willinglymalicioustaco

[willinglymalicioustaco]

Pt. 4!! You would not believe how many times tumblr has crashed on my sad little phone as I try to copy all the fanfic over to here

I don’t think tumblr likes me…..

Ghost pauses mid-turn in the hallway. Fingers twitch.

His first thought is maybe Johnny fell asleep standing up—he’s done it before—or maybe wandered off for tea, for air, for some illusion of normalcy. But Ghost knows better. Knows Johnny’s routine with the kind of bone-deep certainty that comes from war and worry.

So he checks Gaz’s office next.

Empty. Lights off. No coffee mug, no chair kicked out like it usually is from a hasty exit. Not even a folder left behind from one of the half-assed reports Kyle pretends not to hate.

Something’s wrong.

Ghost’s hand fists at his side.

There’s only one other place to look.

The one place he’s avoided like a fucking infection.

He steels himself before the door.

He tells himself he’s just going to check on Roach. That’s all. Quick in, quick out. He’ll nod, say nothing, maybe even pull Roach aside and grunt something that passes for solidarity. He won’t look at her. He won’t see her.

He can’t.

He breathes once.

Twice.

Then opens the door.

And his world ends again.

Because it’s not the painting in the bed. Not the beautiful, coma-still, golden-haired illusion that made it easier to pretend they hadn’t all failed her. No. She’s not in the bed at all.

She’s crumpled on the fucking floor. Half-shifted. Not blonde. Not beautiful. Not masked. Gray and white and trembling. Shoulders curled like a broken wing. Hands raw from scrubbing, skin slicked with tears. Her face—her real face—twisted in shame.

And Johnny is kneeling beside her. Roach too. And Gaz, wide-eyed and breathless in the corner, like someone just gutted him.

She’s saying something, he can’t even hear it, doesn’t need to. Her mouth moves like she’s choking on glass, and her body heaves with the weight of silence, of pain too dense for language.

And Ghost—Ghost—the man who has stood over bleeding bodies, watched villages burn, who’s been the last voice in a dying soldier’s ear—he breaks.

His knees hit the tile with a sound like a dropped weapon. Not graceful. Not calculated. Just done.

He looks at her. Forces himself to.

And for the first time since the mission, he lets his face do something. His mouth trembles. His brow furrows. His chest shakes from a breath that feels like it’s cutting through old scar tissue.

“I…” he starts.

And stops.

The sound he makes next isn’t a word—it’s a sound. Half-choked, half-swallowed. A thing dragged up from some deep pit in him that hasn’t seen light in years.

Roach looks up. Gaz moves closer. Johnny flinches.

But Ghost doesn’t move.

He just reaches—slow, ungloved—and lays a hand on the shaking figure before him.

Not the blonde girl.

Not the mask.

Her.

And for once in his silent, brutal, war-forged life—Simon Ghost Riley lets the mask crack in front of the team.

And not one of them says a word to stop him.

It strikes him in the gut first, then in the teeth. That particular kind of silence.

Price stands at the edge of the mess hall, steam curling from his mug, watching nothing. There’s no laughter, no cursing, no boots on tile. Not even the background hum of nervous pacing or the subtle creak of a chair being leaned too far back.

Just—nothing.

The base is never silent. Not with his team.

And that silence? That total stillness? That’s the kind of quiet that means something’s gone off the rails.

He takes a long sip from his coffee—burns his tongue—and grimaces. Then he moves. Quick and quiet, no hesitation. He doesn’t even bother pretending he’s just strolling. The war in his gut has already begun.

Toddlers. That’s what they are.

Dangerous, armed toddlers with blood under their nails and the weight of gods on their backs. And just like with kids, when they go silent—truly silent—you don’t feel relief.

You feel dread.

He makes for his office. Slips inside, sets the mug down too hard on the edge of the desk—some of the bitter black liquid sloshes over. He ignores it. His fingers go to the keyboard automatically, calling up the internal surveillance.

First, he checks the medical bay hallway.

Nothing.

No Soap. No Gaz.

Not even Roach, who’s been posting up like a damn shadow.

His jaw tightens.

Then he flips to the camera inside the medbay.

His breath leaves him like a rifle shot.

The bed is empty.

The floor—occupied.

She’s on the ground, all gray skin and heaving sobs, surrounded by a half-formed circle of his men. Johnny kneeling. Roach close enough to catch her if she folded wrong. Gaz standing stunned with his hand still half-raised like he doesn’t know if he should touch or not.

And Simon—

Ghost—

Price’s oldest soldier, the brick wall, the immovable ghost—on his knees. One hand trembling on her shoulder, one on the ground like it’s all that’s anchoring him.

The soundless footage crackles slightly as the camera tries to focus. Price doesn’t blink. Doesn’t breathe.

He watches Ghost’s mouth move.

Watches Johnny look away with his throat working.

Watches Gaz’s hand finally land on her shoulder, as gentle as feathers.

Roach says something, lips sharp and fast.

She—Em—jerks like it hurts her to hear it.

And through the flat, colorless feed, Price sees something real fracture. Something shatter quiet and deep and irreversible.

This wasn’t just breaking.

This was bleeding.

Not from a bullet or a blade, but from somewhere softer. Somewhere slower. Somewhere that doesn’t heal with stitches or morphine.

He leans back slowly in his chair.

Staring.

And in the safety of his locked, quiet office, where no one can see—

He presses a hand over his mouth.

Because the silence wasn’t empty.

It was grief. Rippling out in waves through his team.

And he hadn’t stopped it.

He had sent them on that mission.

He had chosen her.

And this—this image of all of them broken on a medbay floor—was the price of it.

Was the Price of it.

He doesn’t move for a long time.

Not even when the coffee goes cold. Not when the light outside shifts from muted dawn-gray to the bare brightness of morning. He just… sits. The camera feed still open. Still replaying the same quiet devastation frame by frame like it’ll change if he watches it enough.

But it doesn’t change.

Em is still curled on the floor, trying to scrub her identity off her own bones.

Ghost is still kneeling—kneeling—like the guilt has finally bent him double.

Johnny looks like he’s been hollowed out from the inside, his face blotched and too raw to be anger.

Roach’s mouth is moving nonstop like he can patch her back together with words alone.

Gaz is a shadow at the edge of it all. Pale. Still. Crushed under the weight of the moment and the knowledge that he wasn’t there when it counted.

And Price…

Price presses a trembling hand to the side of the monitor, his fingers splayed like he’s trying to touch them through the glass. Through time. Through consequence. Like he could rewind it, undo it, fix it somehow.

But there’s no fixing this.

Not in the way any of them want.

Not when it’s so much more than blood and broken bones.

This—this is soul-deep damage.

She woke up trying to wear the skin they loved. She woke up believing she had to be palatable again, acceptable again, just to survive their eyes on her.

And even then, her magic—her instinct—crumbled under the weight of that shame. Of that unbearable need.

She didn’t just try to look like herself.

She tried to disappear inside it.

Price swipes a hand down his face, the scrape of his palm loud in the silence of the office. The lines at the corners of his eyes feel deeper. His chest feels tighter. The weight on his shoulders, heavier than command. He exhales, long and slow.

He gets up.

Walks to the small cabinet by the corner window, opens it, and pulls out a bottle that hasn’t been touched since the last funeral.

He stares at it for a beat, then sets it down unopened.

No.

Not yet.

Not until he does something about this.

He turns back to the computer. His voice is low when he speaks, but it sounds jagged in the quiet.

“Get a trauma team ready on standby. I want her monitored full-time. No more gaps. Full magical suppression warding on standby, but no triggers unless she consents. Tell medical to keep her room dim. Warm. Soft. And for Christ’s sake, get someone in there who’s trained to handle changeling physiology.”

He doesn’t need to say her name. They all know who he means.

They’ve only ever meant her since she nearly bled out across their boots.

Then, almost as an afterthought—he adds: “And someone go check on the boys.”

Because while she was dying, they were unraveling. And now that she’s living—just barely—they’re still unraveling.

And John Price—

The man who chose her.

The man who believed she’d survive it all because she always has.

The man who put her on that mission without preparing any of them for the truth that would come after—

He has to live with the knowledge that this team, his team, is fracturing.

Not because of weakness.

But because they loved her.

And no one, not even Price, prepared for what would happen when the mask broke… and the girl underneath stopped believing she was worth saving.

Not even he was ready to see the ghost of her, sobbing silently under the weight of every single one of their gazes. Trying to peel herself off like skin that didn’t belong.

And for once, he doesn’t know how to lead them through it.

Not yet.

But he’ll have to learn.

Because the silence is only going to get louder.

It’s barely a breath. Barely a twitch. But it’s there.

Between the tears and the ragged sobs, between Roach’s shivering hands on her shoulders and Johnny’s broken whisper of “just breathe, bonnie, just breathe”, something shifts.

Em’s head turns.

Not toward them.

But up.

Toward the far corner of the room. Toward the lens she shouldn’t know is there. A near-invisible black eye in the ceiling, quiet, ever-watching.

And it’s not instinct. It’s not magic. It’s not some fae sixth sense humming under her skin.

It’s just him.

Just John Price.

Because somehow, even in the raw mess of her magic unraveling and her skin still half-peeled between what she is and what she thinks they want, she notices.

The weight of him not being there.

The absence of his presence like the missing warmth of a coat you didn’t realize you relied on until the cold bit deeper.

No gravel voice. No gloved hand steadying a shoulder. No quiet nod that said everything without a word.

He’s not there.

But she feels him anyway.

Somewhere, in the hollow of the room. In the hollower ache of her chest.

So she lifts one shaking hand. Fingers trembling. Skin blotched and raw from where she scrubbed too hard, magic stuttering across her form like a dying lightbulb.

And she waves.

It’s a pathetic, broken little wave. Fingers barely moving. But she tries.

Then—worse—she smiles.

Or something close to it. It’s weak. Cracked. Wet with leftover tears.

It’s the kind of smile someone makes when they’re trying not to make it anyone else’s problem. A “see? I’m okay.” A “look, I’m still me.”

It’s everything she thinks she has left to offer.

And somewhere, not far, a man who’s spent his entire life steel-spined and storm-souled watches that screen, and that goddamn half-smile…

That smile cracks him.

No sound. No curse. No outburst.

Just a quiet, shuddering inhale.

And the sting of tears he won’t blink away.

Because she waved.

Because of course she saw him.

Because even now—after all of it—she still wants him to know she’s okay.

Even when she’s not.

It’s the motion that does it.

Not the wave. Not the smile. Not even the blood-wet edge of her mouth as she tries to hold that trembling expression in place like a paper mask wilting in rain.

It’s the way her fingers shift—fluttering, hesitant, then firm.

A beckon.

A “come here.”

A fucking invitation.

To him.

And it doesn’t make sense.

Not to Price.

Not to the brutal inner voice that’s spent every day since that mission beating him down with I should have called it off. I should have pulled her. I should have—

Not to the iron weight of responsibility that wraps around his ribs like barbed wire every time he sees one of his men look haunted, or worse—quiet.

He’s already halfway to rising before he realizes he’s moved. Mug of lukewarm coffee left forgotten beside the console. His knees ache like hell. Doesn’t matter.

Because she looked at that camera—at him—and she didn’t cry harder.

She didn’t flinch away.

She asked him in.

And he doesn’t understand it.

Not really.

Because all he’s been since that day is another failure in her story. Another man who didn’t stop the bleeding. Another ghost at her bedside that didn’t stay long enough.

But still, she beckons.

And on the monitor, for the briefest moment, Em looks sure. Not of herself. Not of her skin. Not of the swirling magic that cracks and glows in her veins like dying embers.

But of him.

And it shakes something in Price.

Because she should hate him. Should fear him. She should’ve turned away like she has from mirrors, from men, from the sight of her own reflection splintered across their faces.

Instead, she calls.

And maybe it surprises her too—because the moment her fingers curl, the strength of the motion hits her like a wave. The sob that tears out next is ragged, soft, almost guilty.

Like she didn’t mean to want this.

Like she can’t believe she does.

And Price—John fucking Price, all quiet fury and silent burdens—presses the com to his mouth and murmurs just one word:

“Medbay.”

Then he’s already moving. Out the door. Down the hall. Shoulders squared like he’s heading into a warzone.

Because maybe he is.

Because maybe—just maybe—she’s finally ready for him to step onto her battlefield.

Price knows a lot of things.

How to lead men into fire and bring most of them back. How to read an enemy’s next move before the bastard even breathes wrong. How to drag his own soul through hell and not show a goddamn crack.

But this?

This he doesn’t know how to prepare for.

Because when he pushes the door open to the medbay—no knock, no warning, just the solid sound of his boots and presence—nobody moves.

Not a twitch.

Not a shift.

Not even the barest, ingrained straighten-your-spine reflex that every single one of them normally has when he walks into a room.

Roach doesn’t even look up. His hands are fisted in the sheets like he could physically anchor her there with sheer will. His head’s bowed, whispering something into her skin—not praying, not pleading. Just staying.

Gaz is half-folded over her side, one hand over hers, the other splayed on her ribs like he’s checking for the rise and fall. As if without his touch, she’ll forget how to breathe again.

Johnny’s a wreck, worse than Price has ever seen him—eyes bloodshot, nose red, still caught somewhere between a sob and a snarl. His shoulders heave as he mutters something broken and fierce into the crook of her neck.

And Ghost.

Fucking Ghost.

