#oc is Stallard and she will show up after this section in like 6 seconds

[50cal-fullauto-astarion]

Had a dog-ass day so I self-indulged and started on a passion project I wasn’t planning to yet, just to cheer myself up. Simon Riley x F!Ranger OC, feat. more 21 year old Simon.

2003, May .

There’s little romance to bleeding out in Baghdad, but Lance Corporal Simon Riley, twenty-one, is poor-mouthed for it.

He knows it because he can feel it; the warm, living heart is screaming like a dying, thrashing animal in his chest. Pinned down in a mountain of rubble, snipers dancing around blast-barren windows of what used to be apartment buildings, and Simon was the dumbest son of a bitch on the ground, taking a round in the fleshy part of thigh.

Might not’ve ever made it to uni, but he’s not fucking ignorant, this flesh wound tis absolutely not a scratch.

Back slumping down the concrete barricade he’d been propped against, four hours out of water, down a good liter-and-a-quarter of blood, he figures he’s done-in. He’d started out shooting over the barricade, but his gun and all his extra clips ran dry. Wasn’t a shit shot either, even bleeding out.

Starts refusing water when the Welsh comms boy offers it, starts shoving the medic’s pack away from him when he tries to go for fresh bandages, and starts staring at Chris Merryweather’s body cooking on the tarmac fifteen meters out.

It’s weird. It’s bloody fucking weird. Merryweather was making shit jokes about fucking Simon’s mum this morning. Simon was ready to cave his head in with a trench shovel. Now he’s dead. Simon wants to go home.

Figures. He’d only signed up to get out, scrape something together for her and Tommy without the old man’s fucking stain on it. Now he wants terribly to be back in the water-damaged council house with mold inside the cabinet doors, where mum somehow managed to buy a thirdhand NES and Duck Hunt for him and Tommy one Christmas, when dad was in jail.

So fuckin’ stupid, they all three sat around and ate popcorn and soup noodles for dinner on the living room floor, and it was perfect.

That’s about when the sharp pops of sniper fire are blasted out of existence by the deep-throated scream of two diesel engines hitting turbo drive to shriek an ear-splitting whistle. The two tan beasts roar into sight, lumbering much more slowly than Simon had imagined, with crushingly heavy determination over debris to close in. Hell-bent monsters dragging themselves into the fray, black smoke thick as paint pouring over their hindquarters from the exhaust stacks.

There are Punisher skulls spray-painted on the doors, dripped while wet. Makes him think about a book he lost years ago—was about the ossuaries in Portugal. Makes him think about Tommy, too, in that goddamned mask, waking Simon in the middle of the night only to loom and breathe over him.