I Feel It In My Bones (Simon "Ghost" Riley x Reader)

Pushing Boundaries

The next morning, when you woke up, you were hit with a wave of nausea.

You weren't hungover—you hadn't drank enough for that to be an issue—but you had drank enough to feel a spike of anxiety so deep it was suffocating.

Alcohol, being a depressant, didn't mix well with your already dwindling mental health.

The invisible noose was crushing your throat and squeezing your gag reflex. You tore yourself out of bed, almost knocking the black hoodie and the blue cocktail umbrella off of your nightstand in the process. You only just made it to the toilet bowl in time, knees grazing against the floor. You retched, the acid burning your throat, the taste so bitter it only made you choke more. Tears streamed from your eyes as you strained for air.

When you were finished, you slumped onto the floor, pressing your cheek against the cool tiles as you steadied your ragged breaths. Your insides kept on twisting, and you pressed your nails so hard into the palms of your hands that you knew they would leave marks. Though your eyes were closed and squeezed shut, the faces of your old unit looked at you from within your own mind. Their glazed, open eyes stared into nothing. Their lips, slightly agape, were coated in dust and blood. Their lips, slightly agape, were coated in dust and blood. Their hands, bloodied and raw, were stretching towards you for help.

It should have been me. It should have been me. It should have been me.

This was the side of trauma that nobody saw. The side that made you feel insane to try and explain. The urge to destroy, either yourself or everything around you. It made you queasy, made you grind your teeth, made you want to tear yourself apart one cell at a time, made you want to shed your skin like a snake because it felt too tight.

You wanted the pain to stop, to feel nothing, to burrow yourself into a cavern of emptiness so deep you would never re-emerge. You wanted the pain to increase until it was the only thing that thrummed through your veins, until you could taste it on your tongue like blood, until it was the only sense your body could experience.

Looking at the calendar, you could never predict what dates would contain the worst moments of your life. You wished you could tell yourself to hug your parents a little tighter the last time you saw them and to laugh a little harder at the last jokes your unit made. You wished that you could warn your younger self of what was to come.

That while your body had survived, you had never been the same. That you would never go a day without thinking about the past. That you would hate looking at yourself in the mirror.

That you would live in perpetual fear of it happening again.

Your thoughts were interrupted by a soft knock at your door, followed by a familiar English accent. 'Bones? I brought you a cereal bar.'

Shit.

Get it together. Quickly.

'Come in,' you called, your voice only cracking a little. You pulled your mask up just in time, dabbed the wetness away from your eyes, and sucked in a deep breath. It took only a few blinks for your expression to settle into neutrality, for you to push the pain and torment so far into the back of your mind that you were only left with numbness, the feeling of tingling in your fingertips, and a heavy emptiness in your chest.

You made your way back into your bedroom just as Gaz sauntered in, breakfast foods piled into his arms, and he slowly lowered himself to the floor. Once he got comfortable, his long legs covering most of the ground in front of him, he chucked you the breakfast bar, which you caught only as it smacked into the middle of your abdomen.

Your hands clutched the rectangular shape, running the pads of your fingers over the thin, plastic covering. Grounding.

Gaz threw his head back and took a large bite out of a juicy, red apple. He was seemingly oblivious to the fact that, just a few seconds before his arrival, you had been fighting with your trauma. 'Soap's out of commission today,' he mumbled through a mouthful of fruit.