The one who’s always silent, always sharp, always a foot out the door—

He’s seated. On the bed. One gloved hand gently resting near her knee. Still as stone, but not cold. Not detached.

He’s just there.

All of them are.

Collapsed into her like she’s the gravity holding them together.

And none of them even glance up at Price.

Not even to make room.

Not even to pretend they’re fine.

Not even Ghost.

That’s when it hits him like a punch to the ribs:

This isn’t some passing ache.

This isn’t post-op dread or guilt or discomfort.

This is grief.

Still alive and breathing, but grief all the same.

The kind that strips a man down to the bone and makes him cling to what little warmth is left.

And Price doesn’t speak. Doesn’t bark orders or clear his throat or tell them to stand. He doesn’t need to. There’s no point. Because even if he did, they wouldn’t move.

They can’t.

Because she beckoned them all—even without meaning to.

Because she woke up in agony and still tried to smile.

Because even as she sobbed and clawed and cracked, she let them stay.

And it’s enough to paralyze the whole damn room.

It’s not a command keeping them here. It’s not duty.

It’s not fear of the Captain walking in and finding them breaking.

It’s love.

Price exhales slowly and steps inside.

He doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t ask for a report.

He just moves to the foot of the bed, slides his hand into the space between them all, and lays it lightly—respectfully—on her ankle.

Because this is their warzone now.

And this is how they hold the line.

Her voice is a croak, barely more than air dragged over broken glass. But it’s hers.

And it cuts through the heavy silence like a match to oil.

“Aren’t we a joyous kids cartoon.”

It’s the delivery that does it.

Dry as bone. Threaded with something sharp. Her breath’s still hitched, chest still fluttering like it’s not entirely convinced it wants to keep going—but her wit is back. Bent and bloodied, sure. But standing.

And it breaks something open.

Johnny makes a choked sound—half laugh, half sob—as he drags the heel of his hand across his face. “Christ, lass,” he mutters, voice cracking, “you sound like a gremlin.” But he doesn’t pull back. Just presses a kiss to her temple like it might keep her anchored.

Gaz huffs a breath too fast to be steady, eyes stinging. “If this is a cartoon, who’s the talking animal sidekick?” His voice is watery, but there’s a grin curling at the edge of it. “I vote Roach.”

Roach doesn’t respond at first. He’s too busy clutching her hand like it’s the last tether to a sinking ship. But after a beat, he lifts his head—eyes rimmed red, mouth twitching faintly. “I swear to God if I get turned into a squirrel…”

Ghost doesn’t laugh. But the corner of his mouth twitches. Almost imperceptibly. His eyes, though—those sharp, calculating eyes—are different now. Softened. Not warm. Not yet. But present. Like he’s here with her, not just for her.

Price just shakes his head, pinching the bridge of his nose like he’s suddenly aged ten years. “Bloody hell,” he mutters. “Should’ve left you lot in the field.”

But even his voice has that edge—that brittle break behind the sarcasm. Relief. Too raw to name, too loud to ignore.

She doesn’t say anything for a long beat.

Then she smiles. Small. Weak. Lopsided.

But real.

“I missed you fuckers.”

And it’s all they need to start breathing again.

There’s a beat of silence.

And then, in that fragile space where tension still clings like frost on glass, Em—still pale, still trembling, barely more than a collection of bruises and frayed nerves—murmurs,

“But if you need a talking animal…”

A pause. A breath.

“I think I’m the closest you’ll get.”

And in a blink, she shifts.

Where once lay the half-dead woman they’d all circled like mourners around a pyre, there’s now a raccoon perched on the hospital bed. Not a graceful forest spirit or noble creature of myth—no, of course not. This is Em. It’s a raccoon with a bald patch on its belly, fur still matted in places, tail dragging awkwardly against the blanket. Her eyes—beady and way too knowing—glint with mischief and something wilder. Something Em.

And for a second, no one moves.

Then Johnny lets out a wheezing, disbelieving laugh so sharp it folds him in half. He clutches his ribs, still sore from holding himself too tight for too long.

“Jesus Christ, you’re a bloody trash panda,” he gasps.

Gaz sits down right on the floor, legs kicked out in front of him like someone pulled the plug on his spine. “That’s it,” he says, voice high and cracked with laughter. “I’m losing my mind. We’ve killed God and she came back as a raccoon.”

Roach, for once, doesn’t even try to stifle the way his head drops forward with a soft thud against the mattress. His shoulders shake—half laughter, half pure relief.

And Ghost… Ghost blinks once. Slowly. Like he’s trying to recalibrate.

Then—

A tiny snort.

A real one.

He covers it with a hand, but the damage is done. His ears are pink.

Even Price, arms folded across his chest like a commander trying very hard not to care, fails spectacularly to hide the upward twitch at the corner of his mouth. “I take it back,” he mutters. “This isn’t a kids cartoon. This is a bloody circus.”

And there’s her, this tiny snarling creature, baring tiny raccoon teeth and letting out a chitter that almost sounds like a giggle.

It’s absurd. It’s ridiculous.

It’s Em.

And after fifty-nine days of silence and bleeding and brittle, suffocating hope—

It’s everything.

[willinglymalicioustaco]

So I need to give this a title? Pshhhh, nahhhhh. Did you think it ended at part 2? I hope not. The gang hasn’t been tortured enough for that yet

I’m a good person… 😋✌️ anyways… pt. 3 gg ez

Johnny:

Day 47.

Johnny doesn’t plan the visit.

He hasn’t been back since Day 12.

Not since the screaming. Not since his fists hit Ghost’s shoulders like they could knock sense back into him. Not since he saw Em cough blood trying to be beautiful and still not feeling like enough.

Not since he started having to look away from his own goddamn reflection.

He’d tell you he’s been busy. That the missions don’t wait. That command’s been relentless. But truth is, he couldn’t take it.

He couldn’t take her dying while trying to look lovable.

He couldn’t take that it was his fault.

That look he gave her—the flicker, the flinch, the fucking pause.

That was the final nail.

And she saw it.

He knows she did.

But Day 47, something pulls him in.

He doesn’t know if it’s guilt or fate or the ghosts in his spine howling for something they can’t name.

He just walks.

Feet know the way better than his head does.

It’s quiet in the med wing.

Too quiet.

And when he opens the door—

He stops breathing.

She’s sitting up.

Not fully. Not conscious.

But she’s propped, somehow. Bandaged in a way that feels human, not clinical. A drip feeds her slow and steady. Monitors blink soft lights like they’re tired, too.

And her hair—

Blonde.

Glossy. Loose waves over the curve of her shoulder like a painting in a chapel.

Skin warm. Smooth. Alive.

Pink lips. Perfect cheekbones. Long lashes that fan soft when her brow twitches in sleep.

She looks like she did before missions.

Before things went to hell.

Like the girl who used to laugh at his bad impressions and argue about coffee orders and always, always tried to look just right.

Tried too damn hard.

And Johnny’s first reaction should be joy.

Should be relief.

But it guts him.

Because she’s still trying.

Even now.

Even here.

She’s still fucking trying.

Trying to be that girl.

That perfect, golden thing.

He steps closer. Can’t help it. Knees threatening to buckle, breath locked behind his ribs.

“Lass,” he whispers. “You don’t have to. You really don’t.”

His voice cracks like a snapped bone.

“I know I made you think you did. I know what I did. That look—I should’ve—I should’ve never—”

His words die in his throat.

She shifts in her sleep. Barely. Lips part like she’s about to say something, and he holds his breath—hoping, praying, begging—

But she just breathes.

No words. No smile. No magic trick.

Just being.

And that’s when he drops.

To his knees.

Right there beside her bed.

One hand on the floor. One hand over his mouth.

The tears don’t come all at once.

They trickle. Then spill. Then pour like everything he’s buried is rising to drown him.

“I’d take it back,” he rasps. “God, Em, I’d take it all back. I’d bleed out in that fucking snow if it meant you’d never have to do this again.”

No one’s there to see it.

Not Roach. Not Ghost. Not Price.

Just him.

Just her.

And the bitter, impossible truth that her love for them nearly killed her.

She wanted to be their girl. Their perfect teammate. Their little sister. Their savior. Their pretty one.

And it almost destroyed her.

So he sits.

And he holds her hand.

And for the first time since Day 1, he doesn’t look away.

Ghost:

Day 54.

He doesn’t mean to end up here.

Ghost isn’t the type to wander. He doesn’t move without reason. Without mission. Without orders.

But today… today, the tape over his knuckles is soaked through again. The scabs have split beneath. Dried blood flakes down his wrist, into his sleeve. His gym bag’s empty. No wraps. No gauze. No bullshit left to convince himself he’s in control.

He tells himself he’s going to the supply room.

That’s the only reason he makes the turn. The only reason his boots click across the hall toward the med wing he’s been dodging for nearly two months.

It’s been 54 days.

And he’s taken every excuse to avoid this place.

This hallway.

That door.

Her.

He doesn’t mean to look in. He really doesn’t. He tells himself it’s just a glance to make sure she’s still breathing.

But when his eyes catch the window, he stops.

Stops like a man gut-punched.

Because she’s there.

She’s still beautiful.

He had hoped—stupidly, selfishly—that the spell would’ve cracked by now.

That the magic would’ve faded. That the real her, the gray-skinned girl with milkglass eyes and scars that never quite healed right, would’ve returned.

Because then, maybe, he wouldn’t feel like this.

Because then, maybe, he wouldn’t remember the look on her face when she realized he saw her as a threat. When she flinched like she’d been shot clean through.

But no.

She’s golden.

Fucking golden.

Skin like candlelight. Hair like sunshine.

Soft. Human. Easy to love.

She looks… like nothing ever happened.

And for a moment, it’s like time rewinds.

To before the mission. Before the snow. Before the blood and screaming and the sound of Johnny’s voice breaking across her name.

Back to when she still tried.

The girl they liked. The one she thought they wanted.

And Ghost—Simon—he feels sick.

Because he remembers every second.

He remembers how she looked back at him as she fled the tent—like he’d ripped her open just by existing.

He remembers Johnny’s fists. Roach’s screams. Price’s silence.

He remembers standing there, doing nothing, saying nothing, while she bled out in the snow.

While she broke herself, trying to be what they’d never asked her to be—but had still, somehow, expected.

And now here she is.

Still wearing the lie.

Even in her sleep. Even in her coma. Even now.

Still trying to be something lovable.

And it ruins him.

He moves before he realizes it—walks slowly into the room, boots soft on tile, like noise might shatter her into pieces.

He doesn’t speak.

He just stands at the foot of her bed and looks. Takes it in.

The false flush of her cheeks. The curve of her lips. The delicate structure of her collarbones under the sheets.

All of it beautiful. All of it wrong.

None of it her.

And the quiet between them is unbearable.

Because she’s not here.

And yet somehow, she’s still trying to apologize.

Still bleeding out beneath the glamour. Still shape-shifted into a lie just to keep their love from slipping through her fingers.

Ghost exhales once. A shallow, near-silent sound.

Then steps back.

And leaves.

Not because he doesn’t care.

But because he does.

Because he finally sees what she gave up trying to be loved.

And it’s more than he knows how to carry.

Narrator:

Price breaks in the unlit corners of his office—

hands clasped together so tightly his knuckles crack,

jaw clenched like it’s the only thing holding him upright.

He stares at the mission files again and again,

rereads the orders, replays the moment he picked the team,

the moment he knew something was off and said nothing.

He smokes more now. Not for calm. Not for thought.

But for punishment.

He watches her through the glass sometimes—

when he thinks no one else is looking.

He sees her trying.

Even in sleep.

And it kills him in slow motion.

Gaz brings her flowers. Always fresh, always rotated.

Like she can still smell them. Like maybe it helps.

Day 46 changed him. He hadn’t seen her like that,

but he saw her like this—

golden, delicate, unreal.

He pretended to smile,

pretended to believe she was healing.

But that was the day he started sleeping in the armory.

Stopped eating properly.

Started snapping at recruits.

Because she looked like hope and it felt like grief.

And he knows she’s still buried under it.

The real her.

Waiting to come back.

If she ever dares to.

Roach sits beside her most days. Quiet. Hands always doing something.

He changes the wrappings, checks vitals. Keeps her hair brushed.

He talks to her sometimes. Tells her about base life, little jokes, dumb updates.

Pretends everything is fine.

But every day,

he watches her chest rise and fall

and wonders if she’ll open her eyes and not be her at all.

The version she’s wearing isn’t the one who spat blood onto his jacket.

Isn’t the one who tried so hard to look pretty for people who already loved her.

He touches her wrist sometimes.

Just to remind himself she’s real.

And that he didn’t hallucinate the way she shattered.

Soap?

Soap stopped talking the way he used to.

Laughter’s gone.

The edge is still there—maybe sharper—but dull in all the wrong places.

He doesn’t go to her room often.

But when he does, he stands just inside the door,

like he doesn’t deserve to get closer.

Because he knows it was him.

Knows it was the look on his face—

that second of hesitation,

the flicker of fear, of disbelief—

that made her try harder.

Try too hard.

He punches walls now.

Breaks the mirror in the showers.

Won’t look at his reflection.

Not when she copied it.

Not when she died trying to be what he wanted.

Even though all he ever wanted was her.

And he was too late to say it.

Ghost doesn’t scream.

Doesn’t break things.

Doesn’t cry.

But something has gone quiet inside him.

Dead quiet.

His hands are wrecked.

He doesn’t care.

He avoids people now. Avoids questions.

Avoids the room she’s in like it’s radioactive—

until he doesn’t.

