Chapter Text
“You’ve held your head up. You’ve fought the fight. You bear the scars. You’ve done your time. Listen to me, you’ve been lonely too long.”
- The Civil Wars (Dust to Dust)
The sudden press of the rifle’s butt into her shoulder was so familiar it barely even registered. Adrenaline and six years, most of which Anna had spent as a sniper in the US Army, would do that for you. A little over a year ago luck had shined down upon her when Captain Fielder had greased a few wheels to get her transfer paperwork pushed through. He needed a Scout Sniper, and that’s all Anna Miller was really good for lately. Maybe it was the coward’s way out of an uncomfortable situation for her, too. The US military was still a boy’s club, and her persistent complaints about a pushy commanding officer who thought he should have an invitation to her bed were falling on deaf ears. The transfer to the Marines solved the problem with no conflict.
“Nice shot, Blondie.” The man behind her had an accent she couldn’t place. She could see him lower the binoculars from his eyes out of the periphery of her vision. He was supposed to be watching her six, not the skirmish in the valley below them. She bit back an irritated response and focused her attention back on the action. The ground beneath her was so dry and fine she could taste the gritty earth even through the tan gaiter she’d pulled up to cover her nose and mouth.
She was no longer with the 24th out of Camp Lejeune. Four months ago her commanding officer had called her in for an impromptu interview with a couple of men who were military, but not any military she knew. They had wanted to know her plans. She had just finished six years, and everyone seemed to want an answer as to whether she was going to request a discharge or if she planned on making a career of it, maybe get a desk job. The thought of that made her antsy, and anxious. But these guys? They wanted to know if she was tired of deployment, if she wanted to go home.
“No,” she’d told them. “Not tired, and I don’t have a home.”
After twenty minutes of questions that kept coming back to a future she couldn’t seem to envision, they had taken the two-inch thick file off the table and given her a nod before slipping out the door of the makeshift command center. Almost four weeks to the day, she’d been called back in to have a chat with her commanding officer and one of the guys who had interviewed her before. He explained he was with Task Force 141 and they had a need for a sniper. Anna had a need for a way to escape the inevitable question of whether she wanted a desk job in North Carolina or a ticket to civilian life, so her response had been easy.
At the time, Task Force 141 had meant little to nothing to her besides the bare-bones description he’d given. She’d learned fast in the two months she’d been with the team that these guys did not fuck around, and maybe she was in slightly over her head. Her time with the US military had been a lot of hurry up and wait, a lot of sitting around without much action. The 141 moved, and it moved fast. In the past two months, she’d gone from North Carolina to Qatar where she’d been issued a Barnett M82 sniper rifle and immediately sent out to a conflict on the southern border of Sudan. Her unit had moved camp seven times in as many weeks.
She exhaled and adjusted her finger on the trigger of the M82 at the same time she shifted her hips on the ground. Lieutenant Riley had just rounded the corner of a building riddled with craters where bullets had chipped away at the structure. She still didn’t know how he managed to see properly with the mask and the red-tinted glasses, but she also couldn’t deny that he was elite. She’d never seen someone more efficient at getting in, completing the objective, and getting out. Except he didn’t know there was a man with a rifle camped out in the window two floors above him. She hadn’t been able to get a shot in because the insurgent had been keeping himself out of sight. The only reason she knew he was there was the barrel of his gun sliding over the windowsill, the scope reflecting the sunlight better than the broken shards of glass above it.
The barrel tilted down, but Ghost hadn’t clocked the man yet. Her lungs were starting to burn with the need to take a breath, but a breath would mean she could miss. Just that slight movement of her body could mean the shot would go wide. “Come on,” Anna said under her breath. No time to radio him, no time to even voice her concern to her partner today.
Movement behind the scope of the gun as the man found Ghost in the crosshairs. Gotcha , she thought, as she squeezed the trigger. Just a gentle curl of her index finger resulted in an explosive blast and the butt of her rifle smashing into her shoulder again.
“Fuck,” her partner muttered, the binoculars pressed against his face. “Didn’t even see that guy.”
She looked down the scope and saw the window was empty. No rifle, no man. Just a splatter of blood on the far wall. Shifting down to her Lieutenant, she eased her finger off the trigger as he came into view in her scope. Instead of staring at the window her bullet had gone through, he was staring right at her position on the hill above. He gave a curt nod of his head before slipping in the doorway of the building, no doubt to make sure the man was dead.
