Chapter Text
John knows something is incredibly wrong the moment the helicopter touches down. The familiar jolt of the wheels hitting the ground vibrates through his bones as he holds himself upright using a strap on the ceiling of the chopper.
Looking over the airfield, John has to shield his eyes from the bright light fiercely attacking his vision. Credenhill's tarmac steams in the golden rays of the late autumn sun; maybe the last warmth of this year prevailing against the inevitable miserableness of England. The thick air smells of rain, and of something eerily nostalgic that he cannot possibly name.
Kate Laswell's rigid figure stands tall at the edge of the tarmac. Shit has to be fucked to get her here in person, waiting to ambush John even before he gets a chance to debrief and peel off the layers of blood, grime, tac gear, sweat, and simmering anger.
John shoulders his gear, hoisting the pelt onto his shoulders, and makes to move through the group of soldiers and base personal unloading their transport. He doesn't need to physically push anyone out of the way. His presence alone suffices to clear a path wide enough for two men his size; witnessing him working through the cartel bastards earlier in all his gruesome glory inspired respect, fear and admiration alike in his fellow men.
As always after a mission, he mentally notes down the names of every soldier, tries his best to remember them. There are a few promising candidates he'd like to work with more often, all of them charmingly labelled 'non-human' by society, like himself. If he'd have his way, he'd assemble his own unit inside the SAS, bring together all the freaks and cast-outs and frowned upon weirdos that have the potential to be better than anyone else when together.
He's too young to have his way yet though. He'd need a few more years as a Captain, more experience and more of a reputation, then he'd find the best of the best, reel them in, and keep them close, never to let them go. If he knows one thing, it's that loyalty runs deep; it's by far the strongest root to keep beings together.
One of the Sergeants shoots him a questioning look of vibrant green eyes when John separates from the group that has just finished grabbing all their gear and making for the office building for debrief. This one's a gem, John figures, obedient, efficient, smart, strong as hell... Not as good as him, though. No one could ever compare with Simon.
John forcefully ends that train of thought before it can become a problem. It's been years at this point. His therapist is right, he needs to move on at some point and let the ghost of the past rest.
He claps the Sergeant's shoulder in passing, attempting to throw him an encouraging smile which ends up grim and laboured more than anything else. The engines roar deafeningly loud; John holds up a thumb in lieu of spoken words to signal everything's alright.
Even though he knows nothing is alright. Not with Kate here, her face unusually grave, even by her standards.
"What is it?", John greets her, forgoing a warm palm to her shoulder; too bloodied and filthy still. Her dress shirt looks eerily white and clean. Unlike John, Kate always had the luxury of concealing how dirty their work is on her exterior. As much as it's irritating being showered in the grime of the men he kills, John is still somewhat glad for the reminder on his skin, human or beast alike. He doesn't know what kind of man he could become if he wouldn't need to feel the warmth of the blood or hear the crack of bones to prevail. Though maybe he's gotten too used to the bloodshed already, feels at home most when he's covered in the evidence of his success.
Kate motions him to the side of the field, away from any curious ears. Only when they're half-hidden by some crates, she clears her throat and adverts her eyes. She closes them, leaning her head back, and takes a deep breath in. John has never seen her this rattled. A leaden weight coils in his chest, pulling him down, filling him with the dense, boiling heat of premature rage.
Kate opens her eyes, training them on Price's. Her gaze is steeled, but she swallows before opening her mouth to speak.
"They found him."
John blinks, once. He doesn't dare to read into it too much, to hope. But there's truly only one person he can think of that would qualify for an ominous, unspecified 'him' by Kate.
"Kate. What are you saying?" It's a threat somehow. John didn't intend his words to come out like this.
"Simon's alive. An unrelated operation found him in Mexico, no more than two hours ago. No one knows but this squad and me, I got full control and clear hands. He's on route to an MD I trust right this second. I took the first plane here from my current operation in Paris. Nikolai is waiting for the two of us, we're wheels up whenever you're ready."
John doesn't hear anything past the first sentence. He doesn't hear anything but the thunderous pounding of his own heart beat in his ears. There's nothing he could wish for more than to hear this, and yet his world doesn't stop spinning as it does in every desperate daydream. Instead, it rushes faster than ever, the momentum pressing him to the ground forcefully. John stands rooted to the tarmac, not able to move, neither his hands nor his thoughts.
He's alive. Simon's alive. And John didn't get him back.