Until he has to go.

And when he sees her,

perfect and wrong and still—

he leaves faster than he arrived.

Because she shifted just to be beautiful.

Just to be safe.

Because he made her feel like a monster.

And she’s still afraid of what happens if she comes back as herself.

They’re breaking.

Each of them.

Like the slow collapse of a dying star.

Silently. Inevitably.

Not because she failed.

But because they did.

And because somewhere, deep inside—

they’re terrified she’ll wake up and not believe they love her.

Even now.

Even still.

Even after everything.

Em:

She wakes alone.

It’s the kind of night that has weight to it—dense and breathless, where even the air seems afraid to move. Somewhere beyond the reinforced walls of the medbay, rain beats a steady rhythm against the roof, soft and deliberate. Machines beep their careful lullaby. And then, there’s breath.

Not the rasping, unconscious kind.

But real.

Ragged.

Deliberate.

A gasp, sudden and raw. Like a drowning woman breaking the surface.

Em wakes.

Her eyes snap open—green, bright, beautiful.

Her skin warm, gold-toned. Hair curled blonde and glossy against the stark white of the pillow. She looks perfect. Unbelievably so.

Like a painting.

Like a lie.

She doesn’t move at first. Not because she can’t—but because she doesn’t know how.

Her magic hisses under her skin like a cornered animal, no longer on fire but still smoldering. Every nerve feels distantly wrong, out of place, stretched thin like old thread. Her ribs ache. Her throat is dry. Her lungs sting with every inhale.

But she’s alive.

She’s alive.

It doesn’t feel like a victory.

It feels like trespassing.

She sits up slowly. Each movement fragile, deliberate. Her muscles tremble with the effort but hold. Tubes tug at her arm—IV lines, sensors. She rips them free one by one. Her fingers are stiff. Her hands are pale and soft.

Too soft.

She looks down at herself, at the beautiful girl in the mirror across the room. The one she wore like armor. The one they all loved.

And it hits her—

The girl’s back.

She doesn’t remember shifting.

She doesn’t remember wanting to.

But there she is. Pretty. Intact. Alive.

And the wrongness hits so violently she nearly vomits.

Because it’s not her.

Not really.

And this time? She doesn’t feel comforted by the mask.

She feels buried under it.

Her hand lifts, shaky, to touch her own face. She traces the cheekbone. The lashes. The familiar slope of a smile she’s practiced so long it learned to move without permission.

It isn’t joy she feels.

It isn’t even grief.

It’s confusion.

Fear.

Guilt.

The spell came back.

The girl came back.

Not her.

They’ll come in the morning. They’ll see her like this and they’ll smile—relieved, maybe even joyful. And she doesn’t know if she can bear it. Because she’ll look back at them with this stranger’s face, this beautiful disguise, and she won’t know how to tell them—

I died wearing me.

She stands. Barefoot. Silent. Pale hospital gown fluttering with the movement. She nearly collapses. Her body is still catching up to her soul. But she finds the wall and uses it to steady herself. Her legs shake, but they hold.

She walks to the mirror. Slowly.

When she gets there, she studies her reflection—not with awe, or pride, or relief.

But with a tightness behind her eyes that makes the edges of the world blur.

She looks like the girl they mourned.

She looks like the dream.

She doesn’t look like herself.

She places both hands flat against the mirror. Leans in. Presses her forehead against the glass.

And in a voice that’s barely there—

hoarse and cracked and too full of ghosts—

she whispers,

“Where did I go?”

Silence answers her.

Not cruelly.

But with all the finality of a locked door.

The silence stares back at her.

Not indifference.

Not judgment.

Just absence.

The kind of still, thick hush that fills the lungs like smoke. That makes the skin crawl. That feels like standing in a room after something sacred has been torn out of it.

Her breath hitches.

She presses harder into the mirror. Her reflection doesn’t move. Doesn’t care. Doesn’t blink. It’s not her. It’s never been her.

She remembers being on that cave floor. Gray skin split open. Magic sparking in her blood like broken glass. Remembered the taste of blood and snow and shame.

She died like that.

That version of her—raw, real, awful—died in the cold.

And this?

This is what lived?

Her stomach turns.

No—heaves.

With no warning, her body convulses. A violent shudder rips through her, and she stumbles to the side, crashing into the small counter by the medbay sink. Her knees hit the tile. Her hands barely catch her. And then it comes—hot, sour, gut-wrenching.

She vomits. Once. Twice.

A sharp, wet sound that echoes too loudly in the sterile room.

Nothing but bile. She hasn’t eaten in days. Weeks, maybe. But her body is furious anyway. Rejected. Recoiling.

She spits into the sink. Coughs. Trembles.

And when it’s done, she stays there, slumped over, shaking and snot-nosed and gasping, her blonde curls sticking to her cheeks with sweat and sick. The golden girl—so perfect, so pretty—collapsed in a heap of herself, reeking of hospital plastic and acid.

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and looks down at her reflection in a puddle of water on the floor.

Still blonde.

Still beautiful.

Still not her.

Tears well in her eyes, and this time she doesn’t stop them.

Because no one is watching.

Because the silence is too loud.

Because the mask is still on.

And she doesn’t know how to take it off.

She doesn’t make a sound.

But her whole body shakes.

Shoulders heaving. Spine curling inward like it’s trying to fold her down into nothing. Into the grout between the tiles. Into the empty shape where a person used to be.

Her hands won’t stop moving.

She scrubs at her cheeks. Fingertips raw, trembling. Trying to rub the blonde away. Trying to peel the perfect off. Dig the beauty out from under her skin like it’s a parasite. Like it’s something infesting her.

Nails claw at soft edges. At lips too pink. At skin too smooth.

She doesn’t want this face.

Not when it was born of panic.

Not when it was chosen out of shame.

Her magic had reached for safety—instinctive, automatic, ancient. And it picked her. The girl with soft hands and a sweet laugh and warm eyes.

The lie.

She sobs harder.

Not loud. Not like a scream.

But wet.

The kind of cry that drowns in itself. That catches in the throat like a swallowed stone. The kind that burns, that splinters ribs from the inside out. No sound. Just that helpless stutter of breath—gasping around grief too big to fit.

She stares at her reflection in the mirror above the sink.

At the stranger looking back at her.

And she hates her.

She hates her.

She hates the golden hair. The pink mouth. The soft, sweet face that’s fooled them all. Fooled even herself.

Because they looked at this version and loved her.

They touched her. Held her. Chose her.

And they flinched when she bled gray.

Looked away when the changeling showed through.

Even now, now—when she’s nothing but a scrap of herself—her body clings to the lie like armor. Still pretty. Still golden. Still palatable.

And she doesn’t know how to undo it.

Doesn’t know how to be, if this isn’t what she is.

She presses her forehead to the sink rim.

Whispers, cracked and shaking:

“I want her to die.”

She doesn’t mean herself.

She means the mask.

She means the girl they think they love.

She means the thing that won’t let them see her and stay.

Her breath hitches again.

She chokes on a sob.

Rubs harder.

The skin on her face turns red, then raw. But the blonde doesn’t fade. The pretty won’t peel.

And that—

That’s what breaks her all over again.

Narrator:

He moves fast.

No hesitation. No confusion. No nurse-checking or clipboard-grabbing. The second Roach sees the empty bed—blankets thrown back like someone fled, the faint drip of an untouched IV—his heart lodges in his throat and his feet are already moving. The door to the bathroom is cracked. Light bleeding out into the dim corridor of the medical wing.

He’s there in two strides.

Pushes the door open with a breath held tight in his lungs.

What he sees stops him cold.

Not a nurse.

Not a sponge bath.

Her.

Em.

Awake.

Alive.

And scrubbing herself raw.

She’s hunched over the sink, hands shaking so hard it’s a wonder she hasn’t broken the porcelain. Nails clawing at her face like she’s trying to tear something off. Like the skin she’s in doesn’t belong to her. Like it’s suffocating her.

The golden hair he saw only days ago is matted now, tangled and wet at the ends. Her face—that face, the one they always saw, always softened for—is blotched red with fresh welts. Fingernails streaking skin like she’s trying to scratch through it.

“Em—”

Her name rips out of him before he can stop it.

She flinches. Spins toward him. Eyes wide, wet, wild. The tears still tracking down her cheeks shimmer in the sterile light, and her breathing’s ragged, panicked—like she’s cornered, like she’s been caught.

She stumbles back a step, like he’s hit her.

“I—I didn’t mean to—” Her voice cracks. She backs against the tiled wall, trembling like she’s going to collapse into the grout. “It’s not—it’s not me, I didn’t ask for her—”

Roach doesn’t move.

He doesn’t look away.

Not from the blood at the corners of her lips. Not from the scrubbed-raw cheeks or the horror curdling behind her eyes. Not even from the soft, beautiful face she’s begging to peel off.

Because it’s still her.

Even like this.

Especially like this.

He swallows. Tries to steady the tremor in his throat.

“You’re awake,” he says softly. He almost chokes on it. “Jesus, Em. You’re awake.”

She shakes her head violently. “Don’t say that like it’s good.”

He moves slowly. Keeps his hands open at his sides like he’s approaching something wounded. Something spooked.

Because she is.

“Do you know how many nights I’ve sat by that bed?” His voice is low now. Careful. “How many times Soap and Ghost and Price and Gaz checked in just to see if you were breathing? You don’t get to say it’s not good. You being awake is everything, Em.”

Her lips part. The word that tries to come out next doesn’t make it. It curdles in her throat. She presses her palms to her face again. “But it’s not even me, Roach. She came back. The girl. The—this fucking mask. They’re gonna see me like this and think I’m okay. Think I’m fine because I’m pretty again.”

Roach steps forward. Not too close. Just enough.

“They’ll see you because you’re here.”

“No.” She shakes again. “No, they won’t. They’ll see this. And they’ll relax. They’ll think it was never that bad. That it was all just a fluke or a scare or a nightmare they walked away from. But I was bleeding gray and coughing up teeth and screaming and they didn’t look at me then, Roach. Not really. Not when it mattered.”

He doesn’t know what breaks his heart more—the way she says it, or the fact she believes it.

He exhales slowly. Feels his ribs tremble around it.

And then, gently, “Can I touch you?”

She blinks, startled. Her hands pause, still halfway pressed to her ruined cheeks.

“Why?”

“Because I need to prove something.”

She doesn’t say yes. But she doesn’t say no.

So Roach steps forward. Closer now. Heart thudding like war drums behind his ribs. He reaches out, slow as dusk, and cups her face in his palms—fingertips featherlight over her temples, the angles of her cheeks, the blood at her jawline.

And he presses his forehead to hers.

Not a kiss. Not comfort.

Just contact. Human. Alive. Real.

“This face,” he whispers, “or the one underneath it—you’re still the same to me. You’re still you. I don’t give a fuck if your eyes are gold or milk-white, if your skin’s soft or slate-gray. You’re ours, Em. You always were.”

Her knees nearly buckle.

Roach catches her without hesitation. Holds her up with hands that have stitched her back together more times than he can count. And he feels it—beneath the tremble of her ribs, under the paper-thin mask of that beautiful skin—the ache of her. The raw, gasping, still-alive truth of her.

And for the first time since she woke, she doesn’t scrub at her skin.

She just lets herself be held.

She tries to hold it. God, she tries.

Because it’s safer. Because it’s prettier. Because it’s what they expect, what they’re used to, what they can accept without question or hesitation.

But Roach’s hands are too gentle. His words too real. His touch too grounded in truth. And her body, traitorous and raw, believes him.

It’s that belief that undoes her.

The magic clinging to her skin like frost under morning sun begins to melt. Slowly at first. So slow Roach nearly doesn’t see it.

But then—

A flicker.

A hairline fracture in the illusion.

The warm flush of her cheeks cools first, like color bleeding out of a painting.

Then the gold begins to leech from her hair.

Strand by strand.

Blonde turns silver-white. Her lashes pale. Her skin grays—not dead-gray, not corpse-pale, but hers. The slate-ash hue of who she is beneath the veil.

Her shoulders start to tremble. Not with fear. Not entirely. But with the collapse of a dam held too long. With the final, involuntary surrender of a body that can no longer lie.

The mask unravels like silk unraveling from a spool.

Roach watches it happen. Not with horror. Not with shock.

But with stillness.

She’s not looking at him. She’s breathing in ragged pulls, fingers curling in the fabric of his shirt, knuckles bone-white. “Don’t—” she gasps. “Please don’t—”

He shushes her. Barely a sound.

She opens her eyes. And they’re no longer green.

They’re clouded silver, uncanny and endless, changeling eyes stripped of camouflage. The tears make them glint like glass.

“I didn’t want you to see—”

“I’ve seen, Em,” Roach says softly. “I saw the moment you tore yourself apart to save us. Saw the shape of your ribs under your skin when you collapsed. I saw you dying, and even then you were still trying to protect us. You think this—” He brushes a thumb gently under her eye, unflinching at the unnatural hue. “—scares me?”

Her lip quivers.

And the last of the mask shatters.

Hair white. Skin gray. Features distorted just enough to feel otherworldly. Beautiful in a way that defies human symmetry. Beautiful in a way that hurts.

She stands in the bathroom, stripped bare by truth.

The girl is gone.

Only Em remains.

Roach doesn’t look away.

And Em—

She finally breathes.

For real. For the first time since she woke.

And it’s ugly and wet and shaking and real.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and her voice cracks on it.

