Prompt: Ghost And You Are The Only Survivors Of A Military Plane Crash. You Spend Weeks Alone In The

prompt: ghost and you are the only survivors of a military plane crash. you spend weeks alone in the wild together. (ns/fw)

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In the years you’ve worked as a flight attendant, you’ve never experienced a plane crash before. It’s exactly like what you would’ve expected.

Clear skies rapidly turn grey outside the tiny windows to your left and right; you notice it almost instantly because it casts a pall over the interior of the aircraft. It makes the small group of men that you’ve been travelling with sit up a bit straighter in their seats, only a few of them looking genuinely concerned. Military men often do; it’s in their nature to worry and fret. You feel it like a twinge in your gut, like something telling you that you don’t usually fly through dark clouds. 

The soft ding of the seatbelt sign comes on a handful of seconds later. The turbulence only a few moments after that.

Pilots are trained to avoid cumulonimbus clouds like they’re a harbinger of death (and they are). Even large airliners avoid crossing the path of a cumulonimbus. Your pilot should’ve known to divert and fly around the cloud, avoiding the possibility of flying through a thunderstorm altogether. The pilot’s voice crackles over the intercom for everyone to fasten their seatbelts and you notice distantly that his voice seems frazzled. 

Your hands grip the seat as you strap in. This is exactly the kind of scenario you’ve prepared extensively for, but in the face of it, your stomach tosses and turns. Practice can only hope to ape reality; it often falls short. 

From across the aisle, you lock eyes with the lieutenant in the skull mask that politely refused a beverage ten minutes ago. The plane jostles you violently in your seat as it passes through a rough patch of turbulence. Even the lieutenant, twice your size and rooted into his seat, his hands clamped around the arm rests, grunts when he’s rocked side to side. 

There’s a loud pop outside the aircraft and the plane teeters dangerously to one side. The bags in the overheads bash against the doors, the plastic squeaking under their weight. 

Someone screams. The other attendant sitting across from you is already shouting, “Brace! Brace! Brace!” The mantra bursts from his chest along with spittle and the singular, quivering note of fear. There’s not much more you can do but follow his lead, dropping your head to your knees and wrapping your arms around your legs.

Your stomach drops when the plane descends far too suddenly. You would’ve been pulled back against the wall if your arms weren’t wrapped around your legs. You have enough time to peek up briefly to see all of the other men assuming the same position, some with their heads pressed against the seat in front of them before the aircraft nosedives and there’s a sharp whistle in your ear and the lights flicker ominously in the cabin and something tears and tears and tears and—

Then it’s dark.

Your grip must have loosened because the world disintegrates after you hit your head. There’s only a faint buzz and something ice cold, something that grips you from the inside and slithers over your skin. The aftermath of a crash is so quiet for the devastation it brings.

The big one in the scary mask is the one who drags you from the wreckage, lifting you into his arms when you’re still too dazed to do more than whimper pathetically. Fear and pain and adrenaline have crumpled you up into a little ball. 

“Keep your eyes open,” he says, and maybe it’s a shout. His voice is so loud. When you open them, you nearly close your eyes instinctively when you see the gaping hole in the plane where it’s been torn apart. 

“Where are—” it hurts to speak, but you have no choice, “—the others…”

He doesn’t respond. That makes it worse. You slip your arms around his neck so he can hike you closer up his chest. Slung over his shoulder is a black duffle bag that he must have pulled from the overhead, or what’s left of them. When your head turns on a swivel, you startle at the sight of the other attendant still strapped in his seat, his neck snapped back at an odd angle. 

You turn your head away. 

“My leg hurts really bad,” you sob, fingers clutched in the sweat-matted fabric of your saviour’s shirt. 

He palms the back of your head and tips you just enough for you to meet his eyes. Something dark shutters over his face for a split second. If your eyes weren’t filled with tears, you might’ve noticed it. It passes fast though, too quick for you to register it in these conditions.

