Chapter Text
“D’ye think I’d be a good father?”
Johnny had asked Simon in the low light of his barrack, when their nude bodies were still intertwined and they were wearing nothing but Simon’s sheets.
Simon released a soft huff of air against the man’s skin. He didn’t open his eyes.
“You didn’t get me pregnant, Johnny,” he joked dryly to brush off his odd, post-orgasmic-clarity-esque question. “There’s no need to worry about that.”
The corners of Johnny’s lips twitched upward at Simon’s joke. “Nae, I’m serious, Simon,” he’d insisted, voice quavering with a chuckle he had only very narrowly withheld.
Simon only grunted softly, in the way that he did, nestling further against the other man as if he could hide himself.
Johnny shifted back on an elbow to get a better look at him, forcing Simon to loosen the snug way his arms were looped over Johnny’s shoulders and around his neck. A faint pout formed on Johnny's lips when Simon’s eyes remained shut.
“Simon.” He nudged him gently with his arm. Simon opened his eyes in a slow, frog-like blink to look at him.
Simon’s eyes scanned for a moment to confirm that Johnny really was being serious about this question, which, at that moment, Simon did in all honesty find a little absurd.
The skeptical look in his eyes softened just slightly around the edges when he found absolute sincerity in Johnny’s face.
Simon took a moment to respond.
“Sure you would, Johnny. You’d be an alright father.” He answered honestly, although he was still unsure if there could still be some kind of trick belying the question.
“Why’re you askin’ me this?” Simon asked the question slowly. He wasn’t yet sure he wanted to know the answer.
Simon watched as Johnny’s pout twisted into consideration.
After a long, drawn-out moment of quiet, Johnny shrugged noncommittally. “...Dunno,” he said.
A single blond brow raised subtly, but Simon didn’t pressure him into finding a response. He just constricted his arms back around Johnny, this time looping them over his torso so he could pull their bodies back against each other and dip his head into the hollow of his shoulder.
He began to slowly drag his lips against the skin of Johnny’s neck, leaving a ghost trail of kisses as his fingers traced over the fresh welts he’d left in his back.
“‘S jus’...” Johnny began after another lapse of silence, “D’ye ever wonder what it’d be like if we werenae soldiers?" His voice grew quiet, tentative, as if he’d been afraid to broach the subject. “What we’d be like,” He clarified after a beat.
Simon’s lips paused against his throat. He froze, hesitating for a moment to lift his head again.
It had always been difficult for him to talk about feelings. Especially with Johnny. Especially when at the same time, he had to find the strength to hold his gaze and stare into his eyes. Those intense, greyish blue eyes that held all the passion and lightning of a stormy ocean.
He didn’t think it would ever get easier. Maybe someday, if they had more time, it could. Maybe if they weren’t living every day together, neck-deep in the trenches of guerilla warfare, constantly suffocated by the ticking countdown of the bombs they both knew were strapped to their chests.
Maybe, if every kiss they shared didn’t have to mean “goodbye”, Simon would no longer struggle to look Johnny in the eyes.
It was when, not if, for them. It was the cruelest reality that they both accepted and would not ever address.
They never would have more time. And every kiss always meant goodbye.
Simon took a measured inhale of breath before he raised his head to look at him.
He met Johnny’s gaze.
Ocean. Thunder. Violent, crashing waves.
He took another breath.
Johnny’s pout had softened into a concerned frown, and his eyebrows were drawn together tightly, as if he were about to ask if Simon was okay. But he didn’t ask, because he’d learned the way that Simon would always flinch at that question.
Simon hated to be asked if he was okay. His jaw would set and he would roll onto his side away from Johnny, stopping the dialogue before it could even begin.
“No,” Simon finally answered, “I don’t.” The answer was blunt, and it was mostly the truth. Simon didn’t like to dwell on the past or the future. He only lived in the steady, beeping countdown of the present.
Johnny looked at him with a certain kind of sadness in his eyes. Disappointment, maybe. It made Simon want to look away, but he held eye contact. He owed Johnny that much.
“Never?” Johnny asked, voice softer than a breath.
Simon stared at him without responding. He wouldn’t lie to him like that. But he also wouldn’t acknowledge the vulnerability.
After a while of just staring at each other, Simon watched Johnny’s eyes drift somewhere else. It was somewhere far away from wherever they were deployed that night.
Johnny was staring at some small, faraway universe, where their lives weren’t rooted in such a violent world. He was staring at a little suburban home somewhere in Scotland.