Roach pulls her close. Presses his hand against the back of her trembling neck and keeps her there. Not because she needs to be held.

But because he needs to hold her.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he murmurs into her hair. “Nothing.”

And this time, when she cries—

She cries with the mask off.

Day 59.

Gaz’s boots don’t echo in the hall the way they used to. Maybe it’s the hour. Maybe it’s the weight in his chest.

The medical wing has become a shrine in his routine—same time every day, like clockwork. He brings nothing. Says nothing. Just sits for a while, and leaves with a little more of himself cracked away.

He doesn’t expect anything different tonight. He doesn’t hope anymore, not really. Hope hurts.

He turns the corner into the ward and—

The bed is empty.

He stops.

No alarm. No code called. No staff running in a panic.

Just empty sheets, clean and tucked.

And his pulse jumps—because what the fuck.

Then the bathroom door is cracked open, low light spilling across the tiles, and there’s sound.

He moves before thinking.

Pushes open the door like he expects the worst. Like maybe it’s too late.

Instead—

He finds Roach, kneeling on the cold floor. His back is to the door. His arms are around someone.

Not just someone.

Her.

Em.

But not the Em Gaz remembers—not the golden-haired, honey-skinned illusion that laid in that hospital bed for fifty-eight straight days like a dream half-dissolved.

This is—

Her.

Gray skin like fog over stone. White hair clinging to her cheeks, wet from tears. Eyes that aren’t human, but achingly alive. Raw. Shattered. Real.

She’s curled into Roach like a broken thing, sobbing quietly, her fingers clenched in his shirt like she’s scared if she lets go, she’ll fall back into the dark.

Roach turns slightly at the sound of footsteps. Sees Gaz.

And Gaz—

He just stands there.

For a long moment, no one speaks.

Then Em lifts her head.

She sees him.

Her eyes widen—panicked, ashamed, gutted. Her mouth opens, desperate to explain, to hide, to apologize.

Gaz crosses the room before she can get a word out.

He drops to his knees in front of her.

And he takes her hands in his.

Not her disguise’s hands.

Hers.

Thin, cold, oddly jointed. Sharp around the knuckles. Real.

And he presses them to his chest.

Right over his heart.

“Welcome back, Em,” he says softly.

Her breath hitches.

Then she breaks.

Again.

But this time, it’s different. Not from pain. Not from horror.

But from being seen. And not recoiled from.

And Gaz?

He holds on. As steady and solid as the earth beneath her.

Because fuck the what-ifs. She made it.

She’s home.

The sound is small—cracked. Wet.

Not the kind of sob that belongs to a hallucination. Not the kind of sob the med team might play over a recording, or the ghosts in Johnny’s head might whisper when the walls go quiet.

It’s her.

It has to be.

He’s already halfway down the hall, pacing again, like he has every night since Day 31. Ghost told him to stop—told him the nurses were giving reports, told him nothing would change from one hour to the next. And maybe Ghost had been right, maybe. But Johnny doesn’t give a shit. He’s never given a shit about logic when it comes to her.

He stops. Dead still. Every muscle in his body tensed like a tripwire.

That sound again.

A sob. Raw. Ragged. Unmistakably human—and not the pretty kind. It’s the kind of sound that rips through the gut, tearing something out with it.

Johnny doesn’t remember opening the door.

He just knows it’s open now, and he’s standing in the frame, frozen.

Em is on the floor.

Not on the bed. Not tucked neatly beneath blankets like she was for nearly two months.

Alive.

Curled into Roach. Gray skin. Stark white hair. She’s crying—open, messy, unguarded. No mask. No illusion.

Gaz is there too, kneeling, her hands clutched to his chest, saying something Johnny can’t hear over the hammering in his ears.

He doesn’t move.

Not yet.

Because seeing her like this—her, not the projection—feels like something sacred. Like stepping into a cathedral mid-prayer. Like being struck by lightning, and for a second, alive again.

And God, she’s crying like it hurts just to be.

She sobs again, like she’s being pulled in half. Her spine trembles under it.

And that’s what shatters him.

Johnny takes one step in.

Then another.

Then suddenly he’s moving like gravity’s the only thing pulling him forward.

Roach looks up. Gaz says his name.

But Em doesn’t see him—she’s curled too deep into her own pain.

He sinks to the floor beside her.

Carefully.

Gently.

And when he speaks, his voice breaks on the first word.

“Lass…”

Her head jerks up at that, face blotched and wet, eyes wide and milk-pale and real. She tries to cover her mouth. Tries to shrink.

Johnny grabs her hands before she can.

Not rough.

Not forceful.

Just—desperate.

“Don’t,” he chokes. “Don’t do that. Don’t hide. Not from me. Not anymore.”

Her lips tremble. No words come. Just more tears, tracking through a face not shaped for tears.

Johnny’s own vision blurs.

He’s wanted this moment for weeks. Imagined it. Dreamed it. Dreaded it.

But he never imagined how much it would hurt.

She’s back.

But she’s broken.

And it’s his second of hesitation—that look in his eyes, the flicker of shock he hadn’t hidden fast enough—that helped break her.

“I’m so fuckin’ sorry,” he whispers. It slips out like a confession, raw and useless. “I looked at you like I didn’t know you, and I did. I do. You’re my teammate. My friend. And I let you think—fuck. I let you think you were somethin’ to be afraid of.”

She hiccups. Shakes her head like she doesn’t want to believe it. Like forgiveness is too sharp to hold.

Johnny pulls her closer anyway.

Not to fix her.

Just to be with her.

And slowly—slowly—she leans into him, her sobs catching on each ragged breath, her hands clutching his sleeves like maybe they’ll anchor her to something worth staying for.

He feels her bones through her skin.

He holds her anyway.

“I see you now,” he says into her hair. “Not what you looked like. Not the blonde. You. Always you.”

And this time, when she sobs, it sounds like relief.

He notices it first in the silence.

No pacing boots outside the medbay door. No soft thuds of restless movement. No quiet muttering—Johnny’s voice echoing down the corridor like a ghost of guilt that wouldn’t quit. It’s gone. Just… gone.

[willinglymalicioustaco]

Apparently it caps out at a certain word count. I present pt. 2. What if I just say no to tags? Who is there to stop me from total anarchy?? Apparently it’s tumblr. Considering it very politely asked me to tag. I will respect the gods of malice and misfortune by doing tags.

Ghost:

It doesn’t happen fast. Nothing in him breaks clean.

It starts with quiet.

With the hum of the medbay fluorescents. With the hush of soap-sterile halls, and the rasp of Roach’s exhausted breathing as he sits slumped outside Em’s door. With the machine beeping—constant, steady—monitoring a body that doesn’t respond, doesn’t wake.

Ghost doesn’t sit.

Doesn’t look directly at her. Not after the cave. Not after Johnny screamed at him like a wounded animal. Not after Roach looked him in the eye and shook his head like he was already grieving the loss of something that never got a name.

So Ghost keeps walking.

He does the paperwork.

He reviews footage.

He checks with command.

He says the right things.

He says nothing at all.

And all the while, the dam inside him cracks.

Not from the big things. Not from the blood or the screaming or the moment he watched her collapse, gray and beautiful and dying.

No. It’s the small things.

The way Johnny won’t meet his eyes now.

The way Em’s bed is still made in her bunk, neat, untouched, like a fucking memorial.

The way her voice is missing from the radio chatter.

The way her mug—floral, chipped, ugly as sin—sits on the counter untouched, cold.

The way her laugh hasn’t echoed down the corridor in days.

He walks past it all. Silent. Controlled. Locked tight.

Until the gym.

It’s late—past 0300. The place is empty. Lights low. Sweat still in the air from whoever was here before.

He goes to the heavy bag.

Just to move. Just to burn off steam.

He doesn’t even wrap his hands.

Starts slow. Measured jabs. Proper form. Controlled breathing. Like nothing is wrong. Like his ribs aren’t tight with something that feels like grief but won’t give itself the dignity of a name.

Left. Right. Step. Pivot.

Again.

Again.

Again.

The rhythm helps.

Until it doesn’t.

Until the bag becomes her body.

Until the silence becomes her last breath.

Until his hands start hurting and he doesn’t stop.

Until the knuckles split, but he barely registers the sting.

And then something snaps.

A grunt turns to a growl.

A punch lands off-center.

He doesn’t correct.

He doubles down.

He hits the bag harder. Faster. No rhythm now. Just violence. Just raw, ugly need.

To break something.

To bleed.

To feel what she felt.

The bag jerks with each blow, chain rattling. His hands leave smears. His breathing turns ragged.

He hears her voice in his head—

“Y’think I’m not trying?”

“This is what I am, Ghost.”

“I wanted you to see me.”

And he didn’t.

He didn’t.

He saw a threat. A glitch. A liability.

He looked at her with combat logic, not humanity.

Even when she bled for them.

Even when she broke herself trying to be acceptable.

Even when she collapsed trying to wear the skin he found palatable.

She looked him in the eye—just once—and he flinched.

And now her body is hooked to machines, and her magic’s gone silent, and she hasn’t moved in seventy-six hours.

Ghost screams into the bag, finally, fists colliding again and again until he doesn’t even feel the pain anymore—just the wet smack of torn skin on canvas. His knuckles are pulp. Blood runs down his wrists. He can’t breathe.

He keeps going.

Until he misses the bag entirely. Until his knees buckle. Until his body folds in on itself and he’s crouched on the mat, breathing like something cornered and hunted.

And only then—only then—does the dam break.

One quiet word. Said to no one.

“Fuck.”

Then another.

“I saw her.”

He doesn’t know if it’s an admission or a confession. He doesn’t care.

He stays there, bleeding and broken and mute, alone in the dark gym, as the guilt finally lets itself be known—not loud. Not dramatic.

Just real.

Johnny:

The hours after the medbay blur into each other.

He doesn’t sleep. Doesn’t eat much. Keeps pretending to chew the food Roach drops off. Keeps pretending he can hear Price when the captain checks in. Keeps pretending Ghost didn’t look at her like that, and that he didn’t see it—that half-second of cold.

He remembers the scream he made when Em dropped in that cave. Not a battle cry. Not even a name. Just raw sound, dragged from some part of him he didn’t know existed. A howl of guilt, of fury, of grief that hadn’t earned the right to be grief.

Because she wasn’t dead.

But she wasn’t there, either.

He haunts the medbay when Roach isn’t on shift. Sits outside her room with his arms folded too tightly across his chest. Talks to her in the moments when no one’s looking.

Not about anything important.

Just stupid things.

Things like “remember when you called Ghost ‘Skull Barbie’ and he didn’t speak to you for two days?”

Or “I still think you were cheating at cards, by the way.”

Or “I didn’t mean to look at you like that, love. I was just—afraid.”

Always ends with that.

Afraid.

Not of her. Never of her.

But of how much she mattered. How easy it was to forget she wasn’t invincible. How much it cut to see her mask break—and how much more it hurt to realize that she thought the mask was the only part of her they ever wanted.

And maybe… she wasn’t wrong.

The break comes on the fifth day.

No changes. No movement. She’s alive but it feels like she’s leaving, slow and steady, like fog rolling out before the sun.

Roach is sleeping. Ghost’s vanished. Price is handling brass bullshit.

So Soap slips in alone.

The room smells like antiseptic and death pretending it’s not waiting. The machines beep steady. Too steady. Like a heartbeat mocking him.

Em lies there, pale and gray-skinned, mouth slightly open, hair tangled around the pillow. Not blonde. Not golden. Not the ‘girl’ she thought they needed.

Just her. Just Em.

The version of her that bled to protect them.

The version of her that took a knife to the gut and didn’t flinch.

The version of her he hesitated on, for one second.

One second.

And that’s all it took.

Johnny moves to the side of the bed. Grabs her cold hand. Clutches it like an anchor. His knuckles go white.

He whispers something. Doesn’t even know what.

Something like “please.”

Something like “I’m sorry.”

Something like “I saw you. I see you now. You don’t have to hide anymore.”

Then he breaks.

Not loud. Not ugly.

Just a slow folding, like a man collapsing inward.

He sinks into the chair, curls in on himself, still holding her hand.

And he weeps.

Not for himself.

Not for guilt.

But for the truth:

He loves her.

All of her. The soft parts, the monstrous ones, the skin she wore and the skin she bled in.

And it took almost losing her forever to realize that she didn’t need to change a damn thing.

“Come back,” he whispers, voice shaking. “You don’t have to be pretty, Em. You just have to be here.”

He leans forward, pressing his forehead to the back of her hand.

And in that silence, he promises—

If she wakes up, he’ll never let her think she’s a monster again.

Roach:

Roach doesn’t snap like Ghost.

He doesn’t scream like Johnny.

He doesn’t punch holes through walls or throw things or cry until his throat is raw.

He just… runs out of space.

There’s no room left in his head. No air left in his lungs. No more clever deflections or buried grief. He hits the limit like a soldier walking into a minefield he’d stopped believing in.

It happens three weeks after they drag her out of the snow.

Three weeks of stitching her back together. Three weeks of monitoring her vitals, rechecking bloodwork, cleaning wounds that never stop weeping black, not red. Three weeks of watching a heartbeat on a screen to convince himself she’s still alive—because Em doesn’t look it.

She hasn’t shifted once.

No golden hair. No soft, laughing lie of a girl she used to pretend to be.

Just the changeling. Just her.

And Roach stays.

Through all of it.

