulthood he’ll never experience. A warm fireplace and a comfortable chair, joints that do not crack and skin free of scars and someone waiting in the other room, soft and…

And your hand vanishes. He hadn’t realized he’d closed his eyes until he opens them, beholds the small street without you, and his hands close sharply around a bubble of air.

Report- Price begins, caught in the middle of a half-cut sentence.

“Heard,” he interrupts, rubbing at his shoulders. If he needed you before, then he cannot live without you, now. Wants, with each beat of heart, to touch you not through gloves or a mask, but skin-to-skin, tear you open in the kindest ways. Sink into your heat until he cannot remember himself, until he can make that other life a reality.

—

“Jesus, Simon,” Johnny says, interrupting his next shot—the bullet goes a touch wide, doesn’t hit the dummy in the head but instead sinks into its ear. “The fuck’re you doing out ‘ere?”

Last he checked the clock—which was a couple dozen shots ago—it was somewhere in the realm of 1:00. He doesn’t spare Johnny a glance.

“Could ask the same of you.”

“Having a piss. Saw ye through the window.”

“Practicing,” he says calmly. Aim, shoot. Straight through the chest. Another, through the head.

“Jesus,” he repeats, “I ken we have a mission tomorrow, but Christ, you cannae-”

His words are cut off by the next shot. He says something else, and Simon grunts out a response, but his focus has been taken by the task. Must practice—must hit every shot he aims tomorrow, so you will return, so you will let him take your hand, take something else. He’s been dreaming about you, still, this month away. Now, though, it’s less the vague impression of wings and robes, and more…

More real. More him upon you, more you upon him, more the softness of your skin and the pitch of your voice.

He wants you more than he’s wanted anything in his life. And, to be fair, Simon has never coveted much. A bed to sleep in at night, a good glass of bourbon. He’s had much of his greed beat out of him, by his father and life and the trials of the military.

Either way, maybe that makes this a bit more reasonable. A man can only build up so much debt before he can cash in, before he can make a grab at the golden goose and claw at the aurum viscera within.

—

This time, it’s a multi-day mission, taking over a building, waiting for a package to be delivered. No ambush this time around—after last time, mission details have been kept locked behind walls of steel—and so it is straightforward when he splits down a long metal hallway, away from the others. When he locks a man in his sight, aims, shoots, just like all those hours of practice.

He goes down before he has time to scream.

Now, Simon pauses, unsure for the briefest of a second—until the air begins to waver, until you pull into reality like a slip of cloth through a microscopic gap, unfurling and weaving and defining yourself in slow, subtle brushstrokes. You do not spare him a glance until you’re done pulling the ichor from this man’s chest—such single-minded focus on the meal in front of you.

Only when the final drops are gone, down the smooth column of your throat, do you turn your eyes to him.

“Thank you,” you say, flickering into a standing position. He nods—must actively try to keep the motion casual, to not belay the excitement that shudders beneath his skin.

“Still hungry?”

“Always,” you reply, grimacing.

Slowly, he makes his way through the spiraling hallways of the complex, turning his way towards the nexus at the center—where they are supposed to meet—and each enemy that goes down, you appear in due time, drink them dry of whatever liquid rests in their deepest heart. With each successive body, you grow realer yet—each time, he thinks that must be the end of it, but then, it happens again—and even you seem shocked by it. You actually linger, after the fifth, to drift alongside him as he stalks down the hall.

“I’ve never had this much before,” you confess, “I can… I feel like I could stay here forever.”

“Stay?” He asks immediately, focus sharpening immediately, honing in on that word. The small tatters of light that usually flake from the edges of your body are gone, he notices—now, the lines are sharp and distinct against the background.

“Maybe,” you whisper, and give a longer, searching look, evaluating him for some silent virtue that he’s sure he does not have. Not if it’s honor, or patience, or guilt.

Area secure, Price pipes through his headset.

Acknowledged, he replies. Ahead, the meeting place looms, as does the fact that he will not have your company—for how long? A month, two? Until another opportunity to shoot and stab, until he’s able to watch you suck that silver liquid down your throat, ache for the opportunity of a single brush.

His mind makes the decision before his mouth does.

