Chapter Text
Simon wasn't in the hospital when Johnny woke up for the first time.
He was back at the base with Price when his phone rang with an unknown number. When he answered, the woman on the other end hesitated, as if she were just as thrown by the silence on his line as he was by hers. Then she spoke, her accent so thick it took Simon a second to stitch the sounds together, words rolling together in painful familiarity.
"Ma asked me to call you," she said, introducing herself as Johnny's sister.
Mary Callender told him Johnny had finally woken up. There was a brief, shaky beat on the line, "Stubborn bastard," she had said with a wet laugh, “Opened his eyes long enough to tell a nurse tae fuck off.”
Simon didn't recall much after that. He didn't even remember what he had been doing before the phone rang. Maybe filling out some reports for Price, or doing sudoku on paper to kill time. Price had driven him to the hospital, a four-hour ride cut down to two and a half in total silence. Simon couldn't remember most of the day, but he remembered still holding a pen in his hand when they arrived. Mary had taken the pen from his white-knuckled grip and given it to her son, whom Simon had only seen in a picture once or twice.
"Draw something nice for your uncle's friend, aye?" she told her son, Callum. The boy was smashing a bright plastic car into the edge of a hospital chair, the repetitive sound pounding in Simon's head like a gunshot.
Mary led the way into the intensive care unit, the heavy door cutting off the noise of the waiting room. Johnny was sleeping again when Simon finally saw him.
He stopped in the doorway.
Johnny didn't have a tube shoved down his throat anymore, nor the thick bandages covering half his face. His hair had been shaved in uneven patches, and one side of his face was swollen badly enough that Simon almost didn't recognize him.
Simon stared at him for a long moment, not knowing what to do.
Then Johnny's nose wrinkled in his sleep.
There he was.
Johnny always did that when Simon shifted too much in bed in the middle of the night. A little wrinkle there right before he'd start muttering half-formed curses into his pillow.
For the first time in weeks, Simon felt like his chest wasn't full of tar.
Mary sat with him for a moment, pulling a chair up by the bedside next to Simon. She looked quite a bit like Johnny; she had Johnny’s nose. The same stubborn line to her mouth. She was a heavy-set woman, soft but solid where her shoulder pressed against Simon's arm. Simon didn’t move away.
"Gets shot in the head and gets up," Mary murmured, her hand reaching out to gently adjust the blanket over Johnny's feet. "I dinna think he was comin’ back from this, Simon," she whispered, her voice watery, leaving Simon unsure what to say.
Mary had to leave the room eventually. Through the crack of the door, Simon could see her chatting with Price, Callum balanced on her hip. The little boy’s eyes were fixed on him, peering over his mom's shoulder with wide eyes, curious, probably because of the mask.
A man with the face of death, sitting by his uncle. Callum had the same shade of blue eyes and gave Simon a small wave.
Simon looked at the tiny hand, hesitated for a second, and then lifted two fingers in return.
Callum was missing a front tooth when he grinned.
Simon didn't realize when he fell asleep, lulled by the rain hitting the small window behind him, his back aching something terrible from being folded into the small plastic chair. When he opened his eyes, his balaclava was askew, the fabric slightly blocking his view. The room had gone dark, the door shut tight against the hallway noise. His neck protested as he lifted his head, but his gaze immediately sought out Johnny. He wanted to steal a moment, indulge in the quiet lie that he was waking up to Johnny, and Johnny was waking up to him —before the sight pinned him to the chair, utterly paralyzed.
Even in the dark, illuminated only by the streetlights outside, Johnny's baby blues were the brightest thing Simon had ever seen.
Johnny was a still, pale-looking thing, staring at Simon without blinking.
Simon felt caught in the stillness, his mind screaming at him to do something. Yet before he could move an inch, he saw Johnny's eyes roll back, sluggish and frightening, before he fell backward into what clearly wasn't a restful sleep.
Simon scrambled out of the chair, his hands hovering uselessly over Johnny's chest, terrified to touch him, terrified not to. He waited for the machines to start blaring, for the heart monitor to spike, but the steady, rhythmic beep didn't change. Johnny’s chest just rose and fell, heavy and quiet.
Simon didn't sit back down. He stood over the bed for hours, counting the seconds between Johnny's breaths, watching the streetlights slowly fade into a cold, miserable grey morning.
Just as the first pale light hit the windows, Johnny’s chest hitched. His eyelids fluttered, straining against whatever fog kept him down, until those bright eyes locked right onto Simon’s masked face, hovering inches away.
