Chapter Text
He doesn’t say goodbye.
Is not his style.
He doesn’t feel the emotional need to say goodbye to people he is sure he is going to see when he is back.
Yet, when you see him get onto the plane, you swear his eyes linger on you a little when Price is yelling at him his last orders.
It lasts a second, but that doesn’t make it less meaningful.
And then he is gone, and the plane is taking him away, and you aren’t sure for how long he is going to be away. The mission was top secret or whatever and he couldn’t speak about it with the peasants, not like he talked about his missions anyway.
“Well, there he goes”, Soap says beside you, but when he looks at you, you know he recognizes something.
“What?”
“Nothing”.
He confuses you, but you roll your eyes at the end.
You sigh and turn around.
“I have shit to do, you too should return to your thing”.
And before he could respond, you were leaving.
At night, you can’t sleep.
From the moment you get into your bed, all you can do is look at the ceiling through the darkness and think.
Think too much.
When you get tired of that, you decide to go to the kitchen to prepare some tea. It usually helped to get back to sleep.
He was the one who told you that secret. Well, it felt like a secret, you weren’t sure if it was.
Slowly, you got out of bed, and after wearing a sweater, you went to the kitchen in socks and pajamas. Thankfully it was empty, so you made your tea at peace and then sat down at the table.
You looked at the empty chair on the other side and had that sudden feeling you had when something was missing.
It took you around seven seconds to realize what was missing.
He usually liked to lurk in the dark after everyone went to sleep.
It gave another meaning to his callsign, but it also made sense. When you got to know him, of course.
The first time you found him in the kitchen like a true ghost was after a nightmare. You couldn’t sleep so you thought it would be a good idea to lurk in the dark too.
He caught you and after almost giving you a heart attack, he saw the tea you were drinking to calm yourself and called it and you quote “utter rubbish”. Then he made you one of his own teas and you could taste the difference, but he gave you a speech of why his tea was supreme in comparison to yours.
That night you actually slept and it was the first time you saw him being…kind to someone else.
Soon after it became a habit to find each other “casually” lurking in the dark.
Sometimes he will be reading, and you will ask about the book, and he will proceed to give you his own analysis of it and then you will proceed to tell him that he probably would have been a nice English Professor if he hadn’t decided on being a soldier. He then will act offended, and you will laugh at him.
Other times you simply sat down and drank tea in complete silence. But the silence wasn’t hollow, it was…comforting.
Other times you will watch telly in the common room, and he will join you. You will have a fight over if you should see a movie or a retransmission of a football match and if you can’t settle you will play paper, rock, and scissors and the winner got to see what they wanted, and the loser has to endure it. Sometimes you thought he let you win on purpose, others he actually made you watch football matches, especially if he missed them for being on a mission. When you win you usually make him see rom-coms. In the beginning, it was to annoy him, but then you realized he actually liked them. That was how he met (and loved) Bridgerton.
After those nightly adventures, you started seeing Ghost as a person. Silly, you know, but before you only saw him as a walking menace. He was tall, intimidating, reserved, and quiet and the few times he talked it was probably to yell an order to you or to say something mean.
But then, you two started doing those things and it felt like two friends hanging out (or whatever). You never told him that, though, and you were sure you weren’t going to soon, not because he was on a mission and you didn’t know when he would be back, but because it was stupid.
Ghost didn’t make or have friends. He was emotionally unavailable. And you were a fool.
You drank your cheap tea in silence.
A hollow silence.