Anna pulled in a breath and nearly choked on the dust that still somehow managed to get through the gaiter. “Macky. Behind us,” she told her partner.
He turned around abruptly. “Nobody’s there,” he replied. “Looks like they’re just cleaning up. You took out, what, nine of them today?”
“Ten,” she said. Anna wished she could say each one meant something. She was taking lives, after all. But somewhere along the way she had grown numb to it. Maybe it was the distance the gun provided. She was usually hundreds of meters away from her target, which meant no blood or guts or bodies besides the ones in her scope. And those were so far away it was easy to forget they were people. It was probably a bad thing. She was probably broken. It shouldn’t be so easy.
“Report.” Ghost’s flat voice commanded in her ear. She heard each person on the team report in. Her partner spoke for them while Anna pushed herself to her knees and dusted off her vest. She heard Ghost give orders for everyone to meet at the rendezvous point to return to their camp. The ride back would take almost three hours, and she’d had little sleep in the past few weeks. Maybe she’d try to get some rest despite the rattling of the vehicles over the bumpy terrain. Maybe , she thought as she pulled her rifle off the bipod holding it up off the ground.
“Hey Blondie, Mackey said you saved L.T.’s ass today,” said an already unmistakable voice with a Scottish accent. She looked up from her tray of rehydrated turkey and vegetables to find Soap and Gaz sliding onto the bench across from her with trays of their own.
They were both good guys. Competent, dependable, and respectful. Great at their jobs. Soap had one of those flirtatious personalities, and Anna took it with a grain of salt. After over six years in the military, she could clock a guy who was serious about getting into her bed, and she’d learned ways to deter nearly all of them.
At first she thought the ice queen bitch persona would do the trick, but so many of these alphaholes seemed to take that as a challenge. Being too nice and accommodating didn’t work either. After some trial and error, Anna found that making herself unremarkable and boring seemed to do the trick. Her namesake hair was almost always tied back in a ponytail or bun. She wore little to no makeup even on days off. When she wasn’t on a mission, she kept her fatigues on as amour against anyone seeing her as a woman over a soldier or Marine or...whatever she was to the 141. Plus, it wasn’t like she was some great beauty. She had all the requisite female parts without being remarkable.
“I don’t know about that,” she told them, spearing a couple green beans with her fork. Her eyes flipped up to the food line and found Ghost standing there like she’d been aware of where his body was in relation to hers the entire time. The feeling grated on her. Why did she feel this drawn to him? He was a man of few words and offered very little in the way of personality because he offered even less in conversation, especially to a new recruit like her. Maybe it was the fact that he was competent and all business. This feeling of being drawn to him was respect and admiration. Nothing more.
Gaz looked over his shoulder, noticing she’d been watching Ghost’s profile as he shifted forward in line. “If you’re waiting for him to thank you, then you better settle in because that’s not happening.”
Anna shifted her eyes back to her food. “Nope. No thanks needed. Just doing my job.” Besides, he’d already thanked her. The nod in her direction was all the acknowledgement she needed. She almost opened her mouth and asked Soap and Gaz where or how Ghost ate with that balaclava over his face. He took the skull mask off, but the black balaclava with the sprayed-painted jaw bones and teeth was always on. Two months with his team and she had never seen the man with his face uncovered. She refused to ask, though. It shouldn’t matter. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t her business.
“He doesn’t take it off,” Soap said.
The way he seemed to have known exactly what she was thinking made Anna want to squirm. “Take what off?” she asked, looking up at Soap and Gaz.
Soap just smiled like her question was so silly it was funny. “Ghost. The mask.”
She nodded. “Yeah, okay. I...didn’t ask.”
It had been a long day, and the heat from lying on that ridge in the sun was catching up to her. Shoulders tense and a headache creeping down her neck from the base of her skull, she slipped out of the tent they’d been using as a mess hall. There were two supply trucks parked to the left, and the smaller tents they shared for sleeping were clustered together on the right. She inhaled the fresh night air. It was still hot, but not nearly as hot as it had been earlier in the day. She just wanted to shower the dust off before she collapsed into bed.
