The Agent & the Analyst, Part 8: The Hunter
Title: The Agent & the Analyst, Part 8: The Hunter
Words: 2700
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Jensen is a surly government analyst and Jared is the bodyguard that always smiles.
Notes: Part 8 of the bodyguard!verse. Also for the cottoncandy_bingo prompt Midnight.
Part 7
He hears voices. Muffled, faraway, indistinguishable noises flood his ears. Then he hears - and feels - a growing thump in his skull, heavy like a heartbeat just coming back to life.
Drawing a long breath, as though he hadn’t breathed in days, Jared tips himself up and opens his eyes. There are a dozen agents and crime scene analysts at work in the room … in Jensen’s living room.
The chorus of voices shoots through his brain, along with a fierce sharp ache. He puts his hand up to the side of his head and his fingers find a bandage just behind his ear.
“Heya, cowboy,” a taunting voice says before Jared’s eyes can focus on the man towering over him.
That’s confusing; Jared’s hardly ever met a man in his life who stands taller than him. Sluggishly, Jared glances around to realize he’s angled across the sofa with his feet still on the ground, one shoulder pressed awkwardly into the cushions.
“You back to the world of the living now?”
“How …?” Jared’s not even sure what all he wants to ask, what he should know.
The agent kneeling in front of him must know that because he’s smirking. “How what? How long have you been out? How much have we found? How much shit are you in?”
Jared blinks and suddenly the stubby nose and pointy chin comes into view as his eyes uncross. “Jacobs,” he mumbles, acknowledging the smug bastard Jared’s had to work alongside in various assignments in the recent past. They’d come through training together with a sick competitive streak that neither could lead for too long and was revived in the last few years.
Maybe Jacobs finally found the edge right now because he smirks and tsks. “Sleeping on the job. I think that’s a first class offense.”
Jared groans and forces himself up to sit. The motion creates pressure in his skull, right behind the bandage. He covers the gauze with his hand again and tries to take in the room. It’s still dark outside, but the power’s back up inside. One crime scene analyst is checking the front door lock, another is brushing fingerprint dust along the corner of the wall separating the living and dining rooms. A few suited agents are in the dining room talking closely together, a couple others can be seen further down the hall near the kitchen. In there, he can barely read the green digital numbers on the microwave, but he can see well enough that it’s one-something.
Aside from the crew and its work, nothing looks terribly out of the ordinary. Except that last he remembers is a dark evening, a noise in the hall, and that he was walking through the quiet rooms to find the source.
“How’d I end up on the couch,” Jared ends up asking.
“Clarke and I could only drag you so far.”
Jared glares at him and the guy laughs. Then he wonders where his partner - Clarke, the six-foot-two former professional weight-lifter who sits in the guest house while Jared sleeps - is now, or where the guy was back when he got clocked.
His mind is still too foggy to work through the right words so he remains quiet and tries to remember anything he can from the night before. It’s not much.
“You’re one big S.O.B. You been gaining weight while sittin’ on your ass and watching computer geeks geek out?”
That snaps him to attention, his pulse ratcheting up with worry over his assignment. “Where’s Jensen?” he mumbles on his way up to stand, but Jacobs forces him down to the couch along with Clarke now at his other side.
“You rest that concussion for a little bit longer while we get your statement,” Clarke says tightly.
As his brain comes back to full capacity, he realizes it’s not good that he was knocked out in the middle of a power outage. That his fellow agents swarmed onto the scene within a few hours and Clarke is now trying to maintain his position without answering the question.
“Where is he?” Jared asks, feeling his stomach tighten and his head pound again.
“Man, that boat has sailed,” Jacobs says.
As Jared glares at him, Clarke shuffles Jacobs away and mumbles, “Go check another room.” Once they’re left just the two of them, Clarke levels him with an assessing look. “I know you’ve got a bad knock on the head, but you should really think about what you’re saying out loud.”
“He’s not here,” Jared says. Knowing it doesn’t do anything to even out his anxiety. He failed. He walked away from Jensen in the study, after telling him - no matter how cute and jokingly - that he wouldn’t leave him alone when under threat. Now, Jared’s got himself a fat bump on the head and a missing body he had been charged with protecting.
It would hurt no matter what the assignment, but this is Jensen. It downright kills at the moment.
