ir vestido de gris 1/5
ir vestido de gris 1/5
Losers, comic!verse
pairings: somewhat cougar/jensen. (it's practically canon anywho)
warnings: mostly off screen violence, dirty talk, bad spanish and swearing (like a motherfucker)
summary: At first he figures it's just a sex thing. Only, he's not even sure that they are actually fucking.
Beta'd by the lovely choasangel - though any remaining mistakes are very likely mine.
At first he figures it's just a sex thing. Just physical release and it's those two that have gravitated together because Pooch is so spoken for and you'd have to be a suicidal masochist to let Roque near your junk.
So he was okay with that. Well, not okay okay, but he kinda got it. Only, after stealthily spying casually observing he's not even sure that they are actually fucking.
Which might actually be worse.
Because if what Clay is seeing isn't two guys letting off steam, it's two Spec Ops Soldiers falling in love.
What makes the whole situation especially fucked up is that Clay is pretty sure the two don't even realise what they're doing.
Clay takes to calling it 'this thing' in his head, because anything else is going to be admitting things that Clay has gotten very good at ignoring.
Clay is pretty sure this thing is going to end badly.
It kind of sneacked up on him in a way he's no longer used to.
Quiet and stealthy. Like a sniper. Sneaky and completely unexplainable. Like a hacker.
Son of a bitch, whatever the situation between the two, Clay is sure it's heading towards something ugly.
Cougar's too territorial,
(Jensen flirts with everything, hell, he flirts with machinery)
and too damned good with his rifle.
Jensen can ruin lives just as effectively and thoroughly with only a computer.
(Clay had seen what the hacker did to his sister's ex - "People always underestimate the geek." Jensen had claimed, tapping his chest like he was Tarzan - Clay had laughed at the time, but he's been learning the truth in Jensen's cheesiness.)
Jensen comes into the team after an interesting altercation with his previous CO. Clay hasn't got the full details because, like most of Jensen's files, it's been mostly and mysteriously deleted, but the wake of ridiculousness and insubordination the hacker has left behind him makes Clay eager to mould the guy into a Loser.
Of course, Jensen goes about everything backwards.
Pooch, he manages to piss off the second week he's there. (He fixes that over the next month with three illegal acts, two frowned upons and a stolen tank - all of which Clay knows nothing about, so don't bother asking)
Roque seems to actually like the kid. Or he tolerates him exceptionally well. It's hard to tell with Roque, but Jensen is suspiciously free of knife holes so Clay figures something has been worked out between the two and chalks it up as a win.
And Cougar. Well, Jensen and Cougar get drunk the first weekend. Then they spend most of their first offical mission talking, well, Jensen talks about four times as much as Cougar, but the sniper actually plays along with him, and when their first big leave comes up Cougar flys off to Mexico, like he always does, but this time Jensen follows him like a little stray puppy.
They come back three weeks later, Cougar's a little darker and actually looks a little relaxed. Jensen's an interesting shade of red, has a black eye, tells increasingly wild stories about accidently insulting people's mothers while misusing the word 'cheese' and is still following Cougar around like a pup.
I should stop this thing, he thinks when Cougar laughs at something Jensen is saying to him and Pooch nearly kills them all by swerving off the berm at a break-neck speed.
It's their second mission since they added the loud (clothing, words, personality) hacker to the team but it's the first time any of them have heard Cougar spontaneously break into loud laughter.
When they realise they aren't going to die (Pooch's driving skills are not to be scoffed at - even if it's his fault they might be crashing) Cougar's laugh turns into the quiet chuckle they're all used to, Jensen cackles in a decidedly juvenile manner, Roque hits Pooch's shoulder harder than neccessary and Pooch sheepishly looks at everyone and tells Cougar off for startling the shit out of him.
I should stop this thing, he thinks when he finds them knocking over furniture wrestling, while Jensen yells in spectacularly terrible spanish.
