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You aren’t trying to snoop. You really aren’t. You’re looking for the gloves you could have sworn you’d tossed in the back of the closet last season and couldn’t for the life of you find now. That’s when you stumble across the box wedged under Simon’s winter boots. It’s small and unassuming with “SOAP” written in a thick, black marker. Careful and deliberate like everything else Simon does in his life.
The word ‘soap’ means nothing to you. You imagine a small box of hoarded hotel samples or leftover military-issue supplies and chalk it up fondly to one more eccentricity that you will never understand about Simon Riley.
You reach to move the box to the side, but your brow furrows as you touch it. The weight is wrong. Too light. And that is how you end up sitting cross-legged on the floor of the closet, your back firmly against the door. You pull the box into your lap and remove the lid slowly. Carefully. Your head tilts to the side.
The black and tan houndstooth shemagh is familiar. You recognize it from the few photos you’ve seen of Simon from his various deployments alongside Roach and Gaz, who you’ve met a handful of times. The name on the ID discs is a vaguely familiar one. John MacTavish. You know he served with a Scottish soldier named John, and that he was killed in the line of duty.
You hadn’t realized they were close enough for Simon to have his belongings in a small box in the back of the closet.
You pull the soft, weatherworn material out of the box. Underneath is a worn brown leather journal and an assortment of photos. Some are Polaroids - the instant kind you have to shake and hope they turn out okay. Others are printed. Some glossy, others matte. All of them of a younger Simon and the same stocky, blue-eyed man with the mohawk.
John MacTavish. You look at the back of one of the photos. Not John. Johnny. Written in Simon’s careful, blocky print.
You slowly flip through the stack of photos, witness to a life Simon never talks about. Occasionally, you pause to smile. And then your thumb lingers over an image of Simon smiling. Unmasked in a way you’ve never seen him before. Johnny is sitting next to him in a pub, probably, his head thrown back in a full bodied laugh.
Simon sits beside him, his arm thrown around his shoulders, looking at him with an expression you’ve not once seen on his face in the years you’ve known him. Your brow furrows again and you mindlessly chew the inside of your cheek.
You set the photos beside you and pick up the journal. The pages are worn at the edges and feel brittle as your fingers slowly turn each one. The pages aren’t filled with Simon’s handwriting. You know that immediately. Instead, a faster, less precise penmanship, a mixture of rounded print and angled cursive, sprawls across the pages.
Most of it isn’t incredibly interesting at first. Field sketches and rifle schematics. A few landscapes that look like they were drawn from a rooftop. A village mutt with its ribs showing. Nothing groundbreaking.
Until about halfway through. Your hand pauses on a sketch of a much younger Simon leaning over a table, balaclava pulled up just over his nose, a mug of tea in his gloved hand. It’s a quick sketch with rough details. Scribbled in the margin is a small note: LT drinking his piss tea. Big bastard cannae sit still long enough to actually draw him.
Other pages hold a few sketches of Gaz. Some labeled Cap or Price and you assume it’s John Price, though you’ve never met him. He went AWOL after Simon’s teammate died, and you wonder for a moment why you never thought more about that. None of Roach.
He must have come after, you think to yourself.
You keep turning pages. There is a sketch of a chess board with the pieces labeled with initials. JM, SR. You never knew that Simon played chess. A sketch of a meal - MRE components arranged like a fucking Instagram photo with the caption #gourmet. You snort a laugh. Johnny had a sense of humor.
Then drawings of Simon start to take up more of the sketchbook. Simon asleep, leaning against a doorframe. The words like a wee bairn are scribbled in the corner. Simon’s hands, drawn in careful detail. Hands that have traced your body. Daft bastard thinks his hands are ugly. They’re no’ ugly. You run your tongue across your teeth as an uncomfortable feeling settles into your chest.
The sketches of Simon become more and more frequent until they completely replace the landscapes and the schematics. Until they replace Gaz and Price. Simon in different lights, different settings, different states of rest and tension. Some are finished, careful renderings with a warmth and love that seep from the page directly into your skin.
Others are fragments, like Johnny couldn’t help but capture pieces of Simon even when there wasn’t time for a full sketch - the curve of a shoulder, a sharper jawline of Simon’s youth, dark eyes ringed in eyeblack, fixed on whoever held the pencil. On Johnny. You exhale slowly as your fingers trace the drawings. Simon occupies the entirety of Johnny’s journal.
Simon occupied the entirety of Johnny.
You close the sketchbook and lean against the closet door. Exhaling, you pick up the photo of Johnny and Simon again and study Simon’s expression as your eyes go blurry. You’ve never seen that look. Not in bed. Not over dinner. Not in the quiet, almost tender moments when he cups your face with his large hands like he’s trying to convince himself that you’re real.
This is different. Private and unguarded in a way that only youth and reckless love can give. It’s a look that you’ve waited patiently to have directed at you. One that you’ve told yourself would come eventually. That Simon is slow to open up. That some soldiers give pieces of themselves for things and places that never give them back, and you accepted that about Simon long before you’d ever agreed to move in.
You close the journal and run your finger across the worn leather one more time before placing it back in its box. The photos go next, face down, just like you’d found them. Except your hands aren’t working right and several slip out of your fingers. Simon sitting next to Johnny on a plane with a burly man in a Russian flight jacket. Simon with his hands on Johnny’s shoulders in the middle of a desert somewhere. Johnny smiling between Simon and a darker-skinned man with sharp features and a warm smile you don’t recognize, in front of the Mexican consulate. You steady your hands, collect the photos, and place them back in the box.
The shemagh you fold along its creases, already set deep and worn by someone else’s hands. You try to follow them, careful not to create any of your own. You trace the name once more before placing the ID discs on top and replacing the lid. You press the corners. Turn the box until the word faces inward, toward the dark. The way Simon keeps it. Then square it against the wall. You set his heavy boots on top.
As you sit quietly against the door, the burning in your stomach gives way to a quiet sob. Not for yourself, though the heavy grief of a lover who just learned they have been and always will be second to a dead man sits painfully against your rib cage.
You cry for Johnny MacTavish, who loved Simon Riley with a kind of certainty that most never find. And you cry for Simon, who lost the only person who’d ever seen him clearly and has spent every day pretending he hasn’t had everything taken from him.