“No, he’s not,” Clarke acknowledges. He sits beside Jared and keeps his voice low so no one else in the room listens in. “And even badder news is that they’re all gonna be checking the tapes.”
Jared opens his mouth to deny, claim he has no clue what’s being said, but Clarke nods and it’s obvious he knows. He mentally curses himself for letting anything happen when there are a dozen cameras and mics set around the house. He knows what angle and room each can see and hear into; he set them up himself.
He should have known better, shouldn’t have let his feelings get in the way. He’s an adult, a professional adult who is capable of doing his job without the complications of Jensen’s face.
“Getting that close to your charge? What were you thinking?”
Jared shuts his eyes and tries to drum up a good explanation, but he doubts telling the truth will help anything. Clarke married his high school sweetheart of a cheerleader who’s popped out five kids since then. Jared knows the guy won’t understand the draw to someone as publicly introverted as Jensen, let alone one who is also a man.
“I get it, I do,” Clarke says, now sounding a bit empathetic. “We live in their back pockets, and we’re isolated from our lives to live theirs. But you can’t let a crush get in the way.”
A crush. His partner thinks he just has a crush on Jensen. This might really be okay.
“I know,” Jared admits, feeling like he’s covering all shades of guilt filling him up. “I didn’t mean for anything to happen.”
“Yeah, but still. You start looking at someone as more than a charge, and you miss shit.”
“Like a blackout being more than a bad fuse.”
Clarke nods. Then he knocks Jared’s knee. “I’m sure you’ll be harder on yourself than anyone else, anyway.”
He really will. He’ll beat himself up black and bloody until he has Jensen standing in front of him again. “Do we have any word?”
“Nothing,” Clarke answers, going into professional mode. “All channels have been quiet.”
“So we don’t know anything.”
Clarke looks to the back of the house where higher-class agents are still discussing something, and sighs. “No matter what the brass claim, we got nothing.”
*
No one thought it was a good idea, but Jared shows up at Jensen’s office building just after three in the morning. They’d all insisted he stay put, rest, and most of all not be involved in the investigation into Jensen’s disappearance. But none of those things were going to happen. Jared made sure of that with a fierce, determined look to his superior before the man nodded and let Jared leave the house.
The security desk had also been highly suspect of his appearance, but they let him in after he connected them to Clarke for verification. A small part of him wishes they hadn’t allowed his entrance, because he’s feeling dizzy with worry - and the concussion - to trail through the half-lit hallways. Inside Jensen’s office, Jared assesses every surface he can catch from the doorway.
It looks just the same is it did that first day he showed up for the assignment, when Jensen stared at him like he was a loon with two heads. It makes Jared laugh now to think of how much attitude Jensen had back then, or even how nervous he seemed with Jared’s new position in his life. A lot has changed in the last three months because lately Jensen just taunts or brushes off any of Jared’s cautions.
He wonders if anything would be different if he hadn’t left that room, but then his brain travels the possibilities that they’d both still be in trouble being attacked in the dark.
Hell, he sure hopes Jensen’s okay, that they grabbed him without any cause for harm.
Jared steps further into the room and sets his hand to the back of the chair he’s inhabited far too many times while Jensen tap-tap-taped his way through a full day’s work. He remembers the short period of time between that first kiss and just a couple weeks ago where they would shoot each other quick glances around Jensen’s monitor. Recently, they’d fallen into a comfortable routine where they weren’t always checking on the other, because it felt comfortable for Jared to be sitting across from Jensen while Jensen’s concentration on his work reinforced much of Jared’s attraction to him.
And then he’d failed to follow through on a threat. Had let his attraction get the better of them both for just one minute - the wrong minute - and Jared had wound up passed out on the couch and Jensen was … God only knew where and what shape he was in.
Jared sits behind Jensen’s desk and runs the mouse over its pad to bring the computer out of sleep mode. It’s locked, as always, with Jensen having controls set just so. Jensen’s a computer and technical genius, but Jared ain’t too shabby, so he taps out a few potential passwords, lightly smiling each time he thinks he has it, but he frowns when he gets nowhere.
The system beeps at him every time he tries a new word, and that only ramps up his frustration at the whole situation.