“Tonight,” he says, “the safehouse. If you can.” Doesn’t bother giving an address—clearly, you’ve been able to follow him well enough.

Another line crossed, another glimmer of hesitation in your eyes. He tilts his head towards the drained body upon the floor, a sort of come on, a reminder of all he’s done for you.

“I’ll try,” you say.

You will. If he were you, he’d do more than try—he’d long, he’d yearn.

Then again, he already does.

—-

It’s more than a bit of a surprise when he walks into the room, skin still damp from the shower, and sees you perched upon his bed as delicately as a bird. Wings tucked behind your back, knees drawn up to your chest. Already, the edges of your being have grown a touch ragged, tearing in miniscule ways, but you are still mostly whole and mostly real.

“You came,” he says, and you nod, make a little sound of confirmation. Maybe it’s the warm shower, maybe it’s the towel barely clinging to his waist, maybe it’s you perched upon his bed but you are cast in a new light here.

Well. Not new, not if he admits to himself. Another angle, perhaps, the dark side of the moon. The need for your warmth, for the soothing balm of your touch, is nothing new, and neither necessarily is the sudden rush of blood to his groin, but both have been amped up to a thousand.

“What are you?” He asks, still standing across from you, towering above your sitting form. Your eyes dart up to look at him, and then down to his chest, and up again. The skin is a mess of scars—some old, some as new as those wounds from months ago, still faintly scrapped over with raw red skin.

“I told you,” you start, but he cuts you off.

“From where? How?”

“I…” you hesitate, shying back upon the bed, “I don’t know. If I was ever human. Or… I came to, one day, and I was like this.”

His lips twitch up into a smile. This time, the mask is off, and you can see it—it seems to scare and reassure you in equal measure, drawing some parts of you forward and throwing others back.

“And how’d you find out ‘bout the soul thing?”

You shrug. This movement is lighter, and when you look up again, there is a twist of a smile upon your own face. The first time he has seen that expression crack out of anything besides careful placidity—and it is, as expected, beautiful and terrible all at once, tempting as a hot stove.

“Instinct, I guess.”

Some sort of ice has been cracked. Enough that he’s able to move over, gingerly set himself down upon the bed. A good distance from you, yes, but you do not even flinch, do not flicker away to a safe distance—instead, only tilt your head the opposite way, regard him with calculated levity.

“You, then?” You ask eventually, “what are you?”

He actually barks out a surprised laugh. “Y’ don’t wanna know that, luv.”

You let out a low hum, rocking back, wings twitching in what might be amusement. A moment of silence passes—he runs his eyes over you, noting it all down in his memory. The slope of your shoulders, the gentle hang of your robes, the hunch of your wings, feathers all a trembling, blown about by some extradimensional wind. You are beauty personified, Aphrodite if there ever was one, a face to launch ships and start wars and dream of before you die, the life that flickers before the eyes as synapses fire and blood waters the concrete.

Maybe you see the desire in his eyes, misinterpret it—or, not misinterpret, but interpret sideways, interpret halfway—and reach out your hand.

“It feels good?” You ask, fingers curling in on themselves, “when I do this?”

He nods, eyes fixed intently upon them. You have no fingernails—such a strange thing to fixate on—but it’s a small indication of inhumanity.

Instead of waiting for him to grab your hand like last time, you stretch forwards. Emboldened by the conversation, perhaps. He freezes when your fingers graze the curve of your jaw, spine tensing and liquifying in the span of five seconds. The warmth that seeps from the touch engulfs his cheek, his mind, drips down his shoulders in the same manner as an overflowing volcano. More intense, this way, skin to almost-skin—your palm comes around to cup his chin, inspiring another wave of ecstasy. It’s not quite pleasure, which is a strange thing to say when it feels so good—but it’s less active than that, less the burn of enjoyment and more the sooth of inattention.

What the womb feels like, he thinks, and what death feels like, with none of the mess that comes in between.

He has no way of knowing how long you sit there, basking in the pool of bliss, but eventually, you pull away in slow increments, and the warmth fades as quickly as it came. He has enough self-restraint not to cry out, but that doesn’t stop the shudder that whispers through his shoulder, claws at the lining of his stomach.

“I think…” you say, “I think I have to go.” You give him a helpless sort of look, accentuated by your flaking edges, by the motes of light that fall from your arms and dissipate upon the bedsheet.