He sleeps on the floor beside her bed. Trains during the day. Takes his turn on missions. Returns covered in dirt and soot and lies, and then scrubs in, disinfects, and becomes the only one willing to touch her skin like it doesn’t make his stomach turn.

Like she isn’t wrong.

Like she isn’t gone.

The others come in waves.

Soap sits and mutters soft apologies he doesn’t believe are enough. Ghost hovers but won’t cross the door. Won’t look her in the eye. Price leaves files and fruit like penance.

But Roach…

Roach holds her hand when no one else will. Cleans her mouth when blood foams up her throat. Massages atrophying muscles so she doesn’t wake up frozen inside her own skin. Talks to her, even when his voice is barely more than a croak. Tells her she’s here, she’s alive, and she matters.

And every time he says it, part of him doubts.

Not because he doesn’t believe it.

But because he’s afraid she doesn’t.

Because she hasn’t woken up.

Not once.

It’s night when it happens.

He’s alone in the medbay. The nurses have rotated out. Lights are low. The storm outside hisses against the windows like teeth grinding through glass.

She spasms suddenly. Whole body jerking.

Blood sprays from her mouth—black and tar-thick, viscous and choking—and Roach is moving before he can think, grabbing gauze, rolling her to her side, clearing her throat, calling her name again and again like she can hear him, like that part of her wants to come back.

“Em, breathe—god, come on, come on, breathe for me—”

He’s shaking. Hands soaked. Face splattered. Kneeling in a puddle of what should’ve been inside her.

He gets her stable.

Barely.

Machines beep steady again.

But Em doesn’t move.

She doesn’t shift. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t flutter her eyes or squeeze his fingers.

Just sinks back into the bed, limp and gray and too quiet.

Roach stands.

Wipes his hands off on his ruined shirt.

Stares down at her.

And feels everything in him start to crumble.

It’s not the blood.

It’s not the machines.

It’s not even the fear.

It’s her.

The way her body trembled while she tried to change her skin. The way her bones cracked, warped, restructured—tried to be the girl again. The pretty one. The soft one. For them.

Not for herself.

For them.

And she couldn’t hold it. She failed.

And it broke her.

She gave everything.

And it still wasn’t enough.

Roach feels it hit like a blade to the ribs.

He lurches back from the bed. Stumbles into the sink. Washes his hands. Tries to breathe. His reflection in the mirror looks like a stranger. Pale. Haunted. Wet-eyed.

He rips off his gloves.

Slams the metal sink hard enough it echoes.

“What more do you want from her?!” he chokes out to no one. To the gods. To the ghosts in the room. To Ghost himself, wherever he’s hiding, probably bleeding in a gym with no one to stop him.

He laughs. One sharp bark. Then another. Then he’s laughing too hard, and it’s not laughter anymore—it’s a collapse. A flood. His knees hit the floor.

He buries his face in bloodstained hands.

And finally, Roach weeps.

For her.

For Johnny.

For himself.

For all the lives she saved, for all the times they looked at her like she was other and never said it aloud, for the fact that she bled herself dry to be enough—and none of them stopped her.

He crawls back to her bed.

Takes her hand.

Presses it to his cheek.

And whispers, “You don’t have to change for us. Not again. Just wake up. Please. Wake up.”

Gaz:

It’s worse, sometimes, not being there.

Worse not because he was spared the blood or the screams or the sick crunch of bones—no, that part is lucky. That part lets him sleep without jolting awake to echoes of someone choking on their own magic.

But the rest?

The not knowing?

The imagining?

It eats him alive.

Kyle Garrick—Gaz to the field, to the brass, to his brothers—was on a recon in Urzikstan when Em almost died. A week of sand and sun and enemy chatter. A week of thinking nothing was wrong.

He didn’t even know until he came back. Until the helo hit the tarmac and he saw Soap pacing like a caged dog, knuckles bandaged and still red.

“Where’s Em?” he’d asked.

He wishes someone had lied.

Roach told him the story, blunt and clinical at first. The mission. The injuries. The shift. The aftermath.

Then the details came. Slowly. Like bone fragments washing to the shore.

“She looked at Johnny—right at him. Tried to shift. Tried to be her ‘pretty’ face. Couldn’t hold it. Collapsed.”

“She spat blood trying to be what we needed.”

“She passed out thinking we didn’t want her if she wasn’t golden.”

“She hasn’t woken up since.”

The guilt sets in then.

Because Kyle wasn’t there.

He wasn’t the one who turned away. Who flinched. Who went silent in the face of a truth she’d been terrified to show.

But that means he also wasn’t the one to stop it.

He wasn’t there to reach for her. To anchor her. To tell her the lie she believed—that they loved the mask and not the monster—was just that.

A lie.

He was gone.

And she almost died.

The next day, he stands outside her medbay door and can’t go in.

It’s not cowardice. It’s worse.

It’s the belief that he doesn’t deserve to.

He didn’t see her fall. Didn’t scream her name. Didn’t drop to his knees beside her. Didn’t carry her broken body through the storm. All he has are the pictures in his head, the what ifs that rewind and replay until he’s sick from it.

What if he’d been there?

Would she have looked at him?

Would he have smiled at her, meant it, and broken the spell?

Would he have stepped in before she lashed out?

Would he have told her—Em, I see you, all of you, and it’s not too much?

He never got the chance.

And now it might be too late.

It takes three weeks before he opens the door.

The room is too quiet. Too still. The kind of stillness that only happens when machines are the only things trying to keep a person alive.

Em doesn’t move.

She doesn’t flinch.

She doesn’t even twitch.

And Kyle breaks.

Not all at once. Not with fire. Not with fury.

But like a building giving way under the slow weight of time and silence and regret.

He steps to the bed. Sits beside her. Takes her cold hand in both of his. Holds it to his chest.

“I wasn’t there,” he says softly.

Voice shaking.

“I should’ve been. And I know that’s not fair. Not to me. Not to you. But I keep thinking—if it’d been me, maybe… maybe you would’ve stayed.”

His throat closes. His jaw clenches.

“I’ve seen what you are, Em. Not the mask. You. The gray, the sharp edges, the quiet way you never let yourself ask for anything. And I never said anything because I thought—hell, I don’t know. Maybe I thought you didn’t want it known. Maybe I thought you were handling it.”

He huffs a laugh. Bitter. Shaking.

“Bullshit, right? You were drowning and we all stood back and watched you sink.”

He swipes at his face.

“Everyone keeps saying you’re a fighter. That you’ll wake up. That you’ll heal.”

He leans closer, eyes glistening.

“But if you don’t… if you don’t, Em—I need you to know this. You don’t have to change for us. Not for me. I’m not scared of what’s under your skin.”

He touches her forehead, gentle.

“I miss you. Not the pretty you. Not the mask. You.”

No answer.

No movement.

Just the faint whirr of machines.

Kyle swallows hard.

And then he breaks properly.

Hands fisting in the blanket. Head bowed. His whole body shaking as the grief he’s kept locked down tears its way out in ragged, dry sobs.

He stays like that for a long time.

Just him and her and the awful weight of everything unsaid.

Price:

There are two versions of Captain John Price.

The one the world knows. The man with the gravel voice, the steel spine, the uncanny ability to make a call in hell and have it stick. The leader. The tactician. The father to a unit stitched together by war and ghosts.

And then there’s the other one.

The one who sits alone in his office long after everyone else has gone to bed, staring at the reports that mean nothing now. The man who reads her vitals every night like they’re coordinates to a target he could still hit, if he could just figure out what he missed.

He doesn’t cry.

Price doesn’t cry.

But fuck if something in his chest hasn’t been splintered since the night the radio crackled with Soap’s panicked voice.

“She’s not breathing—we need exfil NOW—she’s not—she’s not human and she’s dying, Captain!”

He remembers freezing. Just for a second. A beat.

Then:

“Copy. Sending evac. Hold tight.”

Just like any other op. Just like any other call.

But it wasn’t.

Price was the one who greenlit the mission.

He chose the lineup. Gave the go. Told Em she was ready.

He saw the tremor in her hands before they deployed. Saw how she adjusted her gloves twice, three times, like she was grounding herself in something familiar. He chalked it up to nerves. Maybe pressure.

What he didn’t see was that she was unraveling.

Trying to hold in all the parts of herself she thought weren’t welcome.

He sent her out there anyway.

He sent them all.

In the weeks since, he hasn’t left base once.

He tells himself it’s logistics, command, briefings, but the truth is simpler: he won’t leave her behind.

Not again.

So he stays. Watches the boys fracture around her bed like orbiting debris. Roach, worn thin with guilt and determination. Johnny, running hot and then cold, like he doesn’t know who to be without her. Ghost, silent and unreadable—until he finally wasn’t.

And Gaz. Sweet, sharp Gaz. The only one who hadn’t been there, and the one it chewed up worst of all.

But Price doesn’t break.

He can’t.

Because they all look at him like he’s the anchor now. Like his silence will hold them steady. And maybe it does.

But it’s a fragile thing. One thread at a time.

He visits her room at 0200.

When the medbay is quiet. When there are no eyes on him.

He stands just inside the doorway, arms folded, a silhouette cut from shadow.

The machines hum. She doesn’t move.

She hasn’t in days.

She’s still gray.

Still herself.

And for all the sermons he’s preached to his boys about how it doesn’t matter what she looks like—that what she is doesn’t change what she means—he can’t stop thinking about how young she looks like this. Small. Like someone no one ever taught how to be loved.

That’s what wrecks him.

That they all knew, on some level. And still never said the words.

He takes a breath. Lets it out slow.

“Not gonna lie, love,” he murmurs, barely above a whisper. “I thought you’d bounce back by now. Kinda your thing.”

He smiles, but it’s not real. Just an echo of habit.

His fingers twitch like he wants to reach for her but doesn’t. Won’t.

“You remember what I said to you after Prague?” he asks the air. “You were still high on morphine. Tried to shift into a nurse to sneak out of the hospital.”

He chuckles softly. The sound of a man remembering something sweet at the edge of a battlefield.

“I told you, ‘Don’t need to play pretend, Em. You’re more than enough as you are.’”

His voice thins. Just a little.

“I meant it.”

He doesn’t wait for a response. There won’t be one.

He just stands there.

Silent.

Staring.

Price breaks only once.

Four in the morning. No one’s around.

He walks into the gym, picks up her combat knife—her knife, still tagged and stored in the recovered gear box—and holds it like it’s foreign.

And then he sets it down, sits on the edge of the mat, and bows his head into his hands.

Just sits there.

Still.

Motionless.

No words.

No sound.

Not even breathing for a moment.

Just a man in a storm, waiting for lightning to strike.

He doesn’t cry.

He won’t.

But if anyone had seen the look in his eyes, they’d know—

He’d trade every star, every rank, every mission success, just to hear her laugh again.

Just to know he hadn’t sent her into that fire with the weight of proving herself strapped to her back like a bomb.

Roach:

Roach is the first one in.

It’s early—god, it’s barely past five. The medbay is still blue-dark, lit only by the soft pulse of the vitals monitor and the low hum of regulated airflow. He hadn’t meant to be here. He just… couldn’t sleep. Not with the way she looked yesterday.

Gray skin stretched over bones that didn’t belong in any anatomy book. Hollow cheeks. Brittle limbs. That stillness that made his throat feel like it was closing.

So he comes. Like he has every morning.

Just to check.

Just to say, “You’re not alone.”

But today—today something’s changed.

He freezes in the doorway.

Blinking.

Heart skipping once.

Twice.

Because she’s not gray anymore.

Not changeling.

Not monstrous.

She’s her.

Blonde. Soft. Luminous in the cold early light. Her skin is flushed now, pink and whole and almost glowing. Her lashes lie gentle against her cheekbones. Her lips parted just slightly, breathing even but shallow. She looks—Christ, she looks like—

Her.

The one they first met.

The version of Em she always thought they loved.

And Roach’s chest goes tight.

Not with wonder. Not with awe.

But with grief.

Because he knows she didn’t do this for them. Not consciously. Not out of pride or vanity.

She did it in her sleep.

Some part of her, buried under pain and poison and comatose silence, still believed this version was safer. Still believed they wouldn’t come if she wore the wrong face.

Still believed she’d be easier to love like this.

Roach’s legs buckle before he even realizes he’s moving. He drops to the chair at her bedside, elbows on knees, hands covering his mouth. Not crying. Not speaking.

Just watching her.

And it hurts.

It hurts more than any wound he’s ever taken.

Because she’s beautiful, yes—but it’s not real. Not anymore. Not now that he knows what it costs.

And he wants to scream. Wants to shake her and tell her she doesn’t have to do this. That she already had them. That she could look like hell on fire and still be family.

But she’s not awake.

She’s not there.

Not really.

So all he does is lean forward, gently—so gently—and brush a knuckle against the soft gold curl that’s fallen over her temple. Her skin is warm under his touch.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so fucking sorry, Em.”

Because he should’ve told her sooner.

They all should have.

Price:

It’s nearly 0300.

The base is dead quiet. The kind of silence that makes your ears ring, makes your boots feel too loud on polished floors. Most are asleep. Or passed out. Or pretending to be both.

Price isn’t.

He’s doing his usual circuit—under the radar, unlogged. Just enough movement to fool himself into thinking he’s not pacing. That he’s still in control. That all this weight isn’t sitting square in the center of his chest like a goddamn anchor.

He always passes the medbay.

Never stops.

Until tonight.

