Chapter Text
“Doug! Doug, quick, come look! They’re moving in!”
“Who?”
“The people who bought the house across the street, who else?”
Linda Baker peered out between the blinds of her living room window as she watched the midsize U-Haul pull up in the driveway of 327 Cherrygate Lane, waving for her husband to join her. New neighbors were few and far between in the community, and Linda was dying to see who would be living in the house formerly occupied by the Misters Hernandez.
A young woman hopped out the passenger’s side first, hair pulled back in a French braid.
Oh that’s nice , Linda thought as she idly stirred her coffee. It’ll be nice to have more young people around here.
Linda watched as the young woman made her way towards the back of the truck, undoing the latch before flinging the doors wide open. By this point, Doug had settled in next to Linda with his own mug of coffee. Out loud, he always pretended that he wasn’t interested in the comings and goings of their neighbors, but Linda knew that he loved the gossip as much as she did.
“D’you think it’s just her moving in?” Doug asked.
“Awful lot of boxes for just one girl, don’t you think?” Linda replied, jerking her chin towards the way the truck was immaculately stuffed to the gills.
Their questions were answered, however, when the driver’s door swung open.
In hindsight, Linda wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t...this. A tall, hulking mass of a man, in literal combat boots - not the fashionable kind that she’d seen in some magazines - and cargo pants. The dark grey shirt would have been normal enough were it not for what appeared to be an actual tactical vest and...was that a skull printed on his balaclava?
Linda squinted.
Yes. Yes it was. A skull-printed balaclava, topped off with a pair of black wraparound sunglasses.
Linda watched as the girl flinched a little and hurriedly began unloading the boxes onto the ground as the man approached the back of the truck, where held out a hand for the keys that the girl had frantically dug out of her pocket before picking up the unloaded boxes two at a time towards the house.
“Is that her...?” Doug trailed off in confusion.
“No idea,” Linda murmured as the two of them tried to puzzle out the situation. “I’m guessing boyfriend or husband, though.”
“Maybe he’s just a friend helping her move in,” Doug said as he took a sip of his coffee, eyes glued to the scene that was unfolding before them.
Linda shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“I’m sorry, you want me to what?”
You sat under the cold fluorescent lights of Laswell’s office, eyes tracking the papers that she was shuffling into a folder. As a data analyst, you were never called into the boss’s office, and the novelty of the experience paired with the shock of your assignment made you temporarily forget the correct mode of address.
“Like I said, Agent, we need someone to collect some information on our target.”
“The target” was apparently some overly-paranoid drug-and-human trafficker who kept all his records on non-networked computers and encrypted discs and USBs so there was no way to get any intel on him besides in-person. All indicators pointed to his logistical base of operations being somewhere in the Los Angeles area, but he had a number of offices and warehouses scattered around the area, and the off-the-grid-ness of his operation made it hard to pinpoint a specific facility. To that end, the Task Force had installed you in the shipping company he operated as a front, where you’d ideally get your hands on that intel while working under the guise of an overlooked secretary.
All of that made sense, in its own way, except -
“I understand, ma’am, it’s just that last part that I’m having trouble understanding. You need me to...live with Lieutenant Riley? As his...”
You knew Lieutenant Riley. Or rather, you knew of Lieutenant Riley. Or even more accurately, you knew of Ghost, and had only just now learned that he was actually called Lieutenant Simon Riley. Apparently Laswell thought it conducive to this specific mission that you learn the real name of the storied and notorious operative, for reasons that you objectively knew but couldn’t quite come to terms enough for you to wrap your mind around just yet.
“Lieutenant Riley will be working with the information you provide to help us strategize an approach, and your cover story was the easiest way to tie up any loose ends and throw off some suspicion, for both of you. As for your living situation, well, we thought it best if you had some...backup.”
You knew she meant muscle. A bodyguard. In case things went drastically south.
“...Ma’am, I’m not exactly complaining about having a bodyguard in this current sociopolitical climate, but Lieutenant Riley isn’t exactly someone who uh. Blends in.”
You’d seen the man before. From a distance, but you’d still seen him.
“I understand, but he’s also the man we need on the job,” Laswell said, with an air of finality. Not that you thought she’d be swayed by your lukewarm-at-best protestations.
A knock. And then, the creak of the door opening.
“Ah, speak of the devil.”
You turned around to see Lieutenant Riley standing in the doorway. He seemed even larger up close than he did in those brief glimpses you caught of him around base. You were taller than average, but being this close to him still made you feel...dwarfed. You thought you’d be used to it by now, being on a paramilitary base so often, but it felt different from the Lieutenant somehow.