“Already?” He asks, “after all that?”

You shrug, already drawing both hands back to your chest.

“Hungry, aren’t you?”

You flash him a soft smile. “Very.”

And then, in a twist of reality, you’re gone, leaving him with only the memory of your presence. Greedy thing—five men, and still starving.

He’s wants too, as ravenously as you must. Maybe you’re a good match for each other after all, he thinks, carrion-eater and predator, hyena trailing behind the lion and feeding on the artfully-arranged scraps.

—

By the first month back at base, Simon’s unbearably restless, stalking through the halls. Spends late nights at the firing range until his hand molds into the shape of the gun. Johnny offers to spar with him, to release some of that pent-up energy, and then curses him out for slamming him onto the mat, hand locked around his throat.

It takes a strangely long amount of time for him to reach the next milestone—for him to be laying upon his thin sheets, thinking of you as he’s apt to do, and for the connection to jump between up and down, to jump from his head to his hand to the sudden pressure in his pants. He hasn’t managed to meld the image of you with the image of something feminine—always sheathed in those white robes, always so distant, so clearly not trying to be any form of seductive—but maybe it’s the month away, maybe it’s the dark hour, maybe it’s the drink he’d had at the pub. Something about Madonna-whore, something about the debasement of something sacred.

You are winged and stone, and as his hand wanders down to his zipper, tugs his dick free of its confines, he turns you about in his head—a conglomerate of a dozen angles, of the smoothness of your spine and the suggestion of breasts beneath the robe. Other things too, not what he usually looks at, when trying to enjoy a woman—the taper of your fingers and the flash of your teeth, the divinity hung about you like gauzy strips of taffeta.

He gives himself one cautious tug to the thought, and then another, and pleasure immediately begins raking its talons down his stomach. Hasn’t had the need to do this for months—hasn’t had a woman, in general, in years. No urge for it, for one reason, and too busy, for another, and women don’t tend to like him, for a third. Man who kills people for a living, destabilizes foreign countries and doesn’t bother to clean the blood from out under his fingernails.

You, though. You like it. You need it.

The thought is enough to make his back arch slightly off the bed, as his fist tightens, pace quickens. Another minute, and then he thinks of the brush of your hand against his chin, the bend of your smile, and his hips start jerking, thrusting into the air. Cum spills from his tip and pools warm on his hand, drips down into the lines of his abdomen. Simon lays there for a long, still moment, trying to come to terms with all that this wank session has revealed about himself.

So it helps briefly, in the next month that passes, these small moments of relief. At some point, though, it starts getting worse—he lays upon his bed, liquid cooling on his stomach, and the only thing he can think about is how different it is from you. Falls flatter, too, when he realizes he does not even have a name to groan, does not have anything more than a rapidly-fading memory. Steps into the shower to clean up, scalds the water as hot as it can get, until his skin is shiny and blush-pink, but it’s not enough and it’s too much all at once.

Hardest thing he’s ever done, when Price finally gathers them back into the meeting room, is to pretend he’s not ecstatic at the prospect of a new mission. Down to the dusty stretch of some scorched desert. Hostage rescue this time—save some big-name honcho from being tortured and interrogated so they can torture and interrogate him instead—but what really matters is that it involves taking out a cabal of soldiers, is that it involves spraying bullets and the cutthroat shine of a blade, is that it involves seeing you again.

—

Ghost wonders, when the man falls, and your form shimmers to life, if this is what worship feels like. He’s never been particularly religious—after a life like his, you have to bend one way or the other, and he did not think to take the kind way out—but maybe, if he’d known you younger, with a softer mind, he could’ve been.

Miracle personified, Eve wrapped around a serrated rib and God in a burning bush, sending smoke to cloud the sky.

He does not fully relax until you manifest fully, until you dip your hands into the man’s chest and begin to unwind his soul from his body. Maybe it’s that that gets him: normally, he is always on the move, eyes peeled for the slightest bit of movement, scanning every square inch of corrugated surface. Today, though, he’s blissfully distracted by you, and so, he does not sense the man who clips him in the stomach with a bullet and sprays his blood across the brick.