"John?" Kate's concerned face suddenly is filling his vision. Warm hands on his shoulders, the soft, yet intense citrus aroma of her perfume pulling him back to the present; away from a flood of memories threatening to drown him right then and there. She shoots him an apologetic look. "We gotta move. There's time for feelings on the way."
"Roger," John croaks out with a scratchy voice, his throat apparently even dryer than it feels, "on you."
Kate is right, he knows it, now is not the time to feel. But he can't help the burst of burning rage setting his entire being aflame.
If John had known Simon was still out there, he wouldn't have hesitated to turn the entire bloody desert in Mexico upside down, grain by grain, until he finally got his hands on his boy again.
He tried to, really. But he didn't have a chance. Two soldiers from Simon's squad escaped under miraculous conditions a few weeks after they were captured. He didn't believe them when they reported everyone from their squad was dead. John had been homicidal with sleep-deprivation, guilt and that simmering, feasting rage that never waned, preventing him from accepting his grief.
In the end Kate put her foot down, claiming John was acting biased and insane when he growled at the weaselly men and threatened to crack open their skulls and look for the truth himself if they didn't want to speak it. She wanted him move on, to give him a chance to grieve, to heal. Maybe he did act slightly insane, but Simon deserved people to act deranged for him. Simon deserved the world.
With a quiver of his nostrils, John briefly considers choking the life out of Kate right here and now for making him give up on Simon. Getting to him alone now would be less time-efficient though, so he swallows down the tight ball of rage and fear. Rolling his neck and baring his teeth for a twitchy grin he motions her with a nod to lead the way across the air field.
He zones out after that, his surroundings muffled behind a veil of botchy red and grey. Someone tries to approach him on his way trailing after Kate. Usually John is proud to be a very attentive and mindful person. Right now, though? Everything he is able to gather is that the man in front of him is young, handsome, and claims to need immediate assistance with a case of power abuse against a fellow non-human in the current SAS selection.
If it were any other time, John would not hesitate to jump into action at once, having made it a personal mission to push for acceptance of others like him in the SAS. But now he simply cannot be arsed to care, doesn't even quite gather the man's name. Something with 'G', maybe. John should feel at least somewhat guilty for letting him down, but he can't. Not when all he can focus on are defiant deep brown eyes staring into his face, simmering with fury.
Even though the man's face and body are very dissimilar from Simon, his skin most prominently, his eyes are almost the same; so much like Simon that John forgets to breathe for a second. Bold and full of anger, but with an almost hidden softness shining through.
He violently pulls himself away, dismissing the soldier with a bark, ordering him to find someone else to attend his issue. John shoulders past him, bumping into his arm, but not looking back.
The man will be fine. John needs to prioritise, and there's only one non-human he can manage to focus on right now.
The transatlantic flight feels like a blink and an eternity simultaneously.
A while in, the rage still hasn't subsided, but is overshadowed by raw anxiety instead. John spends the entire time on the plane bouncing his legs and cracking his neck from one side to the other and back. His skin feels too tight, his muscles burning and pleading to move. Dull pain throbs out of his bones, his entire being vibrating in desperate need to fucking do something instead of sitting around and waiting.
Fidgeting with the straps of his still filthy tac gear isn't enough; John grumbles and reaches for his pack, pulling the tightly rolled up pelt out. Unfortunately, the private jet Kate and Nikolai unearthed from God knows where is too tiny and cramped for John to shift, and it's fucking killing him.
Whenever he struggles with his overflowing, too intense feelings, freeing himself from his human skin helps him. The bear always feels more fit to handle all of him, big enough to let all the pain and rage circulate freely instead of threatening to burst him with pressure.
Concentrating on relaxing his tightly locked jaw and taking deep even breaths, John sinks back into his seat and idly runs his hands through his pelt. He feels as put to together as he possibly could, closing his eyes to keep calm and sane.
As true for every selkie, any touch to his pelt is transferred to his body whenever he's not shifted. The sensation feels almost like he was hugging himself, with the strokes of his fingers on the fur feeling like someone would caress him everywhere simultaneously. Similarly to touching his own human skin though, the sensation he inflicts on his own pelt would feel way more intense if it was another person inflicting it.
But still, having his other skin in his lap soothes him at least a tiny bit. He takes good care of it, making an effort to groom it and shift very regularly to feel connected to his bear shape. It's fruitful, seeing as he feels a hint of teeth poking into his lower lip when his fangs start to show. His claws are partly out as well, he realises even without squinting open his eyes to check. These partly shifts regularly happen for selkies that are close to their other skin physically and mentally.