“‘Gonna be okay, sweetheart,” he says, gentler this time, rough-sounding like he’s not used to using that tone. “Gonna get us out of here and then I’ll check your leg. Just hang on to me.”

It’s hard to catalogue every moment because you drift in and out of consciousness. You feel the man shift you in his arms whenever he clambers down the side of the mountain your plane must have flown into. There’s debris from the wreckage scattered around the rocks, the other half of the plane not too far away. When your eyes blink open briefly, you see how decimated the other half is. 

There aren’t any other survivors. Only bodies. He doesn’t stop for them.

Far off from the wreckage, he sets you down onto the soft earth and rifles around in the bag he took. There’s a first aid kit with supplies that he uses to wrap your ankle, which is swollen and tender. The adrenaline crash is nearly more violent than the plane crash you just survived. It wracks through your body as the lieutenant strips your shoes and socks, gently manipulating your foot in his big hands. You notice he’s also lost the mask.

Ochre yellow and green plains spread outward from the mountains. You remember from the flight maps on board that you were somewhere over Mongolia, but the exact mountain range eludes you. This could be the Khangai or the Sayan or the Altai, but you have no way of knowing. 

“Is there a…a phone in the bag? How’s anyone gonna know we’re out here?” You sound helpless, smaller than you’ve ever sounded. 

He shakes his head. The tight ball of tension in the middle of your chest grows tighter. The thought that you’re stranded in the mountains in Mongolia, thousands of miles away from home and no way to get help is almost enough to send you into a panic attack. 

A hand cups under your chin to tilt your head up. His face up close is exquisite and haunting—weathered in the way that career military men often are, burn marks and old scars littered across the delicate skin, lips perpetually chapped, and a nose that looks like it’s been broken way more than once. You can’t look away. 

“Someone’ll be looking for us,” he says. It’s reassuring only because he says it like it’s a certain thing. “Don’t know if you saw who was on that flight roster. A lot of important men were supposed to arrive in Germany at twenty-one-hundred hours.”

You nod, tears still dribbling down your cheeks even when he swipes his thumb across to rub them away. He’s not wrong. There was a colonel on your flight after all. Dead now, hot corpse still steaming in the wreckage half a kilometre away, but he would’ve been important enough to warrant an immediate rescue. 

You go still under his touch. “You weren’t on the flight list.”

He shakes his head. “Never am.”

“But you were with them?” You remember someone on the flight addressing him by his rank. It was early on in the service, when you were still strapping down bags and doing cross-check, making sure everything was in place. But you remember, even then, seeing that there were more bodies on the plane than names on the list; you’d brought it up to the captain, but he’d brushed off your concerns. Maybe he knew the reason behind the lieutenant’s name being held off the passenger list. 

It’s all moot now anyway. 

“Can’t bring a ghost on a flight,” he says darkly, like it’s a joke. Like you’re in on it together. “Can’t put it on the roster at least. S’bad luck after all.”

It’s a monstrous joke at a time like this. Your life feels cracked in half and the scarred brute of a man that pulled you from the wreckage makes jokes like it happens to him every other day. When the sky splits later that night and pours out a lake’s worth of rain, it feels appropriate. You huddle with the lieutenant at the base of a densely branched tree and shake.

Five weeks in the mountains go by slowly. 

The shelter he builds is haphazard but meticulous, composed of various materials that Ghost scavenges from the plane wreck. A door becomes a makeshift roof. He makes you sit and wait as he collects dozens and dozens of branches, chopped down from the surrounding trees and fashioned into a lean-to. Padded with moss and leaves. 

“I can help with getting the leaves,” you protest when he catches you hobbling around and carries you back to the nest of blankets and tarps that he’d pulled from the plane. He goes back every so often to see what remains and what can be used. It’s the only time other than when he hunts that Ghost leaves you alone for even a second, preferring to be within arm’s length of you the rest of the time.

“You can help by sitting your ass down,” Ghost grunts without even looking up at you. 

You frown, fingers digging in the dirt by your feet. It’s a silly complaint but there’s never anything to do but wait. 