He turns immediately, fires off a shot, which by instinct or practice or sheer luck manages to land and kill the enemy before another can be fired. His other hand, he clutches to his stomach, as his knees buckle and he slams to the ground. It’s not good, he knows, immediately—the bullet managed to clip one of the soft, squishy parts of his body, sink into an area with much blood and much pain and much vital function—but he doesn’t know that it’s fatal until he sees white. Until you shimmer into existence, sitting eye-level with him, hands clasped.

“Angel,” he croaks. Blood touches the back of his tongue with the word, and he barely holds back the urge to cough in an attempt to spare you from the spray.

Your hands dart forward, and then draw back, winding around each other in a fretting, wringing motion.

“Go on,” he adds, and the blood burbles up to coat the ridges of his mouth, “‘m dying. Might- might as well get your… your fill.”

“No,” you reply softly, “no, I think I can…” your face screws up in concentration, bottom lip drawn into your mouth, and you reach.

Not for him, but for the same space you grasp at inside the corpses’ chests, but some realm not fit for human eyes. Your hands vanish, even though they’re still there—impossible to explain, four-dimensional mumbo-jumbo, same vein as Cthulhu in impossible colors and geometric shapes that turn inside-out while staying still—and when they reappear, they’re trailing long strands of silver almost-liquid.

You shove it up at his face, and when he doesn’t move, dumbed out by the blood staining his hands and the vision of you, you put a single finger upon his bottom lip and shove the liquid in. It tastes of impossible things, of stardust and stories and some touch of his Ma’s old cooking, but that’s quickly superseded by the fact that your fingers are in your mouth, that you withdraw them and long sticky-sweet strands of silver soul stretch between them and his lips.��

Maybe it’s that that shocks him from his stupor; or maybe it’s the revitalization to his body, provided by the touch of soul—under his very hands, the skin warms to a feverish pitch, edges of the wound stretching together. Something is spit into his bloody palm, and it’s only when he raises it to his eyes does he realize it's’ the bullet—rejected from his body like a drunkard from a nightclub, thrown unceremoniously out.

He gasps once, a great intake of breath like he’s just come up from underwater. You shift back an inch, backing away in a blink of an eye, and the silver melts from your hands. Evaporates might be a better word. Whatever.

“Saved me,” he states, not a question, hand pressing into the former bullet wound with an almost dangerous pressure, searching for any evidence it was once there. He finds nothing—not even a scar. You nod slowly, carefully, hand brushing down your sides. From the edges of your being, large fractalloid chunks of light cleave away, collide against each other and shatter into small pieces that reform once again. It looks a bit like what he’d imagine a supernova would, fusion and fission and a thousand elements conjoining in the nuclear underbelly.

Despite the beauty, he also knows, it’s a sign of hunger, an indication of what the healing process took out of you-

And that only makes it better in a small, sick way. The fact that you gave up so much of yourself for him, that you’re peeling parts of your own body away, flaying the skin from your arm and grafting it over his, insofar as that’s any sort of metaphor. Shearing away a bit of your soul and feeding it to him upon the boat of your fingers, prying open his mouth and melding your corpus with his.

“You’re hungry,” he notes, pushing to his feet, “c’mon. Let’s get you back into good shape, ‘kay?”

He doesn’t miss the miniscule brightening in your features, the smile that tugs at the corners of your lips as you nod. It’s endearing in the strangest of ways, which is to say, it makes his heart beat, in tune with the new life you shoved down his throat, with the taste of the cosmos that still lingers upon his tongue.

—-

Simon’s unsurprised to see you upon his bed again come night. Not perched carefully on the edge like a bird about to take flight, but squarely in the center. He did not tell you explicitly to meet him, earlier, after mowing down six men and letting you suck them dry, but he supposes it’s an implicit order at this point.

For all he’s concerned, you’re his and he’s yours in every way that counts but one, and that one is easily remedied this very second.

Doesn’t start with that though, the proposition. Must stay slow and soft—a ginger set upon the mattress, a rasped, “never thanked you properly, for today.”

“No need,” you say quickly. A moment of hesitation, before your face cracks into a half smile, “couldn’t let my meal ticket die.”

“Oi, that’s all I am to you?” He asks. The offense in his voice is a mere mock, but maybe it gets to you, because you duck your chin into your chest, grin replaced by a bashful twist of the mouth.

