Chapter Text
“Welcome back lads, today we’ve got another streamer drawing lined up,” John pulled up his screen, so his viewers could see the reference images he had been carefully curating. He spun the pen in his hand, dancing it around his fingers.
“Threw together some references, ye all know how it goes by now,”
It wasn’t as though John wanted to lie to his subscribers. He liked them. Most of them anyway. But they really didn’t need to know about the three hours that John had spent preparing for this stream scrolling through the scant social media of his chosen streamer for the day: @ghostghames. The man was an enigma, the gaming community lovingly calling him their ‘gamer cryptid’ and his profile was proof of that. The man only had his streaming platform stuff around, and other than that only screenshots his fans had taken of him existed for John to draw off of. And John has searched .
The hours passed by as John carefully bent over his work, the almost-finished piece spread across his screen in front of him and the monitor glowing above. He cocked his head. This one had come out pretty good, all things considered. The piece showed Ghost with his iconic cat ear headset, the glowing neon lighting up his sharp cheekbones and tired eyes, the rest of his face covered with a black face mask, a smiling jawbone gaping back at John. The artist scrubbed an arm across his eyes and glanced at his clock, the sickly green ‘3:00 am’ laughing at him. Finishing up some last touches, he said goodbye to his chat, waved, and logged off. Without thinking, he went through the motions of uploading the picture, tagging the streamer he had drawn, and shutting down his computer.
His alarm the next day blared from the other side of the room where he had forgotten his phone, and John groaned, stumbling to his feet and lunging for it. Then he unlocked his phone.
The list of notifications was endless, his socials blowing up after his stream. He had known it would do better than most, since he was known for drawing other popular streamers alongside his other crafting and storytime content, but this was another level. Apparently Ghost had a bigger following than John had ever imagined, and they had crawled out of the woodwork at any kind of content revolving around their favorite gaming insomniac.
John scrolled mindlessly as he moved through his morning routine, getting ready to head to the gym, when he stopped, frozen in the hallway of his flat. At the end of the endless scroll, a ‘liked’ notification sat, bold and judgemental. ‘@ghostghames started following you’.
Now, John was used to the creators he drew liking his art, he tagged them for a reason, though it was mostly out of courtesy and a thank you for acting as a reference for his stream that day. But John had been trying very hard to lie to himself about how much he liked Ghost. He was not succeeding well, considering he was standing in the hall like an idiot, a piece of toast in his hand and his eyes wide.
“Oy, who pissed in your cereal?”
John could always count on Kyle to ground him at least.
He shook his head and shoved his phone back in his sweatpants.
“Aye, just…”
Before he could come up with a reliable lie (and really John wasn’t this much of a liar usually ), Kyle snatched his phone from his pocket with nimble fingers, before dancing away to the kitchen, sliding easily onto the counter and thumbing through the notifications on John’s lock screen.
“Ach, you numpty!” He slid on socked feet into the kitchen after his flatmate. “Give it back!”
When he made it, Kyle had clearly made it to the notification that had ruined (made) John’s morning, and was grinning, his ever-present baseball cap askew from his escape. John sighed and collapsed in one of the kitchen chairs the two of them had found in a charity shop down the road, mismatched and scuffed.
“Alright, ask away,”
“I knew you had a thing for the guy!”
John ran a hand down his face and wished he hadn’t woken up that morning. Or at least hadn’t checked his phone before going to the gym.
“Yeah, yeah…”
Here was the thing. Kyle knew Ghost. Or at least, knew a friend who knew Ghost. Kyle had served with Captain Price before he had ever met John, and though he had never been in the field with Ghost when the other man had also been on active duty, he had told John that Price talked about the man regularly. When John and Kyle met, only a year or so before John was medically discharged, those stories were quickly passed on. And when Kyle joined John in his bare flat, bringing with him video games and an endless supply of potted plants two years after John had found himself on his ass and on his own, he brought the news that Ghost had gotten into streaming, after having been discharged himself. And Kyle found it endlessly funny that Ghost had been the one that inspired John to get into streaming himself.
John shook his head. He hadn’t thought it was this bad, his quasi-hero-worship-turned-crush, but his heart was still palpitating, beating a rhythm to ‘ @ghostghames followed you, @ghostgames followed you, @ghostgames followed you’.
“ Kyle, how did I end up here?”
He meant it rhetorically, but his best friend shrugged, his smile softening as he tossed the phone back to John, who caught it easily.
“Got blown up, tried to kill yourself, made a Twitch account, went to therapy…”
John waved a hand, cutting Kyle off, as he snorted.
“Aye, that’ll do it,”
They went about their morning routine dancing around each other the way one does when they’ve lived with someone for a long time. The memory of the notification still made John’s face flush when he thought of it, but Kyle had softened his previous panic, and he felt sturdier on his feet. He was a grown man dammit, this was not going to throw off his schedule.
Simon groaned, rolling over and squinting at the clock. 4:00 am. It was better than last night at least. He rubbed his hands over his face, wincing as his fingers caught on the scars tugging on his lips and cheeks. The echo of gunfire still ricocheted in his ears, superimposed over whispers of an interrogator and shovels digging up loose soil from a new grave. He shuddered and rolled out of bed. No going back to sleep.
The routine of tea in a dark kitchen comforted him, and Simon’s shoulders slowly released, the ever-present thrumming of pain in his joints dying down to a manageable hum. He sat down, tugging his phone from his sweatshirt pocket, and settled in for an hour or so of mindless scrolling as the world woke up outside the window of the flat.
Several notifications awaited him from his streaming account, which he thumbed through mechanically. He was going to start a livestream later, and he typed out a brief announcement. Then something popped up that gave him a pause. Several people had tagged him in some kind of art post. He almost dropped his phone when he pulled it up with how quickly he yanked it toward his face.
It wasn’t as though Simon hadn’t seen people draw fanart of him before. But something about this piece made him pause. The person clearly had a lot of skill, just based on the use of color and lighting, but past that, the way they had drawn Simon made his stomach clench. His first thought was… pretty.
Not once in his life had Simon ever thought he was pretty. Not even before enlistment and all the shit that came after. The scars on his face burned, his knuckles clenching white around his phone.
Pretty.
Simone didn’t even think about it when he clicked the follow button on the artists page, sipping his tea as he scrolled through ‘Soap’s’ account. The sun rose without Simon counting the minutes for the first time in a long time, and he almost didn’t hear Price shuffle into the small kitchen.
“Mornin’,” he mumbled.
Simon grunted in return. Price has never been a morning person, even when he had been forced to be when he and Simon served together, but now, with a mostly-remote desk job and flexible hours, the man took advantage of it, and sometimes Simon wouldn’t even see him until noon.
Simon couldn’t complain though. Price was the reason he was still alive, all things considered. And he was a pretty good flatmate, if you didn’t mind the faint odor of cigars that permeated most of his furniture.
Soon enough, the silent morning routine ended, and Simon rolled his neck, depositing his teacup in the sink to wash later. Back in his bedroom, he moved slowly through a yoga routine that his PT seemed convinced would help his ruined shoulder and cracking knees, before sighing and digging around his unmade bed for his headphones, powering on his PC as he wandered past it, muscle memory taking over.
In his head though, the dramatic lighting and gentle brush strokes of his own masked face danced to the tune of P retty. Pretty. Pretty.