In the early morning hours, Ghost goes off and hunts for you, when the world is still quiet and the animals are still asleep. They’re sluggish when dawn still hasn’t peeled its pink belly off the surface of the world. Ghost comes back with a deer slung over his shoulders one week, his knife still protruding from its neck, and your stomach only twists a little bit. Not used to seeing where your meat comes from. 

There’s not much choice when you’re on your own in the elements. Every day, you expect to see a helo appear over the horizon, and you end each night crestfallen when it doesn’t. 

It’s not like you haven’t completed basic training, a prerequisite to applying as a military flight attendant, but admittedly it’s been several years and basic never taught you to hunt for your food. You did other things that seemed, at the time, inconsequential to your career path, like learning to rappel and how to wait an hour for your NCO to show up for PT in the morning. 

Even if your ankle hadn’t been badly sprained, you wouldn’t be much help. Ghost’s remarkably self-sufficient. It makes you question whether he’s done this before—whether he’s gotten stranded in the woods for weeks on end and had to learn to live hand-to-mouth. 

“Have you…where’d you learn all of this?” you ask him in the dead of night, when the wind is a shrill hiss through the trees and you cower close to him in your sleeping bag (also salvaged from the wreck, though his has a tear down the side of it).

Ghost is quiet for a moment. “All over the place. Been doing this for years, love; had to learn.”

“Anything ever like this?”

Even with the absence of his mask, it gets so dark at night that you can’t see his face. You can hear the wry smile that plays on his lips in his voice though. “I’ve had worse days.”

There’s a story there that you see like a fish darting under the water. Too quick for you to catch with your bare hands. 

You wake up with your cheek pressed against his pillowy chest most days. It’s embarrassing at first, but you learn to let it melt off you when you meet Ghost’s eyes and there’s nothing there but piercing blue. They root you in place most of the time but they never tell you to move. 

It takes a while before your ankle starts noticeably healing. In the intervening weeks, Ghost almost dotes on you, in a rough, untested sort of way. Like he doesn’t have much experiencing tending to another person besides himself for weeks on end. As the weeks drag on, it morphs into something unrecognizable, like a wounded animal healing wrong. 

It starts when Ghost insists on sharing sleeping bags. It’ll be easier for him to pull you close if something tries to drag you off in the night (and doesn’t that thought put you on the brink of a panic attack until he shushes and soothes you). It escalates when you make the mistake of tending to the meat hanging over the fire while he fiddles with the little radio he’d dragged back from the plane, and the look he gives you when you tell him that supper is ready borders on reverent. 

It gets even worse when he has you both strip your clothes off on a particularly cold and rainy night, wrapped around each other for warmth. 

“Sweetheart, you’re shaking,” you hear him rumble, big hand drawing a line down your back. You do tremble at that. “C’mon, get closer. Gonna warm you up.”

You wake up in the middle of the night when your ankle is starting to feel solid enough that you think you can manage to go off on your own to relieve yourself instead of waking Ghost up again. That’s the plan anyway. Before you’ve even managed to crawl all of six feet away from your sleeping bag, a rough hand pins you by your shoulder to the ground and the heavy, over two-hundred pound body of your companion drapes itself over you.

“Where the fuck do you think yer going?” Ghost snarls. 

For the first time in a week, there’s a moment of genuine fear. It’s like realizing for a split second that the animal you’ve let creep up behind you is a lot more dangerous than you thought it was. 

“I have to pee,” you whisper-hiss, heart still skittering in your chest.

He’s silent behind you while he mulls that thought over; you think maybe he’s still half-asleep, his body acting on instinct before his brain’s ready to take over. The tension only releases you when he finally picks himself up off you, but it’s immediately made worse when he insists on accompanying you into the woods. 

He doesn’t even turn around while you pull your underwear down and squat. Ghost’s eyes are bright in the dark, trained on you like it’s the thing that gives him purpose. 

Things change in the woods. There are people who are only one bad thing away from reverting to their neolithic mind; as the weeks go on, you see the way his eyes change when they fall on you, no longer detached but gluttonous. 