“No, no. You’re…” you hesitate for a moment, settle eventually on a quiet, “kind.”

He has had many—many—named ascribed to him in all his years of life, but never kind. It sends a shiver up his spine, makes his stomach twist in a way that has nothing to do with either the nonpresent bullet wound or the heat writhing below. Neither pain nor lust—two sides of the same coin—but instead the same soft, squishy feeling that you’re all too good at provoking in him. The sort of thing that reduces him from Ghost—inhuman, immortal—to Simon, man of meat who’s all too easy to kill, Achilles and his heel and the softness beneath the skin.

He says as much, “Kind? Tha’s a first,” and you shrug.

“I think you’d taste good.”

At his questioning raise of an eyebrow, your wings twitch in embarrassment, and you rush to continue. “I never used to be able to tell the difference, never ate enough, but with you, I’ve developed… how do you say, a palate?” You consider that for a moment, before nodding. “Some are bitter, and some are sweet, and the latter sate me, former don’t. When you were…”

“Dying,” he helpfully supplies, when you seem too distressed to say the word yourself. You give him a grateful smile.

“I could’ve taken it,” you say, “I could reach down, to the parts inside your heart, and feel the rushing of your blood, the movement of your organs, and unhook your soul from your nerves, like unwinding the DNA helices in your cells. And I think it would taste like…” you hesitate again, smile falling from your face, with how caught up you are in your description, “it would be you.”

Simon can only stare, breathless. He wants you to split him open, vivisect him upon the bed, and crawl into his ribcage. Sew him shut with long strands of silver soul, and play your fingers down his vertebrae like a piano, twist your hands through his intestines. It’s the most turned on he’s ever been.

“...Sorry,” you add, a moment later, “I wouldn’t do that, of course, I wouldn’t eat-”

And he’s grabbing your shoulders, pulling roughly to slam his lips into yours. You let out a surprised squeak, but do not pull back, hands coming around immediately to grip his arms with a fervent sort of strength. He falls back, taking you with him, until he’s half-spread across the mattress and you are tucked between his legs. Your wings flatten, cloaking him like a blanket, encompassing every inch of his body in a blissful, rapturous heat that reverberates across every cell and molecule.

You let out a slow, soft moan into his mouth, and he must barely restrain the urge to bite. You and him, two sides of the same coin—predator and parasite, a snake eating its own tail, and he wants to consume you, wants you to consume him in turn. It’s not a new feeling, funnily enough—he has always had the hands to destroy and rebuild, to put a gun together and shoot it in turn.

“How do I taste?” He asks, drawing back slightly. You look up at him with bright eyes, distant universes colliding in the pupils, and wordlessly begin to tug at your robe, shucking it off. Cues him to do the same—tug his shirt over his head, reach down to unbutton his pants and kick them into a disheveled mess upon the ground. When he returns his eyes to you, your robe is cinched around your hips, revealing your chest, the curve of your breasts and dip of your waist. Satisfied with the turn of his attention, you slowly—agonizingly so—bring the robe down your legs.

He has no doubt that this is unnecessary—knows that you could magick it away in the blink of an eye, just like you flicker from place to place in lieu of walking, just like you know how to find him without words. It’s about the performance, it’s about his eyes on you, feeding you in a different, less corporeal way—which, albeit, doesn’t mean much when you’re hardly corporeal in the first place.

His dick twitches in anticipation, already at full mast. Years of nothing but his own hand and half a thought, and here—here is an angel before him, heaven concentrated in the space between your thighs. Call yourself a scavenger, carrion-eater, vulture and hyena and earthworm plowing through the dead, and maybe no God sculpted you upon an adamantium dais, but to him, you are no different from any celestial being he’s ever imagined. He used to wish for you, if not consciously, on those nights alone in his bed, Dad screaming in the other room, stomach hollow. Dreamed of you, six feet under, dead man crumbling under his hands.

He has been waiting all his life for this.

Robe pooling around your feet, you dart to the bed in that peculiar way of yours—standing one moment, sitting the next, close enough that your noses almost touch. He reaches for you reverently, and when his hands land upon your waist, warmth shoots through him as sharply as a thousand euphoric needles.