“Damnit,” he mutters into his hand, resting his elbow on the arm of the chair. He stares across the room and his eyes focus in on a framed picture atop a filing cabinet. It’s a few years ago in a nondescript grassy backyard and Jensen has his arm around a guy a little shorter than him and with a fair resemblance in the shape of his eyes and jaw. It’s Josh, Jensen’s brother, and they couldn’t look happier.
Jared remembers Jensen’s grave disappointment on not attending the festival with his brother’s family. In the end, Jared and Jensen ended up a mess on the floor, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad decision to keep Jensen inside.
He thinks of calling Jensen’s family - no, he should stop by, tell them in person that Jensen’s missing. Other agents likely took care of that, but Jared should be the one to do it. To let them know that it’s not just a case, but it’s personally relevant to Jared that Jensen be found without a single hair out of place or bones will break.
Before he seriously considers leaving, Jared digs through Jensen’s desk drawers and picks the ones that are locked to find case folders hanging in file racks. Nothing means anything to him at first glance, but they should get the AnonOps files to someone to comb them over.
He puts things back into place, resets the locked drawers, and nudges the keyboard tray back into place, and that’s when he sees it: the blinking light on Jensen’s phone signalling a voicemail. The log says the missed call is Jensen’s cell and Jared has to wonder if it’s the kidnappers making demands or other pronouncements. They should’ve called any other number than Jensen’s - especially his office - but criminals don’t always follow patterns, no matter how many of them Jared has realized over the years.
Jared tests his brain - Jensen punches out five keys every time he checks his phone, and Jared has a vague memory of the roundabout movements of Jensen’s hand as he does it. Upper right-side then down, up-left, and down to the left again.
It takes five tries, but Jared locks it in with 30178. As the voicemail system runs its spiel, Jared rolls his eyes and sighs. “Jesus, Jensen, can you be more obvious?” he mutters then thinks about all the security measures he’ll teach Jensen once they’re back in one spot together. “My grandmother knows not to use her birthday, you idiot.”
“I woke up ten minutes after they knocked me out ...” the voicemail is saying in a rush and it takes another full sentence until Jared sits up and realizes it’s Jensen.
“My fucking face. They hit me right in my face. I’m gonna kill ‘em … if I can ever feel my arms again, or get out of here, or whatever.” There’s a rough sigh then Jensen’s voice drops down, sounding more conceding to the situation than like a fighter. “I woke up in the back of an SUV with my arms tied behind my back. I’m in some generic warehouse now, but it’s over the river and through the woods, and if you laugh at me for that then I’m hitting you instead.”
Jared laughs, emotion bubbling in chest, because he can perfectly hear Jensen’s angry inflection and envision the shaking head and rolling eyes that would likely follow that.
“But it’s true,” Jensen continues with a huff. “We went through some wooded area for about eight minutes and came out to a clearing with an abandoned warehouse. I don’t know where it is exactly, but we went southwest into the forest and when they dragged me out of the back of the truck, I saw Orion’s belt back to the northeast where we came from.”
Jared gets up from the desk and keeps the receiver to his ear, uncaring for how it drags the phone base across the surface and dumps things to the floor. When he looks out the window, he can’t make out many constellations, but after a long look and listening to Jensen ramble more about how pissed off he is about his nose, Jared squints to spy three little stars lined up far off to the right of the sky.
“They’re wearing ski masks, or else I’d go into excruciating detail as to every mole and pimple and their stupid faces. They’re smart enough to do that, but not smart enough to take my phone? Idiots.”
Jared laughs again and bites his lower lip, wanting so badly to see Jensen. While he’s glad he’s a secret service agent who knows enough to be close to this case with the power of the government a few phone calls away, he also wishes he didn’t know that a good percentage of kidnappings don’t end well. Especially when they’ve got a few hours head start.
Still, when there’s an abrupt silence on the voicemail, Jared firmly says, “Jensen, we’ll find you,” as if it’ll comfort Jensen. It helps Jared a little.
Jensen clears his throat and mumbles, “Whatever happens, thanks. For watching over me and being a good guy.” Quickly, Jensen says, “Gotta go now,” and the message ends.
Jared races out of the room because he has to go now, too. He’s got phone lines to trace and cell towers to track. Not to mention a river to cross and woods to search before he finds the right angle Jensen had been at to see The Hunter in the sky. Then he’s gonna beat some ski masks bloody and save the day.
