#sad boy | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nsharks · 1 year

Note

can we have more of fighting n make up w ghost plsss :,)

I love me my angst teehee

your first christmas with simon is by far the worst

very brief death mention

In the beginning, when your relationship is still a hesitant little game, Simon's mood can be hard to follow.

There are days between your visits at this point. He'll call you sometimes at odd hours to ask you over. Sometimes because he likes sipping tea with you. Most of the time because he wants to bury himself inside you and make you whimper.

He likes your company.

So much so that he calls you one evening, this time requesting: "Come play Scrabble with me, pet."

You'd been expecting him to invite you over, but not for this. This enigma of a man left you dumbfounded. "What?" was all you could say.

"You said you like it, right? Played it as a kid?"

You shook your head to yourself, disbelieving of his attention to the many details you'd ranted about over the past six months of knowing him. "Um, yes, I did say that."

But that was just one piece of Simon: inviting you over to play board games, grumpily bantering with you when you'd beaten him three times in a row (You must be hiding letters from me. Bloody hell.), then grabbing you by your ankles and dragging you across the rug so he could get you on his lap. He'd given a reproaching spank to your butt and said you had to ride his cock as an apology for cheating. (M’not cheating, Simon, I swear!) But you had no problem apologizing to him, there on his living room rug.

That was one piece, and then the other piece of him would arrive just a week later. Creep up on you until he wasn't even the same person anymore.

One evening, after inviting yourself over (because he'd oddly dropped off the grid for a few days), you are greeted by someone who smells an awful lot like Sterlings. He lets you in, but he's stiff. Withdrawn. He doesn’t offer much of a greeting. Just lets you tell him about your day. His hands are restrained to the pockets of his hoodie and you feel cold in the absence of their attention.

"Are you going to get a tree?" you ask him, forcing a smile despite the weird tension.

"What?"

"For the holidays," you clarify. "You know... to decorate."

Latent eyes. "Don’t plan to.”

Tongue pressed to your cheek, you decide to excuse yourself shortly after that. You mewl over your confusion that night underneath a hot shower.

Your patience and kindness is what entangled you with him in the first place. It’s also what results in you inviting him over to your flat the next day with a little surprise, hoping to bring back the man who’d played Scrabble with you and showered you with kisses.

He presents himself at your door with black sweats hugging his hips and a long-sleeved shirt. The mask, ever-present.

“I’ve got something for you,” you tell him after he’s inside, not bothering to kick off his boots.

Simon only offers you a quizzical look before waiting there as you grab the plate of cookies you’d made. But when you show him your attempt at frosted snowmen and Christmas trees, you suddenly start to feel a bit silly.

“I’ve never made these kind before,” you mutter sheepishly when he says nothing. Just stares at the cookies with a hard look. “Look, I promise they taste good. I also got you a little something.”

And then you’re pointing to a gift under your tree—

—small, humbly wrapped.

“It’s nothing much,” you shrug, chewing your lip. “It’s just something I picked up today. I thought you might need help to get you in the holiday-“

But the shift in his mood is not what you’d hoped for.

It’s strange. Like he hates everything he’s hearing.

The tension in Simon’s shoulders only seems to have woven deeper into the very fibers of him, and he’s suddenly staring between you and the cookies and the Christmas tree.

“What made you think I would wan’ any of this?” Simon cuts you off, each word a slow punch.

You must’ve misheard him. “Sorry?”

“Fuckin’ hell. I shouldn’t have come.”

Your faces pales. “I don’t understand—“

“Don’t understand what? That I don’t give a shit about the holidays?” And his low voice seems to have the same effect as barbed wire. The sheer mass of him suddenly becomes starkly apparent, filling up the room. “Can I make it any clearer for you?”

It’s a little thing called hindsight that gnaws at you. Prickles your eyes. Don’t plan to. You realize, in his own way, he’d already told you how he felt about Christmas time.

But the humiliation draws out a soft snap from you, “Is it so hard to just say thank you?”

“I didn’t ask for this,” he huffs. He’s truly angry: you can’t begin to understand why. “I don’t want it.”

“A normal person would just accept it,” your fingers press into the plate. “Not be such a dick.”

“A dick, yeah?" A bitter taunt. "Can be a real dick if you want me to.”

“Jesus, Simon! No, I don’t want—“

“You sure, pet?” He gestures to the plate in your hands and the tree. “Maybe if you see just how much of a dick I can be, you’ll give this shit up.”

