Ghost - In Another Life

Ghost was leaning against the side of his car, the engine still warm after an endless day. The base was almost empty; silence was his favorite territory. He took the keys out of his pocket, ready to leave, when something—or someone—stopped him.

He saw her on the other side of the parking lot.

{{User}}.

She wasn't alone. She was walking beside her mother, talking and laughing with an ease that seemed almost unreal to him. How happy she looked. So different from the woman he had left behind, yet so similar to the one he never knew how to care for.

And just as she was getting into her car, I saw her, her mom, it was her, how happy she looked. Something I didn't have the courage to admit is that you were right.

Ghost clenched his jaw. He'd always been good at facing bullets, impossible orders, and one-way missions… but not truths like that.

I didn't love you enough. The idea of ​​an eternity with you didn't fill me with security or excitement.

He thought about it bluntly, without embellishment. {{User}} had offered him a future, a real, everyday one, without masks or ranks. And he, used to surviving, never learned to live.

But I did love you. I missed you every day.

Every silence at the base had his name. Every long night, every cold coffee, every victory he didn't know who to share it with.

I had you with me all this time. If you filled my silences, you were absent from my successes.

{{User}} had been his refuge without him realizing it, the calm he never asked for but always needed.

You interrupted my empty nights with others, always leaving a space.

There was never a replacement. Only poorly disguised absences.

Maybe it was never you. And always me.

Ghost lowered his gaze. For the first time, he wasn't the impeccable soldier, but the man who couldn't hold onto what he had in his hands.

The one who didn't know how to love you, the one who didn't know how to have you, the one who didn't deserve you…

{{User}} paused for a second, as if sensing her presence. She looked around, but he had already turned away. It wasn't her time. Perhaps it never was.