Their house, in this dream, had a porch swing and a child’s handprint embedded in the driveway. They wore wedding bands and had unremarkable careers in something like construction or mechanics.
“You’d be a good father, too,” Johnny murmured softly.
Simon’s expression immediately twisted, a scowl burning across the side of his face. His eyes snapped away from Johnny’s, long forgetting his notion he’d had of holding his eyes. “Tha’s bollocks, Johnny.”
Johnny placed his hand on top of Simon’s, letting his fingers slip down and slot between his, like a puzzle piece. Like they belonged there.
“Am no’ jokin’, Si. You would.” And Johnny had said it with such cruel, wicked, gentleness that Simon wanted to curl into his own skin. “If we were somewhere else, instead of here, I think I’d marry you.”
Simon felt the muscles of his hand suddenly cramp and seize, as if the touch was painful. He had the immediate urge to yank his hand sharply away from beneath Johnny’s, but the man ran his thumb over the back of his hand slowly, squeezing once.
Johnny said nothing when water began to bead in the rims of Simon’s eyes, and in that moment, Simon loved him to death for it. Johnny just kissed the droplets from his face as they fell, cradling the back of his head and combing soothing patterns through his buzzed, dirty-blond hair.
And when they kissed for the last time that night, it felt much more final, much more like ‘goodbye,’ than usual.
-
When he died, Johnny wasn’t buried.
He didn’t get a gravestone with his name and a list of honorary titles, as he should’ve.
Like Simon, Johnny was orphaned. It used to be something that gave Simon a morbid sense of comfort. They had nobody, and in that, they had each other.
But that all withered away as soon as Johnny left him too.
If he did have a gravestone, it wouldn't have said “Cherished Son”, or “Beloved Brother”. He was a casualty. He was an unlabeled white cross in a military graveyard, within a sea of other unlabeled white crosses.
John Mactavish would never get the grave he deserved. The words “Devoted Father” would never be etched in marble beneath his name.
Simon’s name was the only one listed as his next of kin when his ashes were unceremoniously delivered to his flat in a cardboard box.
Simon hadn’t even made it two full weeks into a new deployment schedule before Price turned him away.
Soap’s death left a gaping tear in the structure of 141, and he supposed that would be the expected outcome of a situation like this. A twenty five percent margin of allies KIA didn’t exactly bode well for a four-person task force.
Admittedly, Simon’s work had become subpar at best.
He’d blamed it on the unpredictable “adjustment period” that the task force was going through as they searched for a loss replacement for Soap, but the old bastard could see straight through the fabric of his balaclava and directly into his soul, apparently, because when Price presented Simon with the paperwork for a commander-referred leave, he’d cited mental health, not performance.
Simon was standing in the back alley of his London flat, with his back pressed against some grimy brick wall and a cigarette pinned between two thick fingers.
He’d picked the habit back up after Johnny died. Though he would swear that the two weren’t related, he knew it.
Johnny had never been a chain smoker, by any means—once, he’d admitted to Simon that he only ever picked up the habit because he thought it made him look ‘braw’—but he’d smoked often enough that the smell and taste became associated with him in Simon’s mind.
On off-duty winter afternoons like this, Simon would hear the back door of his flat creak open. Johnny would drag in a gust of frigid air and the stench of smoke, and Simon would complain, even though it didn’t really bother him, and coax him further inside with kisses to cold, nicotine-laced lips.
His hand came up to the drawstrings of his hoodie and tugged lightly, drawing the hood just a bit tighter around his face. He shivered, bringing the unlit end to his lips and breathing in.
Tommy’s death was what pushed Simon to originally quit smoking in the first place more than a decade ago, so he supposed it only made sense that Johnny’s death brought him back to it. Perhaps it would be a never-ending loop. Some terrible carousel of death, recovery, and relapse that he would never truly escape.
A small piece of ash fluttered off of the burning end of the cigarette. Simon watched it float down towards the frosty pavement like a leaf.
The flake of ash landed among the snow, the grey color offsetting the surrounding white. His fingers idly started to fidget with the ends of the laces. He took another puff from the cigarette.
His phone began to buzz in his pocket, the vibration persistent and rhythmic, alerting him to the fact that it was actually a call and not just a barrage of memes he’d never open sent from Gaz.
He stuffed his hand into his pocket and pulled out his phone, thumb already lifted, fully prepared to lazily swipe the call away, but it paused midair. The number was unknown, which wasn’t at all what surprised him.
It was the small text beneath the unfamiliar string of numbers, the caller ID, that made him pause.