“Perfect,” he rasps, pulling you closer. You tilt your head back in invitation, and he takes it, planting a wet kiss on the bump of your clavicle, sucking gently. Moves down an inch, and then another, until his mouth clamps around your breast, teeth grazing your nipple. Your hand wraps around the back of his head, pushing him down and forwards, in tune with the breathy, soft groans that reverberate through your chest and into his. Something tickles his arms, and it takes a moment to realize that they’re feathers—your wings twist around, making what looks almost like a dome, enclosing you in this silent, private moment.

When he draws his head back to move to your other breast, you shake your head, nothing but a, “please,” stuttering from your lips. When he raises an eyebrow in silent question, you add to it—“don’t have… much time. Just…”

He knows what you’re saying-not-saying. Draws back, observes the chunks of light that fall from your sides like shooting stars, and makes the decision that any further ecstasy will have to be saved for the next time. If nothing else, he wants at least one chance to bury himself fully into your heat—he has felt the nerveless placidity of your touch, but the connection of flesh will bring a thousand more volts of pleasure pulsing down the conduit.

He shifts, and you flit into another position—half-laying, now, held up on your forearms, legs spread, facing him. Light gleams off your center, small motes that glisten against the stony gray—beats any classical statue he’s ever seen; his Galatea upon his sheets, his hands running up your legs. Past the curve of your ankles and knees, up towards the insides of your thighs and the nexus of your warmth. He so desperately wants to dip down, run his tongue down that long line of heat, but the way your glow scatters across his skin only reinforces that there is little time left, before you must dematerialize back into whatever cold world you hail from.

You let out a moan of sheer anticipation as he rises, lining up his cock with your entrance. A moment of anticipation—your hand, stationed around his bicep, tightens enough that your fingers dig into the skin, and then, he snaps in. Warmth bursts through his entire body, intensified by the keen you let out. In, out, hand going down to search for your clit. When he finds it, he gives it a rough swipe, and you throw your head back, wings flaring out flat and displacing a thousand tiny flakes of light.

“Love you,” you groan, breathless, and it should not move him like it does—you have met four times total, over the course of a scattering of months. But you saved him, and he’s saved you, in a more roundabout sort of way, and if he doesn’t deserve the bloom of true infatuation, then this deep, clasping thing is close enough as to be indistinguishable.

All he can manage is a whispered echo back at you, as he loses control of his lower body, and flushes against you in a release of liquid heat. You clench around him, riding out the waves of pleasure by clawing your hands down his back, starting at the shoulders and ending at the core of his spine, where your hands collapse, liquid and boneless. He falls beside you, narrowly missing your wing—probably thanks to a quick de-re-materialization on your part—arm falling heavily across your bare stomach. Radiance dissipates across Simon’s skin, past the ridges and dips of his scars, a thousand miniature stars and tiny supernovas moving through an unfamiliar universe.

“Thought you were an angel,” he murmurs, tilting his head to look you in the eyes, “when I found you.”

“Yeah?” You ask sleepily. He nods.

“Guardian angel. You’re better, now tha’ I know the truth.”

You stroke a hand down his head, leaving trails that tingle and burn like lines of wildfire. “You think you have one? Somewhere?”

“Not doing a very good job,” he says, snorting. You nod, frowning.

“She’ll have to compete with me.”

You look so adorable in this moment that he has to lean up, capture your lips in his for one soft, slow kiss. At some point, he must fall away, doze off into a languid slumber, but he cannot remember—it all dissipates into a bloom of radiance; a glimpse into the core of a distant sun.

—

When he wakes, in the morning, he faces an empty bed, sheets ruffled and not a calling card to remember you by. Would be insulting, if he did not know that you’ll be back. The next mission, the next time he dons the mask of Ghost, you will be there, his forever follower, his angelic saprophyte, feasting on the death he cannot access.

He smiles, rolling over and stretching luxuriously. Remembers the enclosure of your wings, the strength behind your touch.

It is so cold now, but it will be warm again soon, and he cannot anticipate it enough.

#does it count as cannibalism if ur not technically human #simon ghost riley x reader #simon riley x reader #simon riley x you #ghost x reader #ghost x you #call of duty #cod #smut #x reader #simon ghost riley x you

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