Pooch catches sight of the two, Jensen's yelling "El, elaaah, aah, rom-per-se el...? Fuck I can't, I don't remember!" while Cougar sits on his back and twists his arm, all Pooch does is laugh and enquire about whether or not Jensen has a safeword.
(it's Quesa.. Wait. No, Queso!)
Clay lets it slide because Jensen's spanish is terrible, Cougar's teaching tactics are surprisingly effective and mainly because he can't think how to word his order for them to stop.
He does get Pooch alone to bitch about it though
"They're making googly eyes at each other."
Clay is pretty sure he shouldn't have started his arguement with the term 'googly eyes'.
"Colonel, you could say you and Roque do that."
"What? No!"
"Where's Roque right now?"
Clay doesn't even have to think about it. "In the gym, we'll probably be sparring in an hour or two."
"See? Googly eyes!"
"That's different, he's my SIC." Somehow Clay is on the defensive. How the hell did his calm sensible arguement turn to this?
"GOOGLY EYES!" Pooch shouts, actually raising his hands in the air like he's a one man mexican wave, and walks off cackling to himself.
That's it. Clay is putting 'googly eyes' on the list of words they're not allowed to use anymore. Right below BFF.
Jensen and Cougar go missing in Georgia and turn up a month later in a maximum security prison. Clay moves heaven and hell (and uses the dirty emails of a senator and calls in every fucking favour he's ever accumlated) but it's still another month before the paperwork comes through for an exchange.
I should've stopped this thing, he thinks for the barest second when the cell door opens.
The cell is dark and Jensen's crouched over something laying in the floor.
jesus
Clay realises it's Cougar on the ground as Jensen bolts upright, holding himself in a loose stance, palms upraised in the universal lie of 'I'm harmless'.
He's blinking at the corridor light and babbling in a low pleading voice.
"Listen, I know I was shouting alot, I was very noisy, but my buddy, there's something wrong with him. He's sick, or something. He's all feverish and, I swear this isn't a trap, he won't wake up. You gotta take him to a hostpital, fix him up. I swear, I'll. I'll behave" - He says the word like its the worst thing he's ever said - "Just. Just let him get better, okay?"
The guard enters the room and Clay feels the bitter feeling of pride mixing with shame, that they've made all the guards jumpy of them, that they've held strong, that he's let them stay here for so long - admittedly, he's been as quick as he possibly could, but it's not been fucking quick enough.
A single day would not have been quick enough.
Jensen's body language subtly changes as they come closer, from loose non-threatening to preparing to lash out at the slightest provocation. Clay can't quite figure out why Jensen's so jumpy with Clay here, but as the hacker starts talking again - hands raising up slowly as he backs up - Clay realises he's lost his glasses. Making him effectively blind.
mother fuckers
"It's okay, I'm just backing up against the wall, see? Out of the way, see my hands? I'm not trying anything, just help him. Please?"
"Jensen."
"Colonel?" He squints at them, as if he looks hard enough one of the blobs in front of him is going to suddenly shout BEHOLD! YOUR COLONEL!. "What's going on, Colonel."
"Prisoner exchange." Because, they've got an audience, and at it's barest minimum, that's what this is.
Jensen obviously gets it because he swallows and looks like he wants to ask the going price for two non existant combatants in a country they're not supposed to be in.
Clay's not ready to discuss prices, or make jokes, there's a prison guard whose eagerly listening to their exchange, but more importantly Cougar hasn't fucking moved since he got here.
"Does this mean I get my glasses back now?" He says it lightly, picking the 'make light of it' way, because that's what Jensen does.
"You took his glasses?" Goddammit, Clay had figured on Jensen losing them while being captured, he whirls on the guard, who stammers,
"He stabbed a guard with them! We had to!"
There's a snort from the corner of the cell.
"Guy had grabby hands." It's said in the fakest light voice Clay's ever heard and Jensen does a little duck and hop as he speaks, like he's trying to dodge an unseen but expected blow.