Slowly, Johnny’s hand twitched on the blanket, dragging his knuckles an inch across the sheets until they bumped against Simon’s heavy forearm.
"Sleep, ye daft bastard," Johnny croaked.
Simon let out a sound that might've been a laugh. He didn't move an inch. He just stared down at him through the eye-slits of his mask.
"Thought you'd died," Simon whispered back.
Johnny let out a tiny, breathless huff through his nose, a weak mimic of his old laugh. His eyes drifted shut again.
"Missed," he rasped eventually, words slurred, yet his fingers remained hooked in Simon's sleeve.
Simon stood there through the morning shift change, the tight knot in his throat finally breaking loose.
That first night bled into a second, and then a third, until weeks melted together and Simon lost track of the days entirely. Time became a blur, measured only by the changing shifts of the nurses and the rotation of the MacTavish family.
The first time Johnny's mother arrived, she didn't even flinch at the skull mask. Mrs. MacTavish, who insisted he call her Isobel, simply walked right up and pulled him into a hug that smelled faintly of white soap, Simon’s hulking frame folding awkwardly around her small, frail body. After that, he was part of the room's geography. Mary started leaving an extra styrofoam cup of lukewarm tea on the bedside table for him, and Price would occasionally clap a heavy hand on his shoulder before heading back to the base for a couple of days.
But as the initial fog of the injury slowly began to lift, the terrifying stillness of Johnny's first few days transformed into something much more exhausting to watch.
Johnny was twitchy. He had tremors that jerked his body to the side, and it looked like it took a monumental effort just to lie still against the sheets. Gaz couldn't stay in the room long when he visited, not when Johnny couldn't even keep his gaze straight without his eyes rolling somewhere else. He looked like he was fighting violently with his own body every second he was awake, and Simon couldn't look away.
Johnny had always been a thing of beauty when he was fighting.
Johnny’s mother would painstakingly wipe her son's mouth as she fed him spoonful after spoonful of whatever mash the hospital gave them. And they all ignored the moments when she took a second to wipe away her own tears.
"I did this for years when ye were a wee bairn," she'd snap defensively whenever Johnny had enough clarity to feel embarrassed.
Simon watched all of it.
The feeding. The washing. The endless parade of nurses adjusting blankets and medications.
Every time Johnny needed something, it was someone else's hand that answered.
Simon was just there. A massive, useless weight in a plastic chair.
Isobel had barely stepped out to take a phone call before a nurse rolled breakfast into the room.
Simon looked up as the tray crossed the threshold, and he was already standing.
He was out of that chair so fast it screeched against the linoleum, crossing the small space with a desperate urgency. Before the poor girl could even register the massive man descending on her, Simon’s large hands locked onto the edges of the plastic tray, snatching it right out of her grip.
"I've got it," Simon barked. It came out rough, his fingers white-knuckling the plastic as if she might try to deny him the only job he had left on this earth. "Leave it. I'll do it."
He didn't look back to see her flee the room.
He set the plastic tray over the bedside table, the hollow clink of the metal spoon loud in the quiet room. Simon pulled off his gloves, shoving them into his pockets, leaving his hands bare. He pulled his chair closer, his knees nearly brushing the edge of the mattress, and dipped the spoon into the bland, lukewarm mash.
Johnny's head leaned back heavily against the pillows, a familiar, hot flare of frustration cutting through the heavy fog in his gaze. He kept his eyes shut for a stubborn, defiant second, his jaw locked tight against the humiliation of it all. But as the spoon hovered near his chin, Johnny’s eyelids fluttered open to meet Simon's behind the mask. The tight, defensive line of his mouth softened just a fraction. He let out a low, defeated breath through his nose, mouth uncooperative for words often now, and parted his lips. He loathed the indignity of being fed like a toddler, and his ears flushed a faint, embarrassed red.
Johnny accepted each spoonful, and Simon brushed his thumb against Johnny’s wet mouth, smearing the mess away and licking his own finger clean afterward. Johnny’s ears turned a darker shade of red, spreading down to his neck, but he didn't look away, clinging to the sight of Simon.
By the time the bowl was half empty, Johnny seemed mostly out of it, his heavy eyelids drooping as his focus drifted away toward the rhythmic, dull hum of the rain against the windowpane. Yet his body, still jerky and uncooperative, seemed to calm down somewhat under the steady repetition. Maybe the animal part of his brain knew Simon was fighting alongside him now. That he had Johnny’s six.
