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It's midnight and the chime resounds throughout the entire city, ringing through [Name]'s head as a reminder of what's missing. She glances to the empty sheets next to her in silent understanding.
Tonight will be different. She hopes, she dreams, she wonders. But even she knows that's a lie crafted to preserve her fragile heart.
Every I'll come back to you and I won't forget fades away through the breeze and scatters into pitch black. When [Name] crawls under the covers, she doesn't bother to close the lamp perched on the table on his side of the bed.
He'll come back to turn the light off himself, she says in her head, but the lurch in her stomach and the weight in her chest screams otherwise. Still, she refuses to turn his light off at night, because the second her fingers hit the switch, all her hope would come crashing down with it.
She closes the light next to her pillow instead, turns to face the empty spot beside her, and shuts her eyes. But as the minutes and the hours go by she finds it an impossible task to wander into sleep, so she lays there in the dead of night staring at the ceiling. She stares at absolutely nothing at all, allowing the shades of darkness to swirl and swim before her to distract from the twinge in her chest.
When the pain is inescapable, [Name] curls up into a ball and plants her face in her pillow. After all, how many months had it been since the last time he held her? Since the last time he spoke a single word to her? She knows that love, especially one so strong is a privilege, but how cruel was it for love to not be a right when without it, the parasites in her head consume her and the vultures circling her ceiling fan scavenge at every morsel of anxiousness that litters each crevice of her thoughts.
She misses Simon "Ghost" Riley, every single bit of him, even the part of him that wouldn't say a word to her after he had a rough mission. She loves the bits of him that couldn't bring himself to say I love you even when she repeated it like a mantra on her lips against his own.
But most of all she misses the imprint of his fingers on her hips, how he would pull her back into his chest when he suspected she had fallen asleep, misses how his embrace would tighten whenever she told him she loved him, and the way his eyes remained fixed to her no matter how many people surrounded him and praised him.
It's impossibly frigid that night, even during the peak of mid-winter. [Name] rubs her hands together and blows hot air onto her fingertips, lets the condensation bunch up and rise in front of her. You are in impossible man, Simon Riley, she thinks, but please at least let me know you're safe out there. Waiting for him every night was exhausting in its own right, but above all circumstances hope always rises to the occasion. Hope is untiring, kind, and persistent. It hugs her tight in place of the love she wishes was embracing her, and lulls her until her eyes feel heavy.
When her eyelids finally collapse under hours of stress and fatigue, a shadow casts itself before the moonlit room, wedges through the window, and lowers itself at the foot of the bed. The mattress shifts under its weight, a small greeting to the woman resting peacefully on the other side, but the most she does is stir.
The shadow is aware of how incredibly painful and unfair it is for her to wait every single night for the return of someone who may have not existed in the first place. She was in love with a ghost, an expendable being only adept in the art of war and bloodshed. Although seemingly impossible, the ghost wallowing in her thoughts craves her too; each fleeting touch that lingers on his skin, every kiss against his face, the way she sits next to him in complete silence when he's too tired or in grief to say a word.
Ghost opens his mouth to wake her, to say anything at all to catch her attention and rouse her from her deep sleep, but he can't bring himself to. Instead, he presses a small kiss to [Name]'s forehead and drinks in the peaceful look on her face one last time before setting her down. He pulls the sheets up under her chin and nearly lifts his knee off the side of the bed to make his exit, but a hand shoots out and grabs his wrist tightly. His head snaps in her direction only to find her fast asleep, fingers wrapped around him as small sobs rack her body.
"Please don't go." Her whisper is almost lost in the air, but he manages to catch it in time.
For a moment he doubts that she is asleep. Ghost waits for her to open her eyes and yell at him for making her wait for so long, but it never happens. He breathes out a quiet sigh of relief when the coast is clear. For her sake, he prays that she'll continue to be asleep, but against his conscience leans forward to study her expression.
Even with her eyes closed, despair is scribbled all over her face from the frown on her lips to the crease between her brows.
He stops breathing and the guilt that he didn't know was festering in his head dizzies him beyond repair.
When his fingertips brush against her cheek, adrenaline electrifies his veins and his heart trembles. Under the soft moonlight, she is inexplicably perfect, the everlasting embodiment of beauty in his eyes. Ghost runs his hands along the curves of her waist and settles them on her hips. He is completely mesmerized, but is met with the stark realization that he no longer had the right to love her the moment he chose returning to the military over staying here with her. Granted, he had to do it to keep her safe, but regardless the betrayal stung and left an unhealable welt in its path.
Despite being apart for months, the warmth of her skin and the closeness between them inebriates him completely and he has to shake himself from his stupor before acting recklessly — he was hardly victim to recklessness, but only in moments like these did he nearly fall for its temptations.
Against his best wishes, he pulls away from her body and steps back, drawing a sharp exhale from him at the loss of contact.
His heart was cold and impossibly stubborn, but having always adored the cold, she loved him in all his entirety.
I love you, she always said to him and his response was always the same; lips clashing, her wrists held against the bed as his body dipped into hers, their heartbeats synchronizing and memorizing the rhythm of the other until they moved in perfect unison even when they were apart.
And as he shuts her window and leaves her wrapped in her blankets before disappearing into the night, he turns off the light she left for him as proof of his existence, so that she knew she wasn't a fool to cling onto hope for so long.
Even as a man of stoic nature, he is and always has been so incandescently in love with her that he has said it millions of times in every single way but words.