Work Text:
A bland, listless weight clings to the day. No wind stirs; no birds call; nor do the insects or the small animals make themselves known.
There had been a fire in the village—yesterday, perhaps, or the day before. The rubble still smoulders in places. A charred shoe lies on its side, alone in the middle of an alley. The air stinks of smoke and decay.
One small girl had still been alive here a short time ago. All the women and children of her village had been shot in their homes or in the street as they were going about their daily lives. A foreign man and his foreign army had come in, executed them all, and left again.
But the girl had survived. When Lieutenant Riley found her, she clung to the hand of a dead woman, half-shielded under the body’s weight. When he pulled her away, she screamed, little arms reaching for her mother or aunt or sister. Maybe the woman had been a stranger. It didn’t matter.
“Shh, sweetheart,” he said to her as she struggled limply in his arms. She’d been shot in the stomach. “Let me see. I won’t hurt you.”
Her eyes were wild, rolling from his face to the sky to the ruins of her home around them. She breathed like a frightened animal breathes, in short, uneven bursts, skinny chest trembling under his hands as he set her carefully on the ground.
Her dress had been purple before it had become red, dotted with small white flowers. “That’s a very pretty dress,” he said, as he looked at the hole torn through her guts. Even if they had spoken the same language, she would not have understood him.
There were three auto-injectors of morphine in the top pocket of his tactical vest. He took them out and laid them in a straight line next to her body. When he picked the first one up, he noticed that his hand was shaking.
He brushed a dirty tangle of hair from her forehead and said, “You’re alright, love. Just a little pinch. It’ll be over soon, I promise.”
A moment later, three syringes lay empty on the ground, and Lieutenant Riley went to find his Captain and report in.
Ghost sits on the muddy bank of the small river that runs through the outskirts of the village. Even down here, the air is stale. The river moves sluggishly, its waters clogged with algae and debris from the fire.
On the far shore, tall grasses droop. The gray outline of a city sits like a hulking boulder in the distance, its citizens removed from the horrors here, yet experiencing horrors all their own. The man with the army is there now, if the intel is correct. Tomorrow, Ghost will kill him.
For now, he sits at the edge of the water and looks down at his hands. He’s taken his gloves off; they sit beside him, a red reminder of a legacy of violence.
A shadowy reflection passes over the water, blocking the dull sunlight at Ghost’s back. A man stands behind him. “All good, sir?”
The shadow breaks and stretches as Johnny moves to his side and sits down.
Ghost is still looking at his hands. He flexes his fingers, curling them in, pressing black-rimmed nails into the flesh of his palms. “It can be so bloody ugly, can’t it?”
“Aye,” Johnny says. He doesn’t have to ask what Ghost means; they’ve understood each other perfectly for years. “Sometimes.”
He remembers catching tadpoles in the pond at his granddad’s farm when he was a very young boy, scooping them up in his hands and watching them wriggle.
“Gonna be frogs someday, they will,” his granddad had said, crouching down in the mud, smelling of manure and sun-baked earth. “So be gentle with ‘em, like.” He’d taken Simon’s wrist so softly in his own hand and lowered the tadpoles back into the murky water. “Your brother likes to smush ‘em, don’t he? But we’re gonna give ‘em a chance to see what bein’ frogs is all about. Isn’t that right?”
Simon’s brother Tommy was mean, and Simon didn’t want to be like him at all.
“Yes, sir,” he’d said, and his granddad had smiled at him in the way that made it seem like the whole world was happy; so Simon was happy, too.
The city across the river shimmers like a mirage. “And cruel,” Ghost says.
Johnny picks up a smooth river stone and turns it between his fingers. “Aye, that too,” he says. “But not always.” There’s no blood on his gloves.
“I beat a man almost to death when I was seventeen. Have I ever told you?” Ghost asks.
The stone’s rotation slows, then resumes at pace. “No, sir. Ye never did.”
“I should have gone to jail. He talked funny, after. Like his mouth was full of rocks.” Ghost turns his hands over and observes the many scars across his knuckles where they’ve been split and knitted back together more times than he can remember. “He ran with my brother.”
Johnny’s fingers still.
“I can’t even remember his name,” Ghost continues with a dry chuckle, “only that our neighbour’s dog—whose name I do remember, Stella—had got clipped by a car. I heard it happen, but so did Tommy and his mates.
“By the time I’d come down from my room, they were all gathered ‘round her, joking and taunting her. It was her back legs that got hit, so she couldn’t walk, and she was just growling at them and whimpering, fucking terrified.” Ghost closes his eyes, and for a moment he’s back in Manchester, standing outside that shitty house in the middle of the most miserable summer he’d ever lived through. “So I’d run over, yelled at them to stop, to leave her alone. The neighbour had come out by then, too. But they didn’t stop. And when I pushed the one in front, the one I almost killed, he laughed in my face and kicked the dog.
“That’s the first time I remember ever feeling like I could change things. When I had him on the ground, when his blood was all over the both of us, I just remember thinkin’, Oh. This is how it works.”
A weak breeze ripples the surface of the water and then dies. Johnny is still beside him. “Nobody pressed charges, and I enlisted right after. The dog was fine.
“And that’s all you can do, in the end, isn’t it?” He relaxes his fists and drops them to his lap. “You either hold things together or you pull them apart. The whole world’s like that.”
The dead little girl lays where Ghost left her, just up the road. The tadpoles have grown into frogs. The man whose name he can’t remember lost most of his teeth. The dog was fine.
Johnny drops his rock and leans into Ghost’s side. “You cannae control it, Simon. ‘s’all too big and random fer that.” He presses his open mouth against Ghost’s shoulder; his breath is warm. “We do what we can, eh? And that has to be enough, ‘cause if it’s not, well…saner men than us have lost their minds fer thinkin’ it.” He nudges Ghost gently with his elbow.
“We do what we can,” Simon repeats. He thinks of all the triggers he’s pulled and the throats he’s cut. But with Johnny sitting next to him, it’s easier to remember sewing sutures, too, and holding his brother’s child—the brother who’d decided somewhere along the way to stop smushing tadpoles. He remembers touching Johnny for the first time, holding his own mask in his hands with nothing to stop Johnny from seeing, and wanting to be seen.
He shifts until he’s holding Johnny’s hand in his own. Their fingers curl together.
He looks at the blood under his fingernails and imagines the fingerprints he’s left behind: pressed against bullet wounds, against steering wheels and pint glasses. Pressed into Johnny’s pulse and Johnny’s mouth, pressed deep inside his body. Pressed into windpipes, pressed against a button that will divert a rocket or send one to destroy his enemies. Holding Johnny’s head in his hands. Holding a pistol to someone’s head. Holding a small black box with a silver ring inside; that one, he’s been holding onto for a while.
He holds things together. He pulls them apart. A little girl in a purple dress that’s red.
Johnny squeezes his fingers. “It’s enough, Simon.”
Simon isn’t sure that it is, but he lets Johnny take him by the hand and lead him away from the river and the village, and that’s a start.