Glasgow, SCT
The call was incoming from Scotland.
His finger landed on the accept call button seconds before the call would’ve stopped ringing.
“Hello, is this Simon Riley?” A woman with a gentle voice greeted him as soon as the line picked up.
Simon suddenly recalled that he hated phone calls and everything about them. He wasn’t receiving this call because, somehow, by some god-given miracle, Johnny was magically alive this entire time. Johnny’s ashes were in a bag and a box upstairs, tucked away in the safest and deepest corner of Simon’s closet because he’d been putting off shopping for an urn.
Simon let the cigarette fall from his fingers and stamped it out on the pavement.
“Yeah- Yes, that’s me.” He remembered to respond after a few seconds.
“Okay. Good. My name is Sarah, I’m a social worker working for the RHC in Glasgow,” Sarah informed him, as if he should already know what ‘RHC’ stood for. “Are you in a private place where we would be able to talk for a few minutes?”
“Uh, yes.” He told her, pressing the glass of his phone to the side of the face as he allowed his head to tip back and bump against the brick wall behind him.
“Do you happen to be related to—“ Sarah paused for a moment and the faint sound of shuffling through papers could be heard over the line.
In the short time in which she flipped through the pages, Simon had the thought that he didn’t like her accent. It wasn’t like Johnny’s. Not that he was one to judge Scottish accents—Johnny was the only one he ever really knew—but it still irked him to hear something so familiar yet not quite right.
The rustling ended after another second. “Ah, right. My apologies. Are you related to John Laith Mactavish who served in the British Special Air Services?”
Simon’s grip solidified into stone around his phone. He didn’t actually expect this call to be about Johnny. His mouth felt dry. He swallowed on nothing.
His thumb twitched just slightly over the end call button. Don’t hang up, you’re safe, it’s fine, he told himself. You want to know what this was about. His nervous system had been set ablaze.
He covered his mouth with a fist to clear his throat, pressing the screen of the phone against his ear, hard enough until it dug into his skin. “Um- No. No, he was.. a close friend.”
He felt his knees shaking. His voice wavered, too, and he prayed it was something he was only imagining and that the woman couldn’t hear it, but when she spoke again, it was with a tone that was much softer than before, as if she was talking to a frightened dog or a child.
“Right. Yes, okay.” She said. “And I am so sorry for your loss, by the way.” Somehow, she still managed to sound much too cheery to be delivering condolences regarding a dead loved one.
Simon’s jaw was clenched so hard it began to hurt. His mouth fell open, maybe to try and say ‘It’s okay,’ or ‘I’m fine’, but he couldn’t get anything out. The only sound he made was a pathetic, dry, croak as his vocal cords stalled and gave up on him.
His eyes started to feel wet. He quickly raised his hand over his face, placing his thumb and forefinger beneath the rims of his eyes, an odd strategy he’d developed since he was a boy whenever he was about to start crying.
“..Sir?” The social worker’s voice came hesitantly.
Simon sucked in a sudden breath, as off he was startled.
“Are you-“ The woman faltered. Simon clenched his hand, fingers now pinching the bridge of his nose to stave off a headache. “Are you oka—“
“Fine.” Simon interrupted before she could finish.
“We understand that you are listed as his primary next of kin. Is this accurate?”
“Yes.”
“Well, ah… We’ve discovered that John has— had,” She corrected quickly, which only felt like insult to injury.
She paused for a short time, trailing off, as if hesitant to tell him whatever this was, as if he was unstable, as if he’d make some small, stifled, pitiful sound and she’d have to ask him again: ‘Are you okay?’
Simon was far too tired to tell her to get on with it. In reality, it wasn't even a long pause in the first place, but the entire call just felt so surreal and everything had begun to feel slow, like they were sinking through a vat of honey.
Simon felt his thumb twitching involuntarily towards the red button at the bottom of the screen again. But the woman finally continued on her own, restarting her original.
“We’ve discovered that John had a son.”
Simon’s hand suddenly solidified around his phone like stone. He gripped the device so tightly that it seemed it would shatter in his palm. The durable plastic of the case made a quiet, dry squeaking noise beneath his fingers, like the sound of leather stretching.
“We understand that this can be a lot to process,” the woman said. She had taken on the same gentle, concerned tone from before.
“We understand,” she repeated.
We understand. The words looped over and over in his mind. They, whoever ‘they’ was even supposed to be, absolutely did not understand.