The guard smiles a watery smile and Clay thinks about hitting him until he has splinters of the guard's skull in his knuckles.
The flight home is long and quiet, Cougar still hasn't woken up from his surgery and Jensen alternates between pacing up and down the plane and brooding over the unconcious Cougar, sitting next to him, head on the makeshift bed, forehead pushed up against Cougar's shoulder.
If it had been anyone else Clay might've worried about Cougar waking up and trying to kill whoever was touching him - they'd all learned that lesson over the last couple of years - but there was a level of familiarity in the way Jensen rested against Cougar, Clay guessed it wouldn't be the first time the sniper had woken up with Jensen touching him.
Besides, Clay wasn't sure he'd be able to tear the hacker away without a serious and unnecessary fight.
On leave they disappear into South America, far more thoroughly than ever before. Clay thinks fuck this thing, I'm just going to kill them.
He spends the week after they're supposed to be back calling every south-of-the-border contact he has. (and no, he won't admit to ringing a random number in Sao Paulo and asking if they had two complete fuckheads in the house)
He leaves increasingly profane messages on both of their phones. (wherever the fuck you are, you fucks are fucking late, for fuck's sake.)
And he definitely isn't worrying. Except that he is.
Pooch is the only one not freaking out, he just laughs softly and says 'They're on island time, man, probably don't even know what day it is', and okay, Pooch is the only one of them that has actually been on one of their trips, so he probably knows best. Clay still sees him checking his phone when he thinks no ones watching.
Roque says he doesn't care. (Well, he actually says 'fuck them.') But from the looks of the techs in command have been giving him, Roque's spent alot of his 'free' time threatening harrassing the button pushers into discreetly finding where the fuck their two missing members are.
They've only just been released from hospital - Clay's pretty sure it was all above board, the amount of fucking times that Jensen's screwed with his charts and talked his doctors into letting him go early has made Clay super fastidious about checking those sorts of things.
He should've made them stay in the country, maybe just cuffed them to their bunks.
They had seemed okay, head-wise, and it had seemed a great idea to let them go. They had the leave coming and no one really wanted to throw them straight back into work.
Now Clay wondered whether he wanted them to be okay because it was more convenient.
He's still beating himself up about it (arguing about what he would've done differently, he maybe even promised not to date crazy women anymore - although many would argue that the women he dates aren't crazy when he starts dating them - plus he's met a pretty nice EOD Specialist named Emma who seems really stable, so maybe the promise was moot anyway) when they walk in.
Bags slung over their shoulders, Jensen attempting to talk while laughing. They look good, healthy, Clay thinks, comparing them to the image of them from before. Jensen unnaturally still, Cougar stoking a fire of anger in him, the kind of rage that comes from not being at fault for what happened but still feeling fucking guilty for it.
Clay lets them put their bags down before walking over and tearing them both new ones. They both listen, look suitably chastised, nod in all the right places but neither say a word. Clay worries that it's too early and wonders if he should send them back until Jensen and Cougar come back.
A week later a remix of all the messages he left on Jensen's phone goes around the base. Everywhere Clay goes, his voice is some cherry's ringtone or being used in cadence.
When Clay is finished killing them, he's going to be really proud.
The first time Clay thinks maybe this thing isn't so bad comes after one of their shitty jobs. One of those 'simple in and out' jobs that turn into a clusterfuck that everyone feels bad about. They've been holed up in a tiny room on base, it's dirty but so are they, and everyone's sacked out on the little space they've been given. Bone tired and on edge.
They get maybe an hour and a half before Cougar's breath picks up, the room's tiny, they're practically on top of each other and are all annoyingly attuned to each other.
All of them had nightmares, terrors, whatever-the-fuck you wanted to call them, and while Roque's rare ones tended to make any witnesses want to change their names and flee the country, since Georgia especially, Cougar's just happened to be the worst and most frequent.