“Please, sit.” Laswell gestured to the empty chair beside you. You stared resolutely at some middle distance on Laswell’s desk, unwilling to see what sort of emotion might be reflected in the sliver of the Lieutenant’s face that was exposed to the world, what distaste he might hold for the mission. For you. The last thing a man like the Lieutenant would want to do, you were sure, was being stuck babysitting a desk jockey with next to no combat training.
“Thank you for joining us, Lieutenant. I assume you’ve been briefed about the mission?”
“Affirmative. Price told me.”
You would have snorted if Laswell and Lieutenant Riley were people that you thought would receive snorting in good humor. Affirmative. It wasn’t a surprise that he would speak like that, exactly, but it was still deeply hilarious to you, in some unnameably absurd way.
“Good, good. And I assume he briefed you on your cover story as well?”
“Negative, ma’am.”
Negative. You stifled a despairing little giggle. This was going to be your life now.
“Ah, well then.” Laswell cleared her throat. “Lieutenant, I’d like you to meet your new wife.”
The journey from headquarters to your new home could only be described as “excruciatingly awkward.”
The two of you sat in silence throughout the flight. You twisted your wedding band (you had a wedding band now, without ever having had an engagement ring). It was pretty, flashier than you thought a military-issue wedding band would be. You had expected a plain and practical ring, but this one was gold, with an offset row of what looked like diamonds. It looked like something you would have picked if you were getting married for real.
You wonder who picked it for you.
The Task Force flew the two of you to a private airfield, where they handed over the keys to a UHaul truck pre-packed with all the requisite furniture and accoutrements that typically accompanied a middle-class millennial couple in their late twenties to thirties. From there, it was a two-and-a-half hour drive to 327 Cherrygate Lane, Carbon Canyon, California.
An hour into the drive, you had learned exactly one thing about Lieutenant Riley: he was a terrible driver.
It wasn’t like he never used turn signals, or tailgated, or ran red lights. It was more like he treated the whole trip like he was evading some unseen enemy. He slammed the breaks on stops that were timed for the last possible second. He swerved around turns as quickly as physics would allow. You would’ve been carsick if you weren’t already sick with nerves over your new living arrangements.
Another half hour later, the combination of silence and motion sickness was becoming unbearable. You had to say something, even if only to distract yourself from the nausea.
“So um. What should I call you…?” Sir?? Should you have tacked on a “sir”? Either way, you figured you couldn’t keep calling him “Lieutenant” in public. People would think that you guys had some weird DDLG kink going on. Laswell said there wasn’t really a need for fake names because nobody really knew who the two of you were, anyways. The Lieutenant was technically legally dead and you were, for all intents and purposes, a nobody. But calling him “Simon” in private still felt…weird.
“…Ghost is fine,” he grunted, barely looking at you.
“Ghost,” you repeated, testing it out. A moment passed before you glanced briefly at him before staring back out the window.
When you finally arrived, you practically tumbled out of the passenger’s seat as you tried not to dry-heave, desperately relieved at coming to a full and permanent stop. Once you got your bearings, you hurried over to the back of the truck to begin the unloading process. You had to be useful. The Lieuten- Ghost. Ghost couldn’t think you were dead weight. You weren’t afraid of being a burden. You just didn’t want him to have more things to hold against you later. And you didn’t think your pride would let you live it down if you didn’t almost quite literally throw your weight around a little.
The reality of having to live with him was well and truly settling in now that the carsickness had worn off and two of you were parked in front of your cute little stucco-walled house with your truck of clothes and furniture and the keys to the front door in your hands. And if you were going to be living with him, as his wife, you didn’t want to spend all your time hiding in the shadows, afraid of stepping on his toes. It was your house, your marriage (and that part would never stop being weird), your mission as much as it was his. So you set to work as quickly as you could, undoing the latch and climbing up to start hauling boxes out.
You jumped a little when Ghost walked up alongside you, lost as you were in your thoughts on how to most efficiently unload the truck.
“Take it out the truck and I’ll carry it in. You can leave the furniture to me.”
“I can help you with the furniture.”
Ghost shrugged.
“Suit yourself.”