It’s his job, after all.
Part 9
Words: 2700
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Jensen is a surly government analyst and Jared is the bodyguard that always smiles.
Notes: Part 8 of the bodyguard!verse. Also for the cottoncandy_bingo prompt Midnight.
Part 7
He hears voices. Muffled, faraway, indistinguishable noises flood his ears. Then he hears - and feels - a growing thump in his skull, heavy like a heartbeat just coming back to life.
Drawing a long breath, as though he hadn’t breathed in days, Jared tips himself up and opens his eyes. There are a dozen agents and crime scene analysts at work in the room … in Jensen’s living room.
The chorus of voices shoots through his brain, along with a fierce sharp ache. He puts his hand up to the side of his head and his fingers find a bandage just behind his ear.
“Heya, cowboy,” a taunting voice says before Jared’s eyes can focus on the man towering over him.
That’s confusing; Jared’s hardly ever met a man in his life who stands taller than him. Sluggishly, Jared glances around to realize he’s angled across the sofa with his feet still on the ground, one shoulder pressed awkwardly into the cushions.
“You back to the world of the living now?”
“How …?” Jared’s not even sure what all he wants to ask, what he should know.
The agent kneeling in front of him must know that because he’s smirking. “How what? How long have you been out? How much have we found? How much shit are you in?”
Jared blinks and suddenly the stubby nose and pointy chin comes into view as his eyes uncross. “Jacobs,” he mumbles, acknowledging the smug bastard Jared’s had to work alongside in various assignments in the recent past. They’d come through training together with a sick competitive streak that neither could lead for too long and was revived in the last few years.
Maybe Jacobs finally found the edge right now because he smirks and tsks. “Sleeping on the job. I think that’s a first class offense.”
Jared groans and forces himself up to sit. The motion creates pressure in his skull, right behind the bandage. He covers the gauze with his hand again and tries to take in the room. It’s still dark outside, but the power’s back up inside. One crime scene analyst is checking the front door lock, another is brushing fingerprint dust along the corner of the wall separating the living and dining rooms. A few suited agents are in the dining room talking closely together, a couple others can be seen further down the hall near the kitchen. In there, he can barely read the green digital numbers on the microwave, but he can see well enough that it’s one-something.
Aside from the crew and its work, nothing looks terribly out of the ordinary. Except that last he remembers is a dark evening, a noise in the hall, and that he was walking through the quiet rooms to find the source.
“How’d I end up on the couch,” Jared ends up asking.
“Clarke and I could only drag you so far.”
Jared glares at him and the guy laughs. Then he wonders where his partner - Clarke, the six-foot-two former professional weight-lifter who sits in the guest house while Jared sleeps - is now, or where the guy was back when he got clocked.
His mind is still too foggy to work through the right words so he remains quiet and tries to remember anything he can from the night before. It’s not much.
“You’re one big S.O.B. You been gaining weight while sittin’ on your ass and watching computer geeks geek out?”
That snaps him to attention, his pulse ratcheting up with worry over his assignment. “Where’s Jensen?” he mumbles on his way up to stand, but Jacobs forces him down to the couch along with Clarke now at his other side.
“You rest that concussion for a little bit longer while we get your statement,” Clarke says tightly.
As his brain comes back to full capacity, he realizes it’s not good that he was knocked out in the middle of a power outage. That his fellow agents swarmed onto the scene within a few hours and Clarke is now trying to maintain his position without answering the question.
“Where is he?” Jared asks, feeling his stomach tighten and his head pound again.
“Man, that boat has sailed,” Jacobs says.
As Jared glares at him, Clarke shuffles Jacobs away and mumbles, “Go check another room.” Once they’re left just the two of them, Clarke levels him with an assessing look. “I know you’ve got a bad knock on the head, but you should really think about what you’re saying out loud.”
“He’s not here,” Jared says. Knowing it doesn’t do anything to even out his anxiety. He failed. He walked away from Jensen in the study, after telling him - no matter how cute and jokingly - that he wouldn’t leave him alone when under threat. Now, Jared’s got himself a fat bump on the head and a missing body he had been charged with protecting.
It would hurt no matter what the assignment, but this is Jensen. It downright kills at the moment.