This meagre bit of comfort is all John can get during his flight, so he tries to relax as best as possible to have energy once they arrive. He sure as hell will need a lot of it.
John doesn't quite grasp the reality of Simon truly being alive until he's standing at his bed side, looking down at the hollow, broken shell of a man he once knew.
Simon is hooked up to several instruments that produce a wide variety of irritating beep noises. The vast majority of his body is bandaged to some degree, the little skin that shows on his hands and arms littered with scars John precisely knows weren't there the last time they saw each other. A breathing tube is shoved down his throat, and an IV bag is perched on a metal rod right next to his mattress.
He'll be kept unconscious until they can remove the assisted breathing. John didn't get everything the MD had told him and Kate, too busy staring at the familiar face. There are bandages covering parts of his face as well; John can barely see anything of his features. Simon has never looked so thin and pale, not even at the very first days of his basic training, fresh out of his abusive household when John had met him.
Simon looks so bloody fragile sleeping, dependent on several machines to keep the life in him. Even though it had been himself who clawed his way out of whichever compound he has been kept in, after all these years, alone. He's so fucking strong and brave, and it doesn't fit to the broken and borderline small body laid out in front of John.
The door behind him opens and John jolts slightly. He doesn't know how long he has been standing there, staring and trying to compute. Not daring to touch.
"Excuse me, Captain Price," the same MD from earlier enters the room with Kate, an apologetic smile around her lips while quietly shutting the door behind her, "there's something else I need to discuss with Ka- Mrs. Laswell and you."
John shoots a look over to Kate, raising a single eye brow. She told him she trusted this woman, but failed to mention they are on that type of secret first-name basis one doesn't tell anyone about. Kate slightly squints her eyes, signalling him to shut the fuck up.
"I tried the best I could with the team available, but…" Dr. Williams – if John remembers her name correctly – averts her black eyes with a twitch of her jaw, and produces something from behind her back. A small bundle of black and white fur, streaked with red and brown and grey. John would recognise it anywhere.
"… we have no specialist on site," she continues apologetically, looking back up and presenting the bundle to John, "He had that pelt with him when he was found. Mrs. Laswell confirmed that Lieutenant Riley is listed as a selkie-type shifter like you. It appears to be injured somehow, even scarred. I… I'm really sorry, but I have never seen anything like that."
"Give that here," John mumbles roughly, ripping the pelt out of her hands. It's not supposed to be touched by anyone but Simon. John has been allowed to, on some very dark and very soft nights. Still, it feels like a breach of trust to hold it in his palms now, even if he cradles it to his chest with as much gentleness and reverence he can muster.
The fur still feels somewhat soft, even with all the blood and dirt matted into the hair.
Any injury inflicted to John's pelt heals in a matter of minutes, if not even seconds. It's one of the reasons their kind is respected in the military as much as it's feared, making for an unstoppable force in the field.
But Williams is right: there are deep cuts in Simon's selkie skin beneath all the black and white fur. Some of them seem to be healed and scarred, thick keloids protruding from the sites of injury.
Not all of them are healed though. Others are squabbled over with deep red and black clots, the skin at the base of the hair swollen and visibly inflamed. Blood and pus has soaked the soft hairs, clotting some of the strands together. Chunks of hair are missing, ripped out or not able to grow from injured sections.
Bile rises up John's throat when he spots patches of skin that are missing at the edges of the pelt. It looks like they were cut or ripped out. Would Simon even be able to heal that? Magical recovery could only go so far.
"What the fuck have they done to you?", John whispers, chancing another glance over to Simon's limp body on the bed. He's resting there so incredibly bravely. Because whatever has been done to his selkie skin must have been incredibly worse than what's done to his human skin if the injuries stick to him like that.
"I don't know," Williams murmurs, a frown wrinkling her forehead. Her eyes are filled with a mixture of disgust and deep, genuine sadness.
"I will find out," Kate speaks up, determination steeling her voice. When she steps forward, John realises that Kate's hand has been cradling Collin's upper back inconspicuously.
"I promise," she adds resolutely, invading John's personal space, a firm hand to his shoulder, another to his arm, "I'm gonna find out what they did to him, who did that to him, and where they hide."