His eyes, typically dull and unreadable, shoot you a scrutinizing look that doesn’t even seem to resemble him. But those eyes open up to you, just for a moment. A vulnerable flame doused in what your own perception detects as guilt. Deeply buried guilt that he doesn’t know where to put right now except onto you.

“You know what—“ you’re turning from him with curled lips. Hurt. Embarrassed. There’s a splintering sound when the plate of cookies, ceramic and all, is shoved into the bin.

“However bad of a person you think you are, Simon… I promise, you are even worse than that.”

The words blister your mouth on the way out.

You don't look at him. Just listen, with your hands pressed to your temples, as you hear the thunder of his boots on his way out the door. A slam reverberates through the walls, through your trembling hands. The tears finally seep out once he’s gone. The choking kind. Leaves you a bit numb and empty by the time you’ve ghosted your way into bed.

And at this point in your relationship, there’s no Simon knocking at your door that night. No verbal apology— because Ghost never has to do that. Why would he? You're not even officially his girlfriend yet, just someone he can't seem to shake off. Someone who he thinks about a lot and someone who thinks about him. Someone who'd try, with gentle hands and patient ears, to show him that it's not so bad to be cared for.

You don’t hear from him for days. Empty days that ridicule you. A gift under the tree that snickers at you.

But did you really think he’d let you in?

There was a stony wall he’d put up long before you. Here and there, you’d manage to poke some of the bricks out, peek your gaze through. It was becoming apparent that you’d never truly find a way over it, though.

Until a little box shows up at your door—

—filled with cookies.

It’s a silent offering; you know it once you see the silhouettes of their Christmas shapes. You cry instantly. There’s no name, no message, but you know it’s from him.

That’s all there is, though. And although the box of cookies finds home on your kitchen table, you urge yourself not to give in no matter how strong the itch. You just find his name on your phone and blearily stare at it that night.

A few more days.

Finally, one evening, a dubious knock—

—you can’t stop the hope that carries you to the door.

Simon stands, looking at his feet, anger subdued, and his eyes carefully lifting up. Any scrutiny that’d once been there, storming in his pupils, has long settled. Baring its true skin of sadness.

He’s got something in his grip that you don’t notice until he’s walking in on his own accord.

His name leaves your breath but he must not hear it. Just sits down on your couch and looks at you expectantly. You join him, but leave a purposeful gap, because that scent, that warmth, would diffuse your efforts.

In his hands, a bear. Dwarfed by his palms.

“This was my nephew’s,” he tells you gruffly. Clearing his throat, he hands it to you and gives a little nod, as if to say have it. Within just days, Simon managed to give you the only two gifts he’d ever offered in your relationship. Perhaps, it’s how he thought apologies worked.

You take the bear with gentle hands and feel the aged softness, the worn love. Embedded in it: was, was, was.

Things start to click. You recall his guilt, his hate for the holidays: the distance and anger you’d witnessed in him had really been grief.

“Simon, I can’t take this from you.”

“It just sits in my closet,” he mumbles. Then, a low beg, “Take it… Please.”

You nod.

And then, Simon’s fingertips reach over the gap to touch your collarbone, a tentative request for permission that you give by saying: “It’s okay.”

It’s all he needs to hear before resting his head atop your shoulder. That skin between his brows pressed to the firm bone of you, and you feel it twist tightly to indicate that he closing his eyes, hard. Not crying, no. He didn’t have that in him. But you think, in this moment, that his offering of tender vulnerability is more than enough.

He has poked out one of the bricks in that wall for you.

“Was a proper dick,” he admits in a grumble. Mask lifted to allow a solemn kiss to you neck.

“You were,” you whisper. “But… I didn’t mean what I said.” About you being a bad person.

“Okay if you did.”

But you tell him again, shaking your head and touching his back: I didn’t mean it. And you repeat it a few more times for him until he truly hears you.

And maybe Simon won't spend Christmas day with you. No, he's not ready to let you see that much of his grief. But for tonight, he'll share those cookies with you and open that little gift you got him and tell you a few things about his nephew. Mumbling softly, "you would've liked him, I think."

#sad boy #simon ghost riley x you #simon riley x reader #cod #simon ghost riley #call of duty #fanfiction #ghost #fluff #angst #tw death #fem!reader

4K notes · View notes