It turned out that the two of you worked pretty well as a team, at least in the field of moving in. Between your unloading and Ghost’s slightly-terrifying strength (you could see the point in carrying two boxes at once, but you felt that three was pushing it. Three was just showing off), you had the truck unloaded and the boxes and furniture in all the correct rooms in a little over two hours. It took another hour and a half to get the bed set up and all the other furniture unwrapped and placed in approximately the correct positions before you decided that enough was enough. It was getting late, and the truck was still sitting in the driveway.
Turning to Ghost, who was in the middle of opening up the first box, you asked him, “You take the truck to the UHaul center and I’ll get us some takeout?”
Ghost looked down at his box and back at you.
“We can do the boxes tomorrow, I’m fucking starving. ” Which was true. Air 141 didn’t exactly provide an in-flight dining service, and you’d been too nervous to ask Ghost to stop at a gas station or something along the way for snacks.
“...Right then.”
As Ghost took the truck back, you scrolled through your phone trying to find a place to get takeout before you threw it onto the couch as the swelling wave of “this is weird ” finally crashed into you. Because this was weird. It was weird! You joined the CIA after law school because going into practice sounded like hell and you didn’t know what else to do and you always did like sifting through large piles of paperwork looking for little details that popped out and making organized little databases of notes for those little details. You had no idea where that job was headed, but it certainly wasn’t towards married to an operative.
You weren’t even fake-married. You were truly, legally married. Apparently, the Task Force had filed all the necessary paperwork to make this marriage legit in the eyes of the court, so here you were, at 28, married to an operative who wanted you to call him “Ghost.” More importantly, you had no idea what he looked like. You literally couldn’t pick your husband out of a lineup.
You knew you were supposed to feel some type of way about this whole situation. But somewhere between the flight and the drive and the move, your nerves had settled into a bland kind of resignation. You weren’t sad, because this was only temporary. And you weren’t scared. You knew that objectively, Ghost was the platonic ideal of a violent man, but he didn’t feel like someone who would be violent to you. You didn’t think the Task Force would go to the trouble of keeping him around or assigning him to a pseudo-espionage mission if he was such a loose cannon. Mostly, you thought, this was just your job. It was just a job to get through. You could look at how you felt about it later.
You decided on Greek.
Ghost got home shortly after the takeout did. You were halfway through setting up the table when he walked in, and you noted with a wry amusement how much this all felt like playing house. The little wife waiting at home with dinner on the table.
“I got us Greek,” you offered. “I don’t know if you’re allergic to anything, though, so uh. Proceed at your own risk, I guess.” Why did you say that, now he was going to think that you wanted him dead. But it was too late to take it back.
Ghost stared at you for a moment before grunting, “ ‘s fine,” and grabbing a plate. Crisis averted.
The two of you had just barely settled down to eat when a dull sound echoed through the house.
Knock, knock.
Both of your heads swiveled towards the front door. You hurried to get up before Ghost motioned for you to sit back down and headed for the door himself. You had a mild fascination with how a man so large and dressed in so many bulky layers managed to move so quietly. But there he was, rising from his seat on the floor and stalking towards the door with what could only be described as catlike grace. A big cat, but a cat nevertheless.
Ghost peered out the peephole, standing perpendicular to the door like he was scoping around a corner, one hand on his gun (and where did that come from, you could’ve sworn it wasn’t there when he sat down for dinner). You watched him squint for a second before relaxing and walking back towards you.
“Who is it?” you mouthed.
Ghost shrugged.
Knock, knock.
Ghost froze. You could practically see the wheel of tactical responses spinning in his head and landing ever-closer to “Eliminate The Threat.” Rolling your eyes, you walked to check to see who it was yourself before Ghost could stop you.
On the other side of the door stood a standard-issue, suburban-model, middle-aged couple. The man wore wire-rimmed glasses and a blue polo tucked into a pair of khakis with his hands in his pockets. The woman was carrying a covered baking dish.
“I think it’s the neighbors,” you whispered before pasting a grin onto your face and throwing the door open, but not before catching a glimpse of Ghost’s eyes widening in horror. “Hi guys! So sorry about the wait, we’re just so tired from the whole moving-in thing and we literally just sat down when you knocked.”
“Oh, don’t even worry about it!” The woman waved your apology away. “We live across the street and we just wanted to say welcome to the neighborhood! We brought you guys some brownies, just a little something to say hi with. I’m Linda, by the way, and this is my husband, Doug.”
By this point, Ghost had come to loom ominously behind you. You didn’t hear him walk over, but you could just feel the defensive energy rolling off him in waves, and you didn’t miss the way Linda’s gaze had nervously flicked upwards for a moment in the middle of her introduction. Plus, it was a little hard to ignore the literal shadow he cast upon the doorstep with his frame.