"I'm gonna kill them, Kate" John presses out between his teeth, "don't you fucking dare try to stop me or send anyone else in. I want my hands on every single one of these bastards."
"I wouldn't expect anything less," Kate deadpans, "you have my full support, John. But it will take a while for me to gather the intel. And Simon's pelt…," she runs her gaze over the bundle of fur dangling from John's fingers, "… I can try finding doctors who specialise in non-human medicine. But–"
"No," John interrupts her with a growl slipping from his pharynx, cradling the fur to his chest possessively and taking a step away from Kate and closer to Simon's mattress, "no one is allowed to touch his pelt."
"I still could try to–," Williams offers, but John silences her with a scowl, baring his teeth, and turning his upper body away to protect the pelt in his arms.
"You can look and advise. But any treatment or procedures will be done by me. He's been hurt enough. I'm not having him wake up feeling hands on his pelt that aren't his. Are we clear?"
"S- sure!," Williams breathes out with a too-wide smile, and lifts her hands, taking a few steps back. Her skin looks suspiciously pale, and John can almost smell the fear emanating from her retreating figure.
"Okay, John. We understood, no one is threatening you or Simon," Kate adds, spoken slowly and with pointed calmness, subtly positioning herself in front of Williams, "Have it your way. No issue."
John feels his fangs poke out between his lips threateningly. He figures he should feel guilty for scaring Kate's person, but finds he doesn't really care about the way he looms over them, his shirt straining tightly over his chest with his size slowly increasing upon entering the half-shifted stage.
John tries to relax, cracking his neck again and taking some deep breaths, grinning widely in hope of his brain confusing the clenched face muscles with genuine joy and contentment.
It doesn't work though. His muscles are locked up tightly, boiling-hot blood rushing through his veins, the beats of his heart palpable in his skull and deep in his guts. All his feelings, the fear, his grief, the treacherous hope, the all-consuming rage – everything pulses mercilessly through entire being. They're too intense, rebelling against the borders of his body, threatening to take over.
"Leave," John hisses out the order, "don't let anyone in unless they're here to treat Simon."
He doesn't hear any of Kate's calming or protesting words. He just lets himself flop into a chair next to the bed, grabbing his own pelt and laying it out on his lap to run his right hand through it in a desperate attempt to self-soothe.
Williams and Kate are out of the room at some point. Simon's pelt is still tightly pressed to his chest with his other hand. He's absolutely smothering it, but Simon did always like tight pressure. John isn't too sure if that's still true now.
He carefully lays out Simon's pelt on top of his own on his lap. He combs through the strands of the fur that are not helplessly matted together. For the ones that are, he takes his water bottle and steals the soap dispenser from the bathroom inside the spacious patient quarter.
Only once he's meticulously cleaned all traces of dirt and blood from the fur and rinsed the soap out carefully, he retrieves the medical supplies from his mission pack. The irony from not using any supplies from the actual hospital he's in doesn't escape him. But this med pack is his own, he knows it well, and he won't accept anything from an unfamiliar source for something this important.
John gently applies disinfectant and wound healing cream to any injured or inflamed sites. He doesn't even know if that does shit to help it heal. It's the best he can do though.
After he finishes up, he doesn't feel even slightly relaxed.
However, there's nothing else he can do now but waiting for Simon to wake up and get better.
John considers storming out and demanding Kate to send him somewhere to distract himself in the familiar embrace of a mission, cradled in the warmth of blood, gore and murder. He could try finding the people who took Simon and torture them infinitely worse until they begged for him to kill them. It wouldn't be enough to fully soothe him, but it would probably be the thing that does best for now.
But then again, these lives are Simon's to destroy however he sees fit.
And even more importantly, if he went down that path, John wouldn't be there when Simon wakes up.
He cannot fathom the thought of him regaining consciousness in the presence of anyone that isn't John. It doesn't feel fair to him after all he possibly went through. It kills John to think of all the time Simon had to carry on alone. He's bloody fucking strong; he wouldn't lie here now if he wasn't, but life has been too fucking cruel to him. No more.
John swallows down all the selfish wishes to storm out, work out his rage, and hide from the guilt that bubbles up whenever his gaze runs over Simon's pale face.
He let him walk away to that mission without him. That was a mistake he won't repeat. And he would do everything to make it up to him, to help him recover and heal from everything done to him.
So John devotes himself to Simon instead; vowing to himself to not let him down again, and not backing away until Simon has healed fully, with every single facet of his being.