He'd been waking up every hour or so, not yelling or screaming, just a sharp intake of breath, fast panting as he came down from whatever hell his mind had created for him and then finally a grunt of annoyance, an almost apology for something none of them will mention.
Finally the sniper, awake again after a pitiful twenty minutes, started to get up - he'd skulk around the barracks and scare the living daylights out of whoever was on nightwatch. In the morning he'd be tired (so fucking exhausted) but at least he wouldn't have that paranoid look of someone being hunted.
Just as he flipped his covers aside Jensen rolls over - eyes still closed he could almost be still asleep - and reaches out a hand to stop him.
Cougar stills and the hacker starts talking.
At first he doesn't seem to be talking about anything particular, just throwing words together in the vaguest semblence of sentences. But then, all of them 'asleep' but listening in the pitch black, his low, quiet voice starts painting a picture of a beach that he and Cougar had apparently been to.
Shining white sand and the rolling waves that soaked lazily into it, the clear ocean that slowly changed into the brightest of blues as it stretched away from the coast.
He talks for ages, using every word he has to describe the air (so drenched in sun you could almost taste summer on the wind),
the family with the chubby, laughing baby (bright pink ice-cream cones, little hands leaving sticky prints across the white beach towel as the mother and father giggled and gently wiped dribbling ice-cream away with soft wet tissues),
the elaborate sand castles (wet sand dribbled into tall spires that the waves couldnt reach)
made by the girls in blue bikinis (silly shaped sunglasses perched on the ends on their noses, sand between their fingers as they moulded the sand into something grander),
wide smiled, acne faced boys (flexing their skinny arms for the girls and throwing handfuls of colourful - red - pink - purple - peach - shells at each other.)
He must have stopped sometime, because when Clay wakes the kid is asleep, half out of his sleeping bag stretched across the space between him and Cougar, but he doesn't remember hearing him go silent.
Though he'd never admit it (actually he'd rather cut out his tongue than admit it thankyou very much) he's never slept so well. It was amazing how relaxed, unwound, he was after a night's sleep, dreaming of clean beaches and summer afternoons.
He had had to stop himself from fucking whistling as he made coffee in the dark early hours of the next morning.
Roque comes in as the kettle boils and flicks itself off, the fucker seems postively fucking cheerful. Clay, never one to trust a book by it's cover, eyes him warily and keeps him in his peripheral the whole time.
He was smiling.
It's a small, barely noticeble lift to the corners of his mouth, but it was a fucking smile and Clay kind of wondered if today was the day that Roque had decided to finally make good on his many threats to kill them all.
Roque smiling at any time was disconcerting, Roque smiling before the sun was even up? That shit was downright all kinds of scary.
"You ever think about those two?" Clay asks, not only because he really, really wants to know what Roque's take on the whole things is, but also because if the disturbingly smiling Roque was distracted maybe they all miss out on knife wounds.
Roque raises an eyebrow and pretends to have no idea what the Colonel is talking about.
So Clay has to tells him about the 'spanish lesson', and he may or may not have used the words 'touching each other in a very touchy manner'.
Roque snorts into his coffee cup and gives Clay his patented bored, dead-eye look.
"What, were their cocks out?"
Clay chokes on his coffee and shakes his head as he tries not let scalding hot beverage come out of his nose - really, by now, he should fucking know better than to ask Roque's advice on shit like this.
"Did you catch them indulging in a little sweet blue on blue action?"
Clay shakes his head. No, they were fully clothed, no, no sweet friendly fire - god he is going have that fucking mental image in his head everytime blue on blue incidents happen.
"What's your fucking problem then?"
And what's more interesting than Roque's apparent acceptance of his team mates relationship is the fact that Clay can't answer that question.
It seems impossible, but over the last year and a half that he's been properly noticing this thing, it's never come up in conversations between him and either his sniper or his hacker.
