Gloss and Salt | Simon "Ghost" Riley x Reader

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Ghost wakes up to the female Agent crying next to him and thinks about their road so far and where he wants it to go. As a broken man, his fantasies aren't exactly nice.

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Not necessarily a GhostxReader type deal as this is written from Ghost's perspective and while I do intend to get some viewpoints from the female character's side, I think I'll stay within third person, as I don't feel super comfortable to write from a first person POV. We'll see though.

But I can't do anything unless I get the big bad burly babygirl out of my head. And all the Y/N's are lusting after him, it's time for him to lust after her!!!!!!
This is kinda...dark? Creepy? Ghost gets off on tough shit, but that's what I imagine all the trauma did to him. It gets soft at the end though.

The female character is heavily!!! inspired by Sam Fisher and the Splinter Cell franchise because Sam was one of my first ever fictional crushes :'-)

Please enjoy and let me know what you think :-)

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He can see her cracking. Almost tastes the life draining out of her.

Long before she's laying in the small thing you couldn't really describe as a bed across the room from him, trying her hardest to make her pillow absorb her wet sobs.

She must've thought Ghost was asleep, and he has been for some time, but his sleep is never deep enough. Even now when they're holed up in a small house, an actual fucking house with furniture, running water and a front door that locks, in the middle of a small town in Kosovo, his mind doesn't allow him to slip away completely. It takes him a good ten seconds to realize what makes the noise in the otherwise quiet house as his eyes crack open. The small hiccups continue as his senses come back to him. The stale and cold air, the slightest trace of the first warm food they've had in a week still hangs in the room. He thinks he can hear Price snore through the wall.

She sniffles, wipes her eyes in a desperate attempt to get rid of the salty shine on her face. But it doesn't help. His eyes adjust to the dimness of the room, street lights from below casting their orange haze up into it. They rake over her curled up form, her back facing towards him. A tremor goes through her as her lungs fill with a shaky breath.

It shouldn't really concern him. Crying in a moment of privacy wasn't something neither of them haven't done at one point or another. Although Ghost only ever feels distant echoes of wetness on his cheeks.

But he knows better than that.

It's how her usual quiet but friendly demeanor now turns into absolute silence, simply just observing. Not that he minds.
They way her eyes are dull, nothing left of the reserved but glimmering curiosity he saw over the briefing table. Instead, now they just look ahead, seeing, processing, filing away. Clouded in a way he only sees in his own when he manages a prolonged look in the mirror. When she speaks, she's still as friendly as ever, but her words are clipped. Cut short in fear of opening up too much, letting more spill out than she bargains for. Ghost and her don't really exchange a lot of words to begin with, but he notices. He always notices. It's his curse, really.

He had noticed so many things about her in that single first glance, automatic assesment whirring in his mind, filtering and stowing shit away where appropriate, before his eyes turned away again.

Her posture had been rigid and upright as she followed Laswell into the briefing room. They all knew she was coming with her. Nonetheless, the acrid taste of Laswell's outburst just three days prior translated into the looks they all consequently shot each other.