You wanted this , Anna reminded herself. You chose this . Thinking of going back to Lejeune and living in one of those houses on the base made her feel like she couldn’t breathe. The idea of filing papers for a discharge so she could get a job in the civilian world and live in a sterile apartment on the second floor of some complex with a pool and a gym while she microwaved meals for dinner...it made her sick to her stomach. My head is so fucked, she thought as she passed the second supply truck.
“Didn’t thank you for having my six out there.” The low, flat voice came from the shadow cast by the truck. She recognized it immediately and slowed before turning around to face Ghost.
“You did,” she assured him. “I caught your nod in my direction.”
“Hmm.” The noncommittal sound was like a soft rubble in his chest.
Anna shrugged and smoothed the stray hairs that had escaped from her ponytail. “Just doing my job, Lieutenant. No thanks needed.”
“Where’d you learn to shoot?” His question stopped her from walking away.
“Army,” she replied just as she heard the flick of a lighter. The tip of his cigarette flared red as he pulled in a drag. The shadows and the four or five yards between them prevented her from seeing much, but she could tell the balaclava was pushed up to expose his chin and mouth.
Ghost scoffed and blew smoke into the air while Anna fought a private war in her own head. She wanted to scrutinize him, try to make out the contours of his chin and lips, maybe even the cut of his jaw. However, she also wanted to respect his privacy. He was smoking in the shadow of the supply truck for a reason.
“What was the scoff for?”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Sure about that?”
“About what?”
“About learning to shoot when you enlisted.”
Of course. Of course, he’d have seen a file on her. That two-inch thick file had surely made its rounds, including hitting Captain Price’s desk. It only made sense her Lieutenant had seen it as well. No such thing as privacy when you are in the wheels of the machine. “If you already know, then why’d you ask?” she shot back, more irritation in her voice than she intended.
They stood there in silence for a couple of beats, just watching each other. Ghost finally took another drag from his cigarette and tapped the ashes off it with his thumb. “Don’t know shit, Blondie.” When she didn’t reply, he continued. “If you think I saw your file, you’re wrong.”
Her call name on his lips gave her a rush of adrenaline, and that made her uncomfortable. Why did he make her feel this way? What was this useless fucking crush on him? “My dad,” she finally said. “My dad taught me.”
“Hmm,” Ghost mused as he brought the cigarette back to his lips. “He did well.”
Maybe he meant it to be a compliment. Instead, those three words landed hard on her mind before trickling down into irritation. “Yeah,” she all but snapped before she turned around. Anna took a step away from him toward the showers before turning back abruptly. “You know that will kill you, right?”
“What’s that?” he asked, his voice flat and bored like it always seemed to be if he wasn’t on a mission.
“Smoking.”
He gave a soft chuckle. “Think I’ve got more hazardous things to worry about, don’t you?”
Something about his attitude this evening was just grating on her nerves. Why did he even say anything when she walked by him? “It stinks,” she told him.
He made a noise of agreement before letting the cigarette fall from his right hand. As he twisted the toe of his boot over the smoldering remains, he pulled the bottom edge of the balaclava down over his mouth and then stepped out of the shadows. “Thanks for today, Blondie.”
The sincerity in his voice made her feel like she’d just experienced conversational whiplash. Before she could think of a response, he’d slipped around the corner of the truck and gone off in the opposite direction. She heard his boots crunch in the dry earth and rocks for a couple of meters, then nothing. She’d never met someone who was so big and so quiet. Like a ghost.
The showers were empty when she got there. It took Anna less than ten minutes to strip, wash her hair and body, dry herself, and pull on her clothes. When she was younger, a shower was a luxury, but since she’d enlisted it was just a task to be done. She dropped onto her cot in the corner of the only women’s dorm tent. There were twelve cots evenly spaced; four of them were already occupied tonight.
As she adjusted her pillow, she wondered if Ghost shared a tent with eleven other men or if he had his own private tent. She wondered if he smoked those nasty cigarettes in it. She wondered if he took a shower on nights they returned from missions before he collapsed into bed. She wondered if he took that mask off when he showered. Did he take it off to eat? What was he hiding? Why did he wait outside the mess hall to thank her? Why the fuck did she tell him about her dad?