For a moment, Simon was sent outside of his own body. He was on the newest episode of one of those horrendous soap operas Johnny used to beg him to throw on the television, the kind with the absurd plot twists that were entirely unrealistic.
Johnny guffawed on the couch, pointing at the video on the screen in disbelief.
“That would never happen in real life,” He shifted his head to look at Simon with an amused grin as he drew the arm he had slung over Simon’s shoulder even closer on the couch.
Simon smirked, just the slightest upturn of the corner of his lips, and glanced at Johnny. “That’s why it’s called TV, innit?” He remarked. He forced a furrow in his brow so he would seem more critical when he said it, but there was a small glint in his eyes.
Johnny paused, his grin faltering just slightly as he seemed to process the words.
“..What?” He finally questioned, bewildered. “That makes no sense, Simon. Tha’s got nocht to do with it being called TV,” Johnny complained, bonking his head against Simon’s in a playful punishment.
When Johnny’s head bumped him, Simon couldn’t help but let his face crumple into something that was much more like genuine amusement, an unguarded expression that was rare for even Johnny to see. He raised his hand to grab Johnny by his face, shoving him away in a defensive measure.
Johnny cackled, his head tipping back in quaking, full-body laughter. Any expression stronger than a standard flat face from Simon was cause for uproar in Johnny’s books. Every time.
Simon turned his head back towards the screen, a smile straining at his lips.
“Christ. Just shut up and watch the telly, Johnny.”
Sound began to warp and stutter strangely in Simon’s ears as his senses gradually returned to him.
“We understand that you and John’s father were both unaware of his birth. Is this correct?” The woman’s voice came clearly now, but the words failed to fully compute.
“..What?” Simon was so shocked that he couldn’t even process how pitifully weak the question sounded coming out of his own throat.
“We understand that you and John’s father were both unaware of his birth.” The woman skipped like a record, restating the same sentence in the exact same tone. “Would that be accurate, Mr. Riley?”
“No—” Simon blurted on instinct, but he quickly corrected himself. “I mean—yes. Um.. yes.”
“Thank you.” Simon started to hear the quiet clattering of a keyboard pick up on her mic.
“I understand this is a lot to take in, Mr. Riley.” She doesn’t understand. “And I do apologize, but there is another important detail regarding this matter that I have to ask you about.”
Simon didn’t respond. He didn’t know how.
The woman seemed to take his silence as a go ahead. “John—John junior, I guess I should call him—“
“His name is John?” Simon interrupted without thinking. His entire nervous system was still telling him that this entire thing was fake. He felt his hand cramp up around his phone again.
”Oh— Yes, so sorry. The boy’s name is John MacConnell. He’s eleven years old.”
“Bloody fuckin’ hell…” Simon’s hand raked through his clipped hair, tugging on the blond strands.
“Police intervention was found to be necessary after reviewing the state of John’s home life. He’s been taken into our care.”
Simon’s brain could hardly process so much information at once. A warm sensation began to build in the fingers of the hand that wasn’t holding his phone.
”We’re currently searching for a family member or friend who could take care of him, at least temporarily.”
“Okay.” Simon’s body spoke for him.
“The law requires us to ask you to perform an emergency kinship assessment.”
“Right..”
“I’m forwarding the information to your mobile number now,” The woman told him just as his phone buzzed with several messages. “It would be best if you could complete this as soon as possible.”
He shifted his phone, glancing at the push notifications. His eyes skimmed over the words for a few moments before he closed his eyes and thudded his head back against the brick wall. He released a heavy breath through his nose.
“Thank you so much for your cooperation with this, sir.”
“Mhm.”
“And again,” she began in that gentle tone. Simon’s hand flexed around his phone. “We really do unders—“
The flat beeping sound of the call ending rang out as Simon’s thumb landed on the screen.
He stood still for a long moment, staring down at the disconnect page that was left in the aftermath of the call.
His eyes traced over the caller ID once more.
Glasgow, SCT.
As the words faded and his phone shut off, he was left staring at his reflection in the black glass of the screen.
A sharp, scorching pain suddenly sparked at the fingertips of his free hand. He sucked in a sharp breath of surprise, yanking his hand away from the source.
His cigarette had burned down to his fingertips.
“Shite,” He hissed, lifting his hand to assess the damage to his forefinger and thumb. The skin was slightly pink and flared up in two little twin burns, slightly charred with grey ash.
He slowly glanced down at the snowy ground, staring at the place where the cigarette had fallen.
He scowled and stamped the small flame out beneath his boot before he turned to walk back inside his flat.