That winning streak of faux ignorance comes to a crashing halt after Clay has half carried Jensen for most of a mile over what must be the most fucking deserted farmland in the world. The kid's spitting out bits off shattered teeth between the breaks in his colourful rant.
(fucking teeth, sharp little white bits in the blood that keeps dribbling down his chin everytime he opens his mouth)
His current tangent seems to be about the sniper, mostly.
"God, have you ever noticed how fucking pissed he gets, at me? Like it's my fucking fault people like to hit me in the face. Ok, maybe it might be. But they're bad guys, bad baddies, of course they're going to hit someone. Am I supposed to let them hit him? You should've seen him the first time I pissed off this big Mexican dude, hah, in my defense, my spanish isn't all kinds of awesome. Unless we're insulting and swearing, in which case, champion! But yeah, he got all mean. And pissy. He was like a big girl. Don't be so mouthy, don't piss off the big mexican man, don't steal my hat, I'm having my period! Hah. Cougar would be a totes hot chick. Cowboy hats, man. Can't ever deny a cowboy hat. You know what his problem is? With me, I mean, not with his hat, his hat is a whole 'nother kettle of fish."
Clay really wants to put the breaks on this topic, hell, this whole conversation, such as it is, really really is going in a direction that he's pretty sure he won't be able to magically unhear when they finally meet up with the rest of the team.
But everytime Jensen shuts up he starts drifting into unconciousness, which is not only really not good for the hacker and all the blows to the head he's collected tonight, but Clay's pretty sure if Jensen goes limp they're both going to drop to the ground and stay there.
He's really fucking heavy as it is and while Jensen's technically in a worse state, Clay's not really up to dragging both their asses to the secondary rendezvous.
So he listens, occasionally makes a grunt sound like his contributing to the conversation and focuses on putting one foot in front of the other.
"We're the same people. Person. Type of peoples. 'S why we get along so well. Coz we're scared, you know?"
Ok, so not where Clay thought it was going.
"Cougar's scared, is he?"
"Course. You gotta be. Do what we do. How we do it." He goes silent for a bit, sinking deeper into Clay's grip, then pulls up, stopping and grabbing at Clay so they're eye to eye.
"We should all be scared of ourselves, Colonel."
Through seriously cracked glasses Jensen looks him in the eye with most focus he's had since they started hitting him, and Clay actually feels a little unsettled.
Then the moment passes, Jensen sags back to throw up and Clay plans to dismiss it all as a delusion brought on by concussion.
Clay gets his time with Cougar not long after they get back. Jensen's been wheeled off to somewhere in this ass fuck country that has a decent MRI,
(he had pumped his fist in the air and shouted VIVA LA DENTIST!)
and Clay is watching Cougar slowly stitch up the hole in his calf.
He watches those hands, moving steadily, gently and thinks about how many people they've killed.
Clay doesn't often think about things like that, it's not that he thinks that they're all baby killing mercenaries, but nor is he naive enough to believe that they're always killing The Bad Guys.
"Do what we do. How we do it."
Cougar has nightmares. Horrible recurring ones that leave him exhausted and haunted.
Clay has no doubt that all the shit that Cougar's seen through the scope of his rifle has no doubt left an unseen stain on his mind.
He's read through the lines of the vaguely worded past reports to know that before being a Loser the sniper had been co-opted into some seriously shady company dealings.
The CIA loved using the lethal quiet types that sniper school pumped out, used them hard and without regard.
For all his not thinking about this thing, Clay's kind of been wondering what Cougar got out of it. He doesnt want to speak ill of the brain injuried but Jensen didn't really engender a 'let's be BFF's and do everything together' sort of mutual feeling.
(In fact, next time Clay sees Jensen he's going to hit him over the head because in no way should a colonel ever think, say or comprehend the term BFF)
But watching Cougar, who hasn't said a word since Pooch drove off with Jensen, Clay wonders what Jensen gets out of whatever the two of them have.