Tonight he doesn’t know why his feet veer, slow, pivot toward the soft-glowing hallway. He tells himself it’s just to check. Just a glance. For peace of mind. So he can go back to pretending he’s a leader worth the rank on his collar.

The door’s cracked. Light spilling soft over tile.

And inside—

She’s not there.

Not that her.

Not the wrong-skinned, too-sharp, near-dead shell he’d watched them drag off the snow-slick mountainside. Not the half-shifted form that looked more beast than soldier.

No.

She’s her.

The version he remembers first seeing in briefing rooms and combat drills. The one with gold-flecked lashes and warm skin and that sly, tucked-away smile she never quite trusted herself to show.

She’s still unconscious.

But there’s no mistaking it. Her hair catches the moonlight like honey. Her cheeks have color again. She looks like she just fell asleep. Dreaming soft things, maybe.

For a moment, Price just stands there.

Staring.

And something twists in his chest.

Because the sight isn’t relief.

It’s a lie.

A reflex born from trauma and survival and some kind of internalized goddamn self-hate that runs deeper than any bullet wound. Her magic didn’t return to show her strength. It came back to protect her from them.

From him.

From the judgment she expected to see in their eyes.

And that—that is the part that guts him.

Because if her subconscious mind still thinks this is what they want—if this is what she reverts to when no one’s watching—then Price failed her in more ways than strategy.

Failed her as a leader. As a protector. As a man.

He swallows hard.

Steps closer.

Watches her chest rise and fall, slow and rhythmic, like nothing’s wrong.

Like she didn’t nearly die trying to earn her right to exist.

He presses a hand to the windowpane of her vitals monitor. It steadies him. Sort of.

“I’m sorry,” he mutters. No one to hear it but her machines.

And then, quieter:

“You shouldn’t have to look like this for us.”

She doesn’t move.

She doesn’t need to.

The hurt is already done.

He stares a while longer—until his lungs burn with the effort of not smoking, until the guilt gets too loud to think through.

Then he turns.

And walks back into the night.

Gaz:

It’s day fourty-six.

Give or take. No one’s keeping count out loud, but Gaz knows. He’s tracked it in the smudged coffee rings on his desk, the thinning ink in his field notes, the way the team doesn’t speak her name like they’re afraid it’ll summon ghosts.

He’s been by every day.

Doesn’t say much. Just sits. Leaves things. A dumb trinket from the commissary. Her favorite protein bar. The same little speaker that still half-works when you plug it in and beg it to play something other than static.

He comes alone, always.

Not for show. Not for grief.

Just… because the silence around her feels less sharp when he’s the one keeping watch.

But today is different.

Today, the second he opens the door and looks toward the bed, his heart lurches.

Because the shape there is wrong.

Not wrong like before. Not the uncanny too-thin frame of her gray-skinned form, with its twitching magic and sick-slick sheen.

No.

Wrong because it looks right.

Because the girl in the bed now is golden. Her hair’s curled a little at the ends—dry, soft, healthy. Her lips are pink. Her lashes cast long shadows. Her cheeks are flushed with a warmth that doesn’t belong in a sterile room like this.

She’s beautiful.

Undeniably.

Undeniably her.

But Gaz doesn’t smile.

Doesn’t exhale in relief.

Instead, he freezes.

Because he remembers the last time, well, remembers it in a sense. He wasn’t there, lord the guilt won’t let him forget that. But he’s replayed what he was told, over and over, and over, and over in his head until it became second nature to invision. Until it became a memory of his own creation. The shaking, fever-hot version of her clawing at her own skin, trying to hold the illusion together while the life bled out of her. The way her mouth still twitched into the shape of a smile as if that would make it easier on them.

He walks in slow.

The scent of antiseptic is too sharp, too clean.

He sits in the chair he’s claimed as his own. Lets his eyes drag over the lines of her face.

She’s perfect.

Too perfect.

Too fucking perfect.

His chest tightens. Not with awe. With dread.

This wasn’t a recovery.

This was a retreat.

A body reverting to what it thought it had to be to survive. To be loved. To be safe.

And the fact that it’s her magic doing it—her heart, her soul, her bones—means the wound goes deeper than any scalpel can find.

He clenches his jaw.

“Don’t,” he whispers, voice raw with something that doesn’t have a name.

His hand reaches out, hovers over hers. He doesn’t take it. Just rests nearby.

“You don’t have to do this,” he says. “Not for me. Not for anyone.”

His voice breaks halfway through the next part.

“You don’t have to be pretty to be worth saving.”

And fuck if the silence doesn’t answer like it’s listening.

She doesn’t move.

She just breathes.

And that’s enough to wreck him.

He wipes his face on his sleeve and stays longer this time. Long enough that the lights dim on their own. Long enough that the rest of the world forgets she’s still hanging on by a thread.

But he doesn’t.

He’ll be back tomorrow.

And the day after.

And the day after that.

[willinglymalicioustaco]

I did not sleep last night. Instead:

The mission went to hell fast. My hands still shake from the adrenaline, still buzzing from the fight, the screams, the wet crunch of bone and metal and the kind of blood that’s too dark to be human. Makarov’s soldiers didn’t expect me to shift. They didn’t expect me to bleed and keep moving. One of them stabbed me through the gut, and the other carved a clean line across my palm like he was gutting a fish. I let them. That was the plan. I’m a changeling. I adapt, infiltrate, deceive. They trained me to survive and shift and kill. But no one trained me for this part—the aftermath. The staggering lurch of reality snapping back around me like a noose. The poison in my veins makes my body too fast, too strong, too wrong. The med tent isn’t ready for someone like me. Neither am I.

I make it back to base, barely upright. Soap’s the first to reach me, voice sharp and panicked, hands hovering like he doesn’t know where to touch without breaking something. I can’t focus. I can’t breathe. The blood loss turns the room into a tunnel, narrow and pulsing. Then he touches me. Just a hand on my shoulder. A gentle anchor.

And I snap.

Panic claws its way up my throat like a living thing. My fist lashes out before I can even register the movement, and Soap goes down like a sack of bricks, hitting the floor with a sickening thud. My breath hitches. Horror hits a half-second too late. He doesn’t move. I take a step back, already stammering apologies that feel fake even to my own ears. “I didn’t— I didn’t mean to—” but my voice is raw and wrong and the air tastes like copper and guilt.

Roach comes next, trying to calm me down, but I don’t hear his footsteps over the screaming in my head. He touches my arm and I grab him—hard, too hard—and slam him into the nearest wall. His breath leaves his lungs in a rush. For a moment, there’s silence. Just the sound of my heart thundering against my ribs, like it wants out of me. Then I realize what I’ve done. Again. I let him go immediately, hands up, stepping back like he’s a bomb I just armed. He stares at me, not angry. Not scared. Just… shocked. I open my mouth to explain—something, anything—but the words die in my throat.

And then I see him.

Ghost.

He’s standing in the doorway, still as stone, arms crossed, the faint silhouette of his skull mask caught in the flickering light. His eyes—dark, unreadable, merciless—lock onto mine. And the weight of his stare crushes the air right out of my lungs. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have to. That look… it isn’t horror. It’s worse. It’s calculation. Like he’s cataloging what I am. Weighing the threat.

I’ve seen him look at hostiles like this. At corpses. At things beyond saving.

That’s the moment it hits me—he sees the monster. Not the girl I’ve tried so hard to be. Not the one with green eyes and golden hair and a sweet laugh she practiced until it sounded real. He sees what’s underneath. What I really am. White hair. Gray skin. Milky changeling eyes. Sharp teeth and bone-deep wrongness. And he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t blink. He just sees. And I feel myself splinter under it.

Roach steps between us, face flushed with anger. “You let her run, you cold bastard!” he shouts, gesturing toward the tent flap I’d fled through moments before. “That look you gave her—she thinks she’s a fucking monster now!”

Ghost doesn’t respond right away. When he does, his voice is low. Dangerous. “She is dangerous, Roach. You saw what she did. To Soap. To you. What if she doesn’t stop next time?”

Roach’s voice is sharp enough to draw blood. “She stopped this time. She let me go. You’re the one who looked at her like she was already gone.”

The argument keeps rising. Ghost growls something about survival and programming, and Roach fires back about trust and family. I’m not there to hear it. I’m already long gone, blood trailing in the snow as I shift into something winged, feathered, fast. A shadow against the storm-wracked sky. My body isn’t working right. My magic is unraveling. Every shift feels like it’s peeling the skin from my bones.

I dive toward the mountains.

The wind howls around me as I crash into a crevice, bones jarring, magic flickering out like a dying match. The fall knocks the last of the strength out of me, and I shift without thinking, back into what I really am. The skin I never wanted. The one I was born into.

White hair, ragged and soaked with blood. Gray, ash-toned skin stretched too thin over a skeleton that doesn’t quite match human anatomy. Milky eyes that barely hold focus. A mouth with too many teeth.

Wrong. All wrong.

I collapse. Shivering. Bleeding. Hollow. The cave presses in around me, cold and unforgiving. I try to stay awake, but everything is heavy. My thoughts. My bones. The silence. Even the lie that I can fix this.

When they find me, I’m barely breathing. Soap, Roach, and Ghost. I see their silhouettes through the snow-blind dark. Hear their voices, dim and underwater. They’re shouting. Moving fast. I catch glimpses—Soap’s frantic hands, Roach’s pale face, Ghost’s coat hitting the ground beside me as he kneels. Their voices blur together like storm winds in my ears. And then I see Soap. His face. His eyes. And it breaks me. Not because of pain. Not because I’m scared. But because I expected it. That look. That half-second flicker of revulsion. I knew he’d look at me like that. And I tried to hide it. I tried. Even now, I reach for her like I always have—for the blonde girl with soft lips and green eyes and a fragile human smile that makes people relax. I reach for her like a lifeline. Like if I can just get the shape right, maybe they’ll forget the monster curled at their feet.

My magic stirs.

It’s weak. Barely enough to spark. But the illusion comes anyway, flickering like old film. My skin flushes, pinks. The sickly gray melts into warm peach. My hair bleeds gold across my scalp, strand by strand, like light bleeding into a dark room. My mouth reshapes. My eyes glint green again. And their faces—their faces—change.

Soap gasps, relief flooding his expression. “She’s stabilizing,” he says quickly, as if saying it makes it true. “Look—she looks like herself again.”

Roach breathes out something soft. Almost a laugh. “Christ, Em. You scared the shit out of us.”

Even Ghost—silent, grim, still covered in frost—lets out a breath I didn’t know he was holding. “Good,” he mutters. “That’s good. Hold it together, rookie.”

And for a heartbeat—just one—I believe them. Not the words, exactly, but the tone. The ease that washes over them when they see this version of me. The lie. The girl they think I am. Their relief pours into me like morphine. Warm. Sweet. Temporary. It shouldn’t hurt. I should be grateful. I should hold onto it.

But it’s not real.

This girl is a costume. A safehouse. A hostage situation I’ve run for years and no longer know how to end. And they don’t see it. They don’t see me. Not really. They think the soft lines and golden hair mean I’m okay. They think my healing has a face, and that it’s this one. But I’m crumbling beneath it. The magic is unraveling thread by thread, seams popping open beneath their hands. My real skin—gray, sharp, raw—presses against the inside of the mask like it’s drowning.

The illusion flickers again.

Soap doesn’t notice at first. His hands are on my face, trying to keep me grounded, keep me awake. “Stay with me, Em,” he murmurs. “You’re alright. You’re okay. You look alright. You look like you.”

You look like you.

The words dig deep. I want to believe them. I want to stay inside her. But she’s not me. She never was. She’s the lie I’ve bled to maintain. And she’s dying.

I try again. Try to hold her together. My magic sparks, jittery and frantic, pulling skin tight over bone, forcing color into my face like paint on cracked porcelain. I shape my mouth into a smile because they need it. Because I need it. Because I think if I don’t smile, I’ll scream.

It slips again.

A fracture in my cheekbone. A flicker of pale gray at my throat. They still don’t see it. Don’t understand. I see Roach grin through the snow and murmur, “That’s it. She’s coming back.”

They don’t know I’m trying to disappear.

They don’t know I’m dying inside this mask.

I try again.

Harder this time. My fingers twitch. My jaw locks. My eyes roll back from the pain of it—force-shifting a body that doesn’t want to be born. I’m holding the girl’s face together with sheer will. I can’t breathe. My magic is screaming through my veins. It’s too much. Too weak. Too late.

The spell shatters.

Not fades. Shatters. The color rips from my skin in patches like burned paint peeling from walls. My hair dulls, wilts, snaps back into brittle white strands. My hands twist, distort. My mouth slacks open and I feel the teeth push forward again, sharp and foreign and real. My skin grays in splotches, then all at once, and the girl I tried to be dies screaming inside my skull.

A sound leaves my throat that isn’t human.

And I see it then.

See them see me.

For real.

Their faces go still. Soap’s hands drop. Roach pulls back just a little—just enough. And Ghost… Ghost is already standing, already gone behind his eyes. That calculation again. The kind that decides whether to save or end a thing.

And I crack.

Not my bones. Not my magic.

Me.

My body curls in on itself like it’s trying to fold into the rock. I press my face into the cold stone floor and whisper something that barely makes sound. “I can’t… even die pretty.”

Or maybe I don’t say it at all.

It doesn’t matter.

Because the world tilts and tips and vanishes. My magic gutters out. The pain eats everything. And then—

Nothing.

Just the dark.