Looking at Johnny's stubborn face, Simon thought he could do this forever; swallow every ounce of Johnny’s pride and carry it for him.
He didn’t realize until he scraped the last of the mash with the spoon and let Johnny lick it off that Isobel was back, sitting in the chair Simon usually occupied.
"The doctors say the shaking will settle," Isobel murmured, her thumbs mindlessly rubbing the shirt in her lap. "The confusion, too. The lad’s head just needs time to mend itself."
Simon didn't care either way.
Isobel seemed to know that as well. She pulled a pack of wet wipes from her bag and reached out, grabbing Simon's big, rough hands, gently wiping away the mash and spit smeared across them. She didn't mind the silent protest from the giant of a man, gripping his hands with a surprising strength, her brittle fingernails biting slightly into Simon's palms.
Johnny's eyes drifted down to their hands then, watching his mother's tiny, fragile fingers working over each of Simon's knuckles.
Simon wondered if, behind all that heavy fog, Johnny was already aware. Aware of how much he was loved, and how he had adamantly dragged Simon into being loved, too.
Before Johnny got shot, they didn't have a name for what they were.
Some days, Simon would find Johnny after an arduous day on the field and light his cigarette, standing arm-to-arm in the quiet dark. And some days, Johnny would sneak into Simon's quarters after everyone else had fallen asleep, slipping in hidden and soft into his bed.
Defining a relationship in the military just wouldn't do. They both knew that. People got killed, and burying what you'd call simple stress relief was never the same as carrying the urn of your loved one.
So, Simon and Johnny never talked about what they were, or what they could be if they ever made it out alive. Instead, they kissed breathless and bit their fingernails into each other's skin, holding one another closer until it felt like their bodies melded into one. Simon never said a word, but he knew by the way Johnny looked at him, eyes wide, mouth bitten red and slick beneath him, that Johnny wanted something more from him. Something Simon wasn't sure he could give, or if he was even capable of holding.
But then, perched on the small hospital chair, Simon felt like Atlas, with the world on his shoulders, capable of carrying whatever Johnny placed there.
Johnny's mother would call him "Johnny's boy" to whoever was on the other end of her phone. And when Mary's husband made his rare visits, Simon was introduced plainly as "Johnny's partner."
Simon, who had no place on this earth, no legal name, and no promised burial place, suddenly found himself belonging.
The day the doctors finally brought up the word discharge, the tiny hospital room felt smaller than ever.
Isobel was fussing over a mountain of pamphlets about long-term care facilities and physical therapy clinics scattered across her lap, her tired hands quietly worrying the paper. Mary was on the phone with her husband, hushing little Callum from afar.
Johnny ignored them entirely.
He was more lucid by then, sitting up in the bed, stubbornly forcing his left hand to grip a plastic spoon without the help of his useless, somewhat paralyzed right side. He was looking at Simon, and his eyes were so blue that the early spring sky outside the window couldn't even compete.
Simon stepped closer to the mattress, leaning over the guardrail. He laid his heavy head right next to Johnny's on the thin, crinkling hospital pillow and whispered like a secret meant only for the two of them.
"You're coming home with me, Johnny."
Johnny let go of the spoon, letting it clatter loudly onto the tray, and leaned his head against Simon’s cheek, where it scarred. It was the first smile that reached Johnny's eyes since everything.
Johnny’s mother was watching them when Simon reached out, his mask already hooked up over his nose, and took the leftover pudding cup from the tray.
Johnny immediately caught on, his smile twisting into a stubborn scowl as he tried to pull away. Simon wasn't having it. With one massive arm pressed across Johnny's chest, he easily wrestled the Scotsman down against the pillows, pinning him in place.
“Ye bastard,” Johnny bellowed. His left side flared up, flailing wildly in a frantic, one-handed counterattack that sent the bedside tray tipping sideways toward the floor. Simon’s knee shot up, perching hard against the edge of the mattress to catch the metal frame just before it crashed.
With a plastic spoon dangling loosely from his own teeth, Simon let out a laugh, catching himself off guard by the sound he rasped out. Keeping the other man locked down, Simon pulled the spoon from his mouth and shoved a massive dollop of pudding right past Johnny's yelling lips. Simon thought about licking it sweet from Johnny's mouth while the Scot was trapped helplessly beneath him.
Later that afternoon, after the room had finally quieted down, Simon saw the mountain of pamphlets dumped entirely into the small plastic bin by the door.
It felt like victory.