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What they are is a ghost story.
Even the oldest soldiers can still be nervous scouts, sitting around a fire, telling each other a bunch of spooky legends to see who scoots a little closer together when the hook finally swings out of the darkness.
So, when Recall happens there’s a bit of that going around; Old squaddies playing at revival, at a rusty sort of camaraderie, the only way they know how. War stories get swapped like bags of graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate, trying to stack up melancholy so it tastes sweeter than how it was.
But the Soldier doesn’t do that anymore. And the Reaper never did.
Because one’s possessed, and the other’s trapped in the walls, and both think it surely can’t be them that’s the unholy mess. It’s the other guy playing the demon that won’t let go. Always was a bastard that way, even in life.
They are a ghost story that no one on the team wants to tell, the tale they always flip past real quick to get to the one about the dead girl on prom night. Not because it’s scarier than all the other stories, but because it’s colder, a little more real, the way their lives make an incomplete circle.
Nobody died, they just changed, and went on living together in the house that hate built. It’s haunted as hell, and sits on unconsecrated ground, and no one’s buying it. You can still hear them, doppler-moaning down the hallways, telling each other to get the fuck out. At night, with the fire going, and the clock chiming midnight, all that wretched groaning sounds like I…miss…us.