There’s a brown bear that slouches past your camp one day, sniffing around only because it’s curious, and Ghost all but completely obstructs your vision with how he shoves you behind him. He puffs up big when the bear gets too close, keeping you hidden until it snorts and ambles off, not interested in the pair of you. 

Do animals act like this? He curls you around him in sleep, legs tangled together. When you soak in the lake under the glare of the sun, he slips into the water and comes up behind you until his hands close around your waist and he tugs you closer to the edge, away from the deeper parts. It’s testament to how long you’ve been out on your own that you’re no longer unaccustomed to the feel of his hands on your bare flesh. 

His lips on your bare shoulder are a little less commonplace, but you only shiver and stare out at the mountains. 

Then one day, you look up into the sky away from the sun and there it is, a black dot on the horizon at first. You scream for Ghost, who’s skinning a fish on a damp log near you and start waving your arms wildly in the air, unbridled joy streaming out of you. He’s quick to pull his mask on when the chopper lands a few hundred yards away and two similarly dressed soldiers spill out. 

You ignore the stiffness in his body as he sits beside you in the chopper, pinning you against the side. Ignore the way he answers for you when the men start asking questions. 

What does it mean to come back worse?

“Wha’s that, love?”

“Trauma bonding,” you repeat, swallowing nervously. It’s months later, but the weeks on the mountain and the forest still haunt you. The real world seems flimsier now that you’re back in it, less real somehow. Here, no one hunts for their food. “The therapist said that we trauma bonded. And—and that’s why you won’t—”

Here’s where the words can’t seem to come out on their own. 

He sleeps in your bed these days—can’t stand to be more than a room away from you at any given time. Follows you into the bathroom when you need to clean up at the end of the day, crowding you into your too-small shower. The you from a month ago wouldn’t have been able to imagine inviting a six-foot-four soldier into your apartment, but—and here’s where your brain scrambles a bit to catch up—you didn’t invite him in. 

He lifts a brow. The mask comes off in your apartment, so you’re able to see the way his lips slip into something unimpressed. “Why I won’t what?”

You swallow. “You know. Leave.”

“Do you want me to leave, love?” 

That’s the crux of it. The heart of it. You really don’t. In the dark sometimes, if the wind rustles outside your window just right, shrill like those weeks in the forest and out on the open plains, your heart pounds in your chest until it grows so tight that you think it’ll just stop. 

“No,” you whisper in response to his question.

Most nights, you wake up drenched in sweat, still half in a dream where you turn your head and the other flight attendant is staring back at you with wide, empty eyes. Blood dribbling down from his head. Where a plane is ripped in half, grey metal strewn across a mountain and the valley below is a dark pit where you go to die. 

Then you roll over in your bed and Ghost is there, already awake and cupping a wide hand over your cheek, laying kiss after kiss across your face. Murmuring that it’ll be alright, that you’re safe. That he’s got you. 

His breath is hot on your skin.

You let him roll you over and spread your legs when he says those things. Let him be a bit filthy after being so kind to you in the woods. 

He spits on your pussy and rubs it in with a coarse thumb, chuckling when you yelp all breathlessly and squirm away. Sometimes when you fuck, he gets rough with you and slaps it, but he’s always tender with you after a nightmare, content to sooth you with his mouth on your pussy until you’re close to hyperventilating. 

“S’alright, sweetheart,” Ghost breathes, spearing you on his turgid length, barrel chest heaving when he finally crams it all in. Always a bit too big for you to take without crying. “I got you, I’ve got you. Not gonna let anything happen to you.”

It’s a new development, but it feels older than time. You could’ve let it happen in the woods and you might have, if no one had ever come. 

“Look at me, sweet girl,” he tuts when you turn your head to the side, holding your face in one hand until you have no choice but to stare at the bulk of him straining over you. He has shoulders like mountains that roll when he pushes into you. “Didn’t I say I’d take care of you?”

You don’t want to acknowledge what this is: that you found something in the woods and it followed you home.