Narrator:

She hits the ground hard. Limbs slack. Chest barely rising. Skin all wrong. That soft illusion—the one they all clung to, maybe even loved—is gone. What’s left is jagged and gray and bleeding out in the snow, in the silence, in the aftermath of a shattering.

And for a second, no one moves.

Then Soap drops like the sky’s falling. Onto his knees, beside her broken form, hands moving to press against wounds that aren’t clotting, magic that isn’t responding. His voice is a harsh rasp. “No, no—Em, no—stay with me, fuck—Roach!”

Roach is already there, already unpacking the kit, gloves on, sleeves up, jaw set with surgeon’s steel. He doesn’t blink at her skin, doesn’t flinch at the twist of her arms or the way her ribs look too sharp beneath gray flesh. “Her pulse is weak,” he mutters. “But it’s there. We need to stabilize her now or we lose her.”

But Johnny—he can’t focus.

He’s shaking. He’s screaming now.

“You looked at her,” he snarls at Ghost, voice rising like a wildfire over Em’s body. “You looked at her like she was a fucking thing!”

Ghost stands rigid a few paces back, arms still crossed, eyes locked on the blood blooming beneath Em’s ribs. He says nothing. That silence—that silence—is what makes Johnny snap.

“You fucking cold bastard! She took a blade for you last month—ripped through her shoulder clean—and still ran extraction on the kid in Prague. She killed the Changeling King’s heir to keep you alive in Svalbard, and you didn’t even say thank you, just catalogued it like you were counting fucking stats!”

“She’s dangerous,” Ghost says finally. Low. Quiet. But Johnny hears it like a goddamn gunshot.

“She’s family!” Johnny’s voice breaks on the word, throat raw. He gestures to Em—bleeding, unconscious, wrong and perfect and herself—and shoves Ghost back hard, fists clenched. “You looked her in the eyes and killed her with it. And I—I—” He can’t finish. “I saw the flicker. I saw her see me flinch. Just for a second. That’s all it fucking took.”

Roach is working fast, covered in her blood, packing gauze against open wounds, his voice a mantra: “Hold on, Em. Just hold on, alright? Stay with me. You’ve survived worse.”

But Johnny is spiraling, voice ragged now. “She tried to fix it. Tried to put the mask back on for us. For me.”

“You think I wanted this?” Ghost growls. “You think I wanted her to break? I didn’t flinch. I assessed.”

Johnny rounds on him again, eyes wild. “Assessed what, Ghost? If she was worth saving? If she was still useful? If the monster could be aimed like a rifle again?”

Ghost doesn’t answer.

Because that’s exactly what he was doing.

And Johnny knows it. Em knew it. That look in her eyes—that final fucking look before the light went out—wasn’t pain. Wasn’t fear.

It was knowing.

Knowing they’d all rather have the illusion than the real her.

Knowing she wasn’t allowed to break, or bleed, or look wrong without someone writing her off.

Roach slaps a seal on the worst wound, voice snapping like thunder. “She’s not gone. Not yet. I’ve got a blood stim in—magic’s not taking but her core temp’s holding. We can still win this.”

“Don’t talk like she’s a mission,” Johnny mutters, but it’s not aimed at Roach.

He turns back to Em. Falls to his knees again.

The tears come fast, hot. His gloves are slick with her blood. Her chest jerks once under his touch. Barely.

“She’s still in there,” he whispers, voice breaking. “C’mon, bonnie. I know you are. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean to see you like that.”

Ghost stays back.

For once, he doesn’t speak.

Maybe because he knows he fucked up.

Maybe because this silence is the only penance he can offer.

Roach doesn’t stop moving. “If we can get her stable in the next five minutes, I think I can—”

But Em’s body convulses.

Just once.

A brutal twitch.

And the magic that’s left in her lashes out—not controlled, not clean, just a surge of heat and shadow and pressure, like her whole body is rejecting itself. Like she’s trying to shift again. Even now. Even dying.

Johnny grabs her face. “No, no, no—don’t. Don’t try to be her. Don’t try to be the girl again.”

Roach backs off a half step, shielding his eyes from the flash as her skin ripples again—this time in panic, not power. The girl tries to come back.

But the spell fails.

Again.

Em shudders and jerks and collapses harder, her real skin bleeding back through the illusion. Gray. Pale. Wrong and right and her. Her mouth falls open, and a sound crawls out—wet, guttural, almost like a sob but too broken to finish.

And this time, her pulse does dip.

Flatlines.

For one horrible second.

Johnny loses it. “EM!”

Roach’s hands are already back on her, frantically slamming more heat into her veins. “Come on, come on—damn it, breathe!”

Her chest rises.

Once.

Shallow.

A heartbeat thuds beneath her skin.

Faint. Fragile. There.

And all three of them—Soap, Roach, even Ghost—are still as statues around her broken body.

Because she almost died.

Trying to be someone she’s not.

And they all let her.

Ghost:

Ghost watches her die.

Not physically, not entirely—not yet. But something in her crumples in that final flicker of failed glamour, and he sees it. Sees the exact second her will breaks.

Sees her give up.

Not from blood loss. Not from pain. But because the lie she always wore—the soft, pretty mask of humanity—won’t come back. Won’t obey. And without it, she doesn’t know how to be alive.

And Ghost realizes, with the slow horror of a man watching his own hands pull the trigger, that she thought she needed it. For them.

For him.

And he had helped her believe that.

Johnny slams into him with both hands, fury in every inch of his frame. “You looked at her like she was fucking expendable!”

Ghost doesn’t budge. Doesn’t even raise his voice.

Because he can’t.

Because Johnny’s not wrong.

He had been assessing. Coldly. Methodically. Watching her shift like a wounded animal backed into a corner, and instead of reaching out, instead of being human, he’d gone silent. He’d let the mask slip from his own eyes. Let her see the math in his brain—asset or threat.

Not friend.

Not family.

Not Em.

“Say something, you cold bastard!” Johnny shoves him again, chest heaving, eyes wild and rimmed with salt. “She would’ve died for you. Hell, she has. And you stood there and watched her fall apart like she was nothing but a tool you didn’t want to fix!”

Ghost doesn’t move. Not this time.

What could he say?

I didn’t mean to?

I was scared?

I didn’t know what to do with her face like that, like her?

No.

He’d seen combat changelings before. The enemy kind. Shape-shifters with dead eyes and smiles that never quite touched their lips. Tactical nightmares. No mercy. No softness. No real center.

He’d spent years learning to recognize the shift beneath the skin. To watch for the twitch in the bone, the warping magic. To identify, catalogue, and neutralize.

And even when Em had proven again and again that she wasn’t them—wasn’t a threat, wasn’t a trick, wasn’t a monster—his first instinct, when the illusion dropped, was to do what they’d trained into him.

Assess.

And in doing so, he watched her bleed out believing that look.

That judgment.

That she had finally shown too much, and now none of them would love her.

“You let her go,” Johnny spits, voice wrecked. “She looked at you for help, Ghost. Just for a second. And you gave her nothing.”

Ghost flinches. Just barely. But it’s enough.

Because Johnny sees it. And steps back.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” he whispers, trembling. “You know. You know you fucked up. That look killed her harder than the blade ever could.”

And all Ghost can do is stand there. Still. Silent.

Roach is working on Em. Blood soaking through his sleeves. Breathing hard, cursing under his breath as he tries to keep her warm, alive, present. He doesn’t look up. Doesn’t even acknowledge the argument. Because he knows too.

They all do.

The mask had slipped off Ghost first.

Then off Em.

And now?

Now there’s just silence.

And her body. Pale. Quiet. Real.

Johnny:

He’s shaking. He doesn’t know when it started—maybe somewhere between “she’s crashing!” and “we’re losing her!”—but it won’t stop. His hands are fists, white-knuckled and shaking, and he can’t breathe around the way her name is still in the tent, hanging in the air like smoke.

He doesn’t even know how he got from her side to Ghost’s chest, doesn’t remember the moment he moved, but his hands are already on him, shoving, teeth clenched, voice cracking.

“You looked at her like she was a fucking threat.”

Ghost doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak.

That silence—it makes Johnny want to scream.

Because it’s not that Ghost doesn’t care. No, it’s worse. It’s that he does. He just knows. Knows he’s fucked it, and he won’t even defend himself. Won’t even try to explain.

“You didn’t say a word,” Johnny snarls, spittle catching on his lip. “Not one fucking word, mate. She was falling apart and you—you just stood there! Like she wasn’t even a person anymore!”

Still nothing. Just that goddamn mask. That skull. That void behind it.

Johnny’s stomach twists. Something sour, something rotten. He remembers that look—just a flash in Ghost’s eyes, the moment Em’s skin split into that grayscale hue, all soft illusion stripped away. That inhuman beauty she hated. And Ghost had seen her.

And calculated.

Threat assessment complete.

And Johnny had felt it, like a nail driven into bone.

“She thought it mattered to you,” he whispers, voice fraying. “All that time she spent trying to look like someone you’d trust—someone you’d protect. And you couldn’t even give her a fucking blink, Ghost. Just stared at her like…”

He stops. Swallows. Hard.

“Like you were already figuring out where to put the bullet.”

And that does it.

A twitch.

Not much. A breath. A blink. Maybe less than that.

But it’s enough.

Johnny sees it. The flinch. The crack in the marble.

It lands like a punch to his own chest.

Because it confirms everything.

“You do know,” he says. Soft, but bitter. “You knew exactly what you were doing. And you stood there and let her break. You watched her die, and you didn’t even fucking flinch—”

He breaks off, swallows the scream behind his teeth.

“No. That’s not true,” he mutters. “You did flinch. Just now. After. After it was already too late.”

The rage drains out of him so fast he stumbles. One second a wildfire, the next—a husk.

He steps back. One hand rakes through his hair, the other clenched and trembling at his side.

“She was more than what she looked like,” he says hoarsely, eyes red-rimmed. “More than the face she put on for us. And I think… I think you knew that too. But you were too scared of what that meant. Too scared to look at her and still see the same person. So you didn’t. You shut it down. Shut her out.”

Behind him, Roach is still working. Still swearing, fingers slick with blood that isn’t even warm anymore.

And Em lies there, breath fluttering like moth wings.

She’s dying.

And all Johnny can do is stand there. With the man who helped her give up.

He turns his back on Ghost. Doesn’t say another word.

Because what else is there to say, when someone you love is breaking in front of you—

and the person who helped it happen doesn’t even try to deny it?

Roach:

It’s all slipping through his fingers.

Her blood. Her breath. Her shape.

Roach isn’t a medic. Not really. Not like the ones back at HQ with degrees and clean gloves and warm lights. But he’s sewn more bodies shut in the field than he cares to count. He’s stopped more bleeding with his bare hands than he ever should’ve had to.

But this?

This is different.

This is Em.

This is her.

She’s shaking. Convulsing. Limbs twitching like static’s caught in her nerves, like her body doesn’t know what to be. She coughs once, hard, and blood spatters his forearm. Dark, thick. It sticks, even through the cold.

He should be focused. Should be counting her breaths, checking the depth of the wound, applying pressure. Triage.

But all he can see is her face—no, not even hers. Not the one they know. The one she wears.

It’s flickering again.

Blonde hair curls in one heartbeat, gold and soft. Then it burns away like smoke, strands paling into white. Skin blooms with warmth—human pink—and then collapses into ashen gray. Her lips tremble. Her eyes shift between green and milky-white and green again, before rolling back entirely as pain pulls her under.

She’s trying.

She’s still trying.

Still trying to be beautiful for them.

Still trying to look like the girl who smiles at Soap’s jokes and blushes when Roach sneaks her coffee and flinches when Ghost looks her way.

She’s dying, and she’s still trying to be pretty.

And something in him shatters.

“No,” he whispers, throat tight. “No, Em, don’t. You don’t have to. You don’t have to look like her.”

His hands press into her side, searching for the bleeding, finding it, clamping hard even though it feels like pressing into a wound that reaches through her. Her skin shifts again, gold to gray. Gray to gold. The spell flares—burns. Then flickers out. Her whole body seizes.

“I’ve got you,” he mutters. “I’ve got you, okay? Just hold on. Just stay here. Please.”

But she’s losing it. Losing herself. Her eyes flicker open and there’s fear in them, not of the pain—but of being seen.

And God, that’s worse.

He leans over her. Forces his hands to stay steady, even though they’re shaking.

“Look at me,” he says, louder now. “It’s okay. You don’t need to shift. You don’t need to pretend.”

Her eyes lock on his. Pale. Alien. Raw.

“Y-you’ll look at me,” she rasps, coughing blood again. “A-and hate it. I look… wrong. I’m wrong—”

“No,” he says. Fierce. Final. “You’re you.”

He presses a wad of gauze into the wound, and she screams. But it’s a human sound. Raw and awful and alive.

“You don’t get it,” she sobs. “I was trying. I was. I thought… if I was her, maybe I’d be enough. Maybe I could be something you’d keep.”

Roach’s jaw clenches. His vision blurs.

He wants to scream. Wants to burn down the whole damn war for doing this to her. For making her believe she had to shrink herself down and paint her skin warm just to be worthy of a place beside them.

“You already are,” he says, voice breaking.

“You were, even when you scared the shit out of me. Even when I didn’t understand. You saved me. Again. And again. And I never thanked you, did I? Never once said, ‘I see you.’ Not her. You.”

She’s sobbing now. Silent, hiccuping gasps that seize through her as her magic fails. Not gracefully. Not peacefully. It tears itself apart.

The girl burns away for good this time.