Jensen's a tactile person, likes to touch everything, gets up in everyone's personal space
(One of the few reports that had managed to not suspiciously disappear had read 'This man has no sense of personal space or private boundaries' - Clay had quoted that to the hacker when he had first called him to attention, poking him hard in the chest and telling him that in no way was Clay to ever find out what that meant)
Cougar's more focused inwards and even now, sewing up Clay's leg - an action that was quite intimate when you thought about it - he's barely touching the colonel, and even those little touches are clinical and methodical.
Cougar looks up at him, as if Clay's thinking too loud.
"He'll be okay." Clay says, partly because it's reassuring, and colonel-y, and of course Jensen's going to be okay, but mostly because he can't think of anything else to say.
The sniper's head dips, eyes disappearing under the brim of his hat. It's a nod, probably agreeing with him, Jensen would be fine, but it also says Jensen would be fine, because I need him to be okay.
Turns out Cougar was as much of an eloquent motherfucker as Jensen was.
Clay doesn't want to get all sappy and risk his dick shrivelling up and him becoming a massive fucking girl, but he does indulge in a little thinking about maybe, if the two of them are together together, despite all their differences and clashes then perhaps this thing was something that Clay was going to be okay with.
Part II
Quick spanish lesson
romperse el brazo - to break one's arm
queso - cheese.
(my spanish dictionary wants me to write cougar/jensen because everytime i look up words the phrases listed are increasingly muse!giving - for instance, whilst looking up words starting with 'el' i find
tener la boca grande & Los ojos azules
to have a big mouth & blue eyes.
directly next to each other.
..CONSPIRACY
Losers, comic!verse
pairings: somewhat cougar/jensen. (it's practically canon anywho)
warnings: mostly off screen violence, dirty talk, bad spanish and swearing (like a motherfucker)
summary: At first he figures it's just a sex thing. Only, he's not even sure that they are actually fucking.
Beta'd by the lovely choasangel - though any remaining mistakes are very likely mine.
At first he figures it's just a sex thing. Just physical release and it's those two that have gravitated together because Pooch is so spoken for and you'd have to be a suicidal masochist to let Roque near your junk.
So he was okay with that. Well, not okay okay, but he kinda got it. Only, after stealthily spying casually observing he's not even sure that they are actually fucking.
Which might actually be worse.
Because if what Clay is seeing isn't two guys letting off steam, it's two Spec Ops Soldiers falling in love.
What makes the whole situation especially fucked up is that Clay is pretty sure the two don't even realise what they're doing.
Clay takes to calling it 'this thing' in his head, because anything else is going to be admitting things that Clay has gotten very good at ignoring.
Clay is pretty sure this thing is going to end badly.
It kind of sneacked up on him in a way he's no longer used to.
Quiet and stealthy. Like a sniper. Sneaky and completely unexplainable. Like a hacker.
Son of a bitch, whatever the situation between the two, Clay is sure it's heading towards something ugly.
Cougar's too territorial,
(Jensen flirts with everything, hell, he flirts with machinery)
and too damned good with his rifle.
Jensen can ruin lives just as effectively and thoroughly with only a computer.
(Clay had seen what the hacker did to his sister's ex - "People always underestimate the geek." Jensen had claimed, tapping his chest like he was Tarzan - Clay had laughed at the time, but he's been learning the truth in Jensen's cheesiness.)
Jensen comes into the team after an interesting altercation with his previous CO. Clay hasn't got the full details because, like most of Jensen's files, it's been mostly and mysteriously deleted, but the wake of ridiculousness and insubordination the hacker has left behind him makes Clay eager to mould the guy into a Loser.
Of course, Jensen goes about everything backwards.
Pooch, he manages to piss off the second week he's there. (He fixes that over the next month with three illegal acts, two frowned upons and a stolen tank