“No, he’s not,” Clarke acknowledges. He sits beside Jared and keeps his voice low so no one else in the room listens in. “And even badder news is that they’re all gonna be checking the tapes.”
Jared opens his mouth to deny, claim he has no clue what’s being said, but Clarke nods and it’s obvious he knows. He mentally curses himself for letting anything happen when there are a dozen cameras and mics set around the house. He knows what angle and room each can see and hear into; he set them up himself.
He should have known better, shouldn’t have let his feelings get in the way. He’s an adult, a professional adult who is capable of doing his job without the complications of Jensen’s face.
“Getting that close to your charge? What were you thinking?”
Jared shuts his eyes and tries to drum up a good explanation, but he doubts telling the truth will help anything. Clarke married his high school sweetheart of a cheerleader who’s popped out five kids since then. Jared knows the guy won’t understand the draw to someone as publicly introverted as Jensen, let alone one who is also a man.
“I get it, I do,” Clarke says, now sounding a bit empathetic. “We live in their back pockets, and we’re isolated from our lives to live theirs. But you can’t let a crush get in the way.”
A crush. His partner thinks he just has a crush on Jensen. This might really be okay.
“I know,” Jared admits, feeling like he’s covering all shades of guilt filling him up. “I didn’t mean for anything to happen.”
“Yeah, but still. You start looking at someone as more than a charge, and you miss shit.”
“Like a blackout being more than a bad fuse.”
Clarke nods. Then he knocks Jared’s knee. “I’m sure you’ll be harder on yourself than anyone else, anyway.”
He really will. He’ll beat himself up black and bloody until he has Jensen standing in front of him again. “Do we have any word?”
“Nothing,” Clarke answers, going into professional mode. “All channels have been quiet.”
“So we don’t know anything.”
Clarke looks to the back of the house where higher-class agents are still discussing something, and sighs. “No matter what the brass claim, we got nothing.”
*
No one thought it was a good idea, but Jared shows up at Jensen’s office building just after three in the morning. They’d all insisted he stay put, rest, and most of all not be involved in the investigation into Jensen’s disappearance. But none of those things were going to happen. Jared made sure of that with a fierce, determined look to his superior before the man nodded and let Jared leave the house.
The security desk had also been highly suspect of his appearance, but they let him in after he connected them to Clarke for verification. A small part of him wishes they hadn’t allowed his entrance, because he’s feeling dizzy with worry - and the concussion - to trail through the half-lit hallways. Inside Jensen’s office, Jared assesses every surface he can catch from the doorway.
It looks just the same is it did that first day he showed up for the assignment, when Jensen stared at him like he was a loon with two heads. It makes Jared laugh now to think of how much attitude Jensen had back then, or even how nervous he seemed with Jared’s new position in his life. A lot has changed in the last three months because lately Jensen just taunts or brushes off any of Jared’s cautions.
He wonders if anything would be different if he hadn’t left that room, but then his brain travels the possibilities that they’d both still be in trouble being attacked in the dark.
Hell, he sure hopes Jensen’s okay, that they grabbed him without any cause for harm.
Jared steps further into the room and sets his hand to the back of the chair he’s inhabited far too many times while Jensen tap-tap-taped his way through a full day’s work. He remembers the short period of time between that first kiss and just a couple weeks ago where they would shoot each other quick glances around Jensen’s monitor. Recently, they’d fallen into a comfortable routine where they weren’t always checking on the other, because it felt comfortable for Jared to be sitting across from Jensen while Jensen’s concentration on his work reinforced much of Jared’s attraction to him.
And then he’d failed to follow through on a threat. Had let his attraction get the better of them both for just one minute - the wrong minute - and Jared had wound up passed out on the couch and Jensen was … God only knew where and what shape he was in.
Jared sits behind Jensen’s desk and runs the mouse over its pad to bring the computer out of sleep mode. It’s locked, as always, with Jensen having controls set just so. Jensen’s a computer and technical genius, but Jared ain’t too shabby, so he taps out a few potential passwords, lightly smiling each time he thinks he has it, but he frowns when he gets nowhere.
The system beeps at him every time he tries a new word, and that only ramps up his frustration at the whole situation.