And all that’s left is the changeling. The real one. The gray. Blood-matted hair. Sharp-boned face. Milk eyes full of terror.

Roach doesn’t stop working. Doesn’t flinch.

“You’re not wrong,” he whispers. “They were.”

He presses a final dressing in place. Wraps her side tight. One hand cradles her jaw, light, reverent.

“Stay,” he breathes. “As you. Please.”

Her breath stutters. Her body sags.

And then she goes still in his arms.

Roach doesn’t panic. Doesn’t cry. He just leans in close, forehead pressed to hers, voice low and steady.

“Don’t you dare go.”

Behind him, Soap is shouting again. Ghost isn’t saying a word.

But Roach is still here.

And he’ll keep stitching.

Even if the girl she tried to be is gone.

Narrator:

They carry her like something sacred and broken.

Not a soldier. Not a weapon.

Not even a girl.

Just what’s left.

Her body is light in Soap’s arms, but not because she’s small. It’s the kind of light that means empty. Like something hollowed out. Like the soul’s already halfway gone. Blood soaks his jacket, slick and slow, her head lolling against his chest as they move. His grip is too tight. He knows it. But he can’t loosen it. Not even a little. Because he remembers—he knows—it was him.

He was the first to look at her like she was broken.

And she saw it.

She felt it.

She died for that look.

Roach walks beside him, hands still stained red, cradling gauze and pressure packs, barking orders at the air, at the universe, at no one. Anything to keep from thinking about the way she reached for a face that wouldn’t come. The lie she tried to wear as her body came apart in his arms. She bled for the right to be seen as lovable.

And Ghost…

Ghost follows behind.

Silent.

Eyes fixed.

Expression unreadable.

But the silence isn’t emptiness. It’s a storm locked behind glass.

The guilt hasn’t taken shape yet—but it will.

The things he didn’t say.

The things he did.

Because he knew what she was. From the start. Knew and catalogued it. Threat level. Combat potential. Psychological profile. Like she was just another asset. Another moving part.

He’s always been the tactician.

And that’s why it cuts so deep—

Because he looked at her and didn’t see a reason to stop.

She tried to die pretty for them.

And all three of them—strong, trained, lethal—could only watch as she failed.

The medbay doors slam open.

White light floods the corridor. Bleach. Metal. Sterile order. None of it fits the bleeding, heaving chaos they carry in. Medics shout. Hands reach. Soap won’t let go. Roach has to pull him back. Ghost doesn’t move.

They lay her on the table. She’s not breathing right. Not enough.

Not enough.

One of the medics says something clinical, precise. A laceration to the lower abdomen. Puncture. Internal bleeding. Collapsing lung. Faint pulse. Another asks if she’s stable.

No one answers.

Because “stable” is a foreign language in this room.

And the worst part is—they still don’t see her.

The medics flinch at her form. At the teeth. The pallor. The eyes.

One of them hesitates before touching her wrist.

Roach sees it.

And his voice is iron when he says, “She’s one of ours.”

The room stills.

Orders resume.

But the damage is done.

And it’s not just in her body.

It’s in the space between the three of them.

It’s in the way Soap grips his wrist like he’s punishing himself.

It’s in the way Roach’s voice shakes when he whispers, “C’mon, c’mon, come back to us.”

It’s in the way Ghost hasn’t spoken in twelve minutes and doesn’t plan to anytime soon.

She is not dead.

But something has died.

The girl is gone.

The lie they let her cling to until it tore her apart.

And what remains—the creature, the truth of her—is bleeding out under cold lights, as a team that calls itself a family realizes just how blind they’ve been.

And how much they might lose.

Ghost:

He doesn’t sit.

Doesn’t pace.

Doesn’t speak.

He stands just outside the glass wall of the medbay, arms folded tight, boot heels locked to the tile. He’s barely breathed in hours. Just watches. Waits.

The doctors murmur in low tones. Machines blink. Tubes run from her arms. Her chest rises and falls in shallow, stuttering rhythm—like her body’s not sure whether to fight or give up. She hasn’t moved since they cut away her blood-soaked gear. They had to strap her down when the convulsions got worse. Not violently. Gently. But still.

Ghost watched them bind her wrists. And said nothing.

He hasn’t spoken since the mountain.

Since the moment her magic broke like glass in her hands and she begged for the pretty version to come back.

And it didn’t.

That’s what haunts him.

Not the wounds. Not the blood.

Not even the sound her bones made when she hit the rock face on the fall.

It’s the silence when her shift failed.

It’s the moment she realized she was trapped in the skin she thought they hated.

That he hated.

Because he knows what she saw on his face.

Not revulsion. Not horror.

Calculation.

It was never meant for her. That look. It was the mask he wears when he’s deciding who walks away from a mission. Who doesn’t. The look he gives hostiles and hard calls and dead weight.

And in that moment—she thought she was one of them.

She thought he’d decided.

Soap sits hunched over on the bench across the hallway. His head is buried in his hands. Roach is gone—probably passed out somewhere or vomiting up the guilt—but Johnny stayed.

He hasn’t looked at Ghost once.

Not since he shoved him, fists clenched, screaming “Say something, you cold bastard! Say something! She DIED because of you just standing there!”

Ghost hadn’t said a word. Couldn’t. What was there to say?

You’re right?

That wouldn’t fix it.

Nothing would.

So now he watches. Silent. Still. Stone.

Like he’s guarding a grave.

And he remembers. Every. Fucking. Detail.

The way her eyes found his across the cave. The glint of recognition. The desperate, hopeful shift in her skin as the girl started to come back—blonde hair, green eyes, the illusion she wore for them like armor. And how, when she saw the look on his face—when she really saw it—her whole body faltered. Twitched. Buckled.

Because she believed he was already letting go.

And she tried anyway.

Tried to hold it. Tried to look like someone she thought he could still save.

Someone he might want to save.

And when she failed…

She didn’t just pass out.

She gave up.

He’d seen men die before. Seen the surrender in their eyes. But never like that.

She didn’t go under fighting. She let go.

And now—every beep of the monitor is a fucking confession.

Every shallow rise of her chest is a question he doesn’t know how to answer.

What was she to him?

Not just a teammate. Not just a weapon. Not just another oddity to tolerate.

She was loyal. More than any of them deserved.

She was the one who took a bullet for Johnny. Twice.

The one who tracked a wounded Roach through a blizzard with half her own ribs shattered.

The one who took orders even when they carved her open from the inside out.

She was his.

He just never told her.

Not in words. Not even in looks.

Only in the way he positioned her in a stack. Protected her flank. Checked her six.

The little things.

The ones she’d never see if she was too busy checking for signs of revulsion.

Because she couldn’t believe she was anything else.

And maybe…

Maybe he let that be true too long.

The medics murmur. Adjust tubes. The overhead lights click down into a softer setting. Night cycle.

Hours pass. He doesn’t move.

Soap finally lifts his head, voice low and brittle. “She’s not gonna die, right?”

Ghost doesn’t answer.

He doesn’t know how.

Soap:

Not in some poetic way. Not some soul-bond metaphor.

He hears it because it’s piped through the glass into the hallway.

Through the machines they hooked her up to.

Through the steady, shallow beep… beep… beep… that’s the only goddamn thing keeping him from vomiting on the tile floor.

It’s too soft. Too slow.

Too fucking fragile.

He hasn’t moved from this bench in hours. His back’s cramped. His spine aches. He doesn’t care. He can’t stop seeing it—her face, the way it shattered the second she looked at him. The second their eyes met. The second he flinched.

Because he did. God help him. He flinched.

She had just crawled into her deathbed, choking on her own magic, and she looked at him for hope. Just a second. Just a flicker.

And he—

He fucking flinched.

Not out of disgust. Not out of fear. Out of pure, uncut shock.

Because it had never hit him—not really—what she’d been hiding.

He thought she kept her mask up out of habit, vanity, ease.

He didn’t know it was terror.

Didn’t know that this was what she thought of herself.

That all the warmth and soft laughter and shiny blonde prettiness was a costume she wore just to stand beside them.

He didn’t know that without it, she thought she was unworthy of love.

And his dumb, useless fucking flinch just proved her right.

He punched a wall after they got her strapped down. A real one. Not metaphorical. Left blood on the knuckles. Doesn’t remember doing it. Just remembers Roach screaming for gauze while Em writhed on the table, her skin stuck somewhere between forms, teeth too long for a human mouth and eyes that wouldn’t stay still. Blood came up when she coughed. So much blood.

And she still tried to shift.

Still tried to go pretty.

Still tried to look like someone they could stand to touch.

And Johnny had screamed. Not at her. At Ghost.

At the son of a bitch standing in the doorway like death himself, arms crossed, skull mask hiding nothing.

He’d wanted to make him react. Wanted Ghost to say something. To admit she mattered.

That she wasn’t a monster.

That she was theirs.

But Ghost hadn’t spoken. Hadn’t moved.

Except when Johnny shoved him.

And that flinch—just that one motion—cut deeper than any words could.

Because it meant Ghost knew.

He knew what she saw. Knew what it did. And he couldn’t lie.

Couldn’t tell Johnny it didn’t mean anything.

Because it meant everything.

So now here they are.

Roach is off somewhere in medbay limbo, hands soaked in changeling blood, probably breaking apart on the inside. And Ghost is standing like a sentinel outside the glass. Still. Silent. Stone.

And Soap is slumped on a bench, face buried in his hands, trying not to fall the fuck apart. Because if she dies—

No.

No. He won’t say it.

But if she does…

He’ll never forgive himself.

Because when the time came—

When she looked at him for permission to be real,

to be herself,

to be seen—

He failed her.

And he doesn’t know how to come back from that.

He doesn’t know how he mutters the question to the silent sentinel that is Ghost. But it falls from his lips all the same, “She’s not gonna die, right?”

And the ass has the stone faced facade down enough to just stand there.

Johnny glances up. And finds Ghost’s eyes through the crack in the door, or perhaps the sliver of the medbay window—which one he’s not sure, but he’s silent, and just watching.

Johnny hangs his head again.

Too tired to fight the sentinel this time.

Roach:

It takes nineteen minutes and forty-three seconds to get her from the cave to the medbay.

He knows because he counted. Not on purpose. Not as some trauma-tic tic to latch onto. It was the only thing his mind could hold onto while her body bled out in his arms on the ground of the cave.

He didn’t look at her face. Not at first. He looked at the wound. The writhing skin. The edges where the magic had blistered, clotted, collapsed in on itself like scorched silk. He looked at the tremors. The blood. The mess that used to be a ribcage. He kept his hands moving like that could matter. Like training applied to this.

But the moment that broke him wasn’t the injuries. It wasn’t the convulsions. It wasn’t the scream she couldn’t finish because she choked on her own tongue.

It was when she turned her head, barely lucid, saw him hovering—and tried to look pretty.

He watched it happen in real time. Her skin shimmered like hot oil. Her hair changed shades in patchy, uneven blots. Pink tried to creep into her cheeks. Green bled into one iris, then flickered out like a dying screen. Her lips curled in the beginnings of that fake laugh—the sweet one she always used when she was afraid they were getting too close. Like she was about to say something dumb and deflective like “D’you like the new color?”

But her body couldn’t hold the spell.

And it broke her.

She let out this sound—not a scream, not a sob—just this quiet, rasping moan, like a kid finding out the sun doesn’t come back tomorrow.

And then she coughed blood on his sleeve. A full mouthful. Warm and black and thick.

Roach didn’t speak.

He just cradled her skull, murmured something soft—not a lie, not a promise. Just contact. Kept the pressure on. Kept breathing in rhythm with her. Kept saying her name like if he did it enough times it’d glue her soul back inside.

When they got her on the table, she seized again. Spine arched. Mouth open in that way that meant her teeth didn’t know what size to be. He held her legs down. Didn’t even flinch when the change twisted her feet into something birdlike for half a second before they shrunk again.

The medics started shouting. One of them asked what species. He told them human. He lied.

Because if he didn’t, they’d hesitate. And hesitation meant death.

So he said human, and he worked beside them, and when one of the doctors gagged at the state of her lungs, Roach barked at him to focus or fuck off.

It wasn’t righteous rage.

It was grief.

In slow motion.

Still happening.

Still being stitched.

He could feel Johnny falling apart behind him. Could hear him pacing, breathing, occasionally slamming a fist into a wall like that would bleed the guilt out. Roach didn’t turn around.

And Ghost—

Ghost didn’t even come in.

He just stood in the window. Watching. Always watching.

Like he was still deciding.

Like her life was a puzzle to be solved.

Like the bleeding woman on the table hadn’t saved his life three fucking times.

Roach didn’t yell. Didn’t scream.

He just looked up at Ghost, across the glass, over the blood.

And shook his head.

Not in hate. Not in fury.

In mourning.

Because it wasn’t just Em that was dying.

It was the thing between all of them.

The trust. The tether.

The thing they were.

And maybe—just maybe—none of them deserved her.

[willinglymalicioustaco]

Okay. So I’ve never posted before on tumblr-and English isn’t my first language…

So, hold with me here…

But!! changeling reader, on a mission with Soap, Roach and Ghost (perhaps others as well, I’m just a little hyper fixated on them rn). But not JUST changeling reader…. No-I’m talking reader came BACK a changeling. Like reader was human maybe at some time-or maybe their brain got messed up somehow so reader thinks they died but they didn’t-just got like experimented on or something???

You feel me??

I don’t know how to tag 🧍‍♀️🧍‍♀️

Hopefully I did it right…