“Oh my god, thank you!” You gushed, trying to compensate for Ghost’s foreboding presence with a determined cheeriness. “I’m ____, and this is my husband Simon.” You took the tray from Linda and shoved it into Ghost’s hands in an attempt to make him look less menacing. It was harder to look menacing when one was carrying a foil-covered brownie dish. “Look, babe! The neighbor brought us brownies!”
Babe. You cringed a little inside. You probably should have cleared it with him first. But it felt weird calling him “Simon” to his face, even though you’d just introduced him as such. There was a difference, you thought, between saying someone’s name was such-and-such and addressing them by said name, like the layer of detachment that was present in an introduction was removed in direct address, opening up a level of intimacy that you didn’t think was appropriate. And calling him “Ghost” in front of everyone was out of the question. “Babe” it was, then. That was something that normal young couples did, right? Right??
You were also sure that your grin was approaching manic levels of beaming-ness by this point, but you needed to impress upon Ghost the importance of this interaction going smoothly so badly . Well, as smoothly as it could when your husband was a mostly-silent, 6’4” refrigerator box of a man dressed in a skull-printed balaclava, wraparound sunglasses, and just...all that tac gear. First impressions were important, after all.
Ghost nodded, in a display of barest civility. You took that as a win.
Thankfully, Linda cut in right before the silence got too awkward. “Well, we’ll be getting out of your hair now, I’m sure you guys are exhausted.”
You laughed. You hoped it didn’t sound too desperately relieved. “Just a little bit! Thank you again for the brownies!” You shook Linda’s hand, then Doug’s, trying to ignore the slight tint of concern in their smiles. “I’ll send the dish back when we’re done!”
Linda assured you that there was no rush before turning to leave with her husband. After waving them off for what you believed was the appropriate length of time, you shut the door with a relieved sigh. Your relief, however, was short-lived, as you caught sight of Ghost’s scowl, which was mitigated only marginally by the brownie dish that he still held in his hand.
“What?”
“What was that for?” Ghost bit out, gesturing towards the door with the brownie dish. It would have been funny if he didn’t seem so genuinely upset
You blinked. “...You mean why did I open the door?”
Ghost widened his eyes in emphatic exasperation.
“...Because...they looked like neighbors? And...it’s the neighborly thing to do?”
“You had no idea who those people were!” You were briefly thankful for the balaclava, if only because it muffled his voice from prying ears. “What if they worked for...what if they...”
As Ghost trailed off in wordless frustration, you realized something. He was worried. About you, more than the mission itself, it seemed. Or maybe you were extremely delusional. Maybe he only cared that you would jeopardize the mission if you got him and yourself killed. Whatever the reason, it felt that the right thing to do was maybe to reassure him, instead of fighting him about what you would privately insist was the objectively-normal choice to open the door to people who looked like neighbors.
"I'm sorry."
Ghost froze again. Almost imperceptibly. It was as though something in him had…not exactly settled, but rather…hovered in an abrupt suspension.
“I’m sorry,” you repeated, endeavoring to look him in the eyes. You’d always had trouble doing that, looking someone in the eye if you weren’t gearing up for a fight. But you needed him to know. If this, god, if this marriage was going to go any kind of smoothly, you needed him to know you meant it. He looked like someone who needed to know that. “You made a good point. I didn’t know who those people were. I didn’t know if they were a threat. But the mission parameters dictate that we appear normal.” You figured he’d have an easier time with the thousand tiny unpredictabilities of everyday civilian life if you framed them as requisites to the mission. “And it’s normal for people to greet new neighbors. And to open the door for people who are greeting their new neighbors. Especially if they can tell that you’re home. So sometimes we will have to open the door for people we don’t really know.”
Ghost stayed silent.
“…I’ll let you look first though, if people knock on the door in the future. So you can…assess.” That seemed like the right kind of thing to say, let him feel like he had more control over the situation. Over the hypothetical future situations.
A beat, and then -
“Understood.”
“…I might still have to open the door sometimes, though. Even if you don’t really want me to.” It felt best to also account for any exceptions ahead of time.
“…Understood.”
“Cool, cool.” That got settled a lot faster than you expected it to. “Do you…do you maybe wanna go back and finish dinner with me now?”
Ghost paused for a moment before nodding and followed you back to the kitchen.
I am going to get a good grade in fake wife , you thought to yourself with a growing sense of amused hysteria. Something that is reasonable to want and possible to achieve.