“Damnit,” he mutters into his hand, resting his elbow on the arm of the chair. He stares across the room and his eyes focus in on a framed picture atop a filing cabinet. It’s a few years ago in a nondescript grassy backyard and Jensen has his arm around a guy a little shorter than him and with a fair resemblance in the shape of his eyes and jaw. It’s Josh, Jensen’s brother, and they couldn’t look happier.
Jared remembers Jensen’s grave disappointment on not attending the festival with his brother’s family. In the end, Jared and Jensen ended up a mess on the floor, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad decision to keep Jensen inside.
He thinks of calling Jensen’s family - no, he should stop by, tell them in person that Jensen’s missing. Other agents likely took care of that, but Jared should be the one to do it. To let them know that it’s not just a case, but it’s personally relevant to Jared that Jensen be found without a single hair out of place or bones will break.
Before he seriously considers leaving, Jared digs through Jensen’s desk drawers and picks the ones that are locked to find case folders hanging in file racks. Nothing means anything to him at first glance, but they should get the AnonOps files to someone to comb them over.
He puts things back into place, resets the locked drawers, and nudges the keyboard tray back into place, and that’s when he sees it: the blinking light on Jensen’s phone signalling a voicemail. The log says the missed call is Jensen’s cell and Jared has to wonder if it’s the kidnappers making demands or other pronouncements. They should’ve called any other number than Jensen’s - especially his office - but criminals don’t always follow patterns, no matter how many of them Jared has realized over the years.
Jared tests his brain - Jensen punches out five keys every time he checks his phone, and Jared has a vague memory of the roundabout movements of Jensen’s hand as he does it. Upper right-side then down, up-left, and down to the left again.
It takes five tries, but Jared locks it in with 30178. As the voicemail system runs its spiel, Jared rolls his eyes and sighs. “Jesus, Jensen, can you be more obvious?” he mutters then thinks about all the security measures he’ll teach Jensen once they’re back in one spot together. “My grandmother knows not to use her birthday, you idiot.”
“I woke up ten minutes after they knocked me out ...” the voicemail is saying in a rush and it takes another full sentence until Jared sits up and realizes it’s Jensen.
“My fucking face. They hit me right in my face. I’m gonna kill ‘em … if I can ever feel my arms again, or get out of here, or whatever.” There’s a rough sigh then Jensen’s voice drops down, sounding more conceding to the situation than like a fighter. “I woke up in the back of an SUV with my arms tied behind my back. I’m in some generic warehouse now, but it’s over the river and through the woods, and if you laugh at me for that then I’m hitting you instead.”
Jared laughs, emotion bubbling in chest, because he can perfectly hear Jensen’s angry inflection and envision the shaking head and rolling eyes that would likely follow that.
“But it’s true,” Jensen continues with a huff. “We went through some wooded area for about eight minutes and came out to a clearing with an abandoned warehouse. I don’t know where it is exactly, but we went southwest into the forest and when they dragged me out of the back of the truck, I saw Orion’s belt back to the northeast where we came from.”
Jared gets up from the desk and keeps the receiver to his ear, uncaring for how it drags the phone base across the surface and dumps things to the floor. When he looks out the window, he can’t make out many constellations, but after a long look and listening to Jensen ramble more about how pissed off he is about his nose, Jared squints to spy three little stars lined up far off to the right of the sky.
“They’re wearing ski masks, or else I’d go into excruciating detail as to every mole and pimple and their stupid faces. They’re smart enough to do that, but not smart enough to take my phone? Idiots.”
Jared laughs again and bites his lower lip, wanting so badly to see Jensen. While he’s glad he’s a secret service agent who knows enough to be close to this case with the power of the government a few phone calls away, he also wishes he didn’t know that a good percentage of kidnappings don’t end well. Especially when they’ve got a few hours head start.
Still, when there’s an abrupt silence on the voicemail, Jared firmly says, “Jensen, we’ll find you,” as if it’ll comfort Jensen. It helps Jared a little.
Jensen clears his throat and mumbles, “Whatever happens, thanks. For watching over me and being a good guy.” Quickly, Jensen says, “Gotta go now,” and the message ends.
Jared races out of the room because he has to go now, too. He’s got phone lines to trace and cell towers to track. Not to mention a river to cross and woods to search before he finds the right angle Jensen had been at to see The Hunter in the sky. Then he’s gonna beat some ski masks bloody and save the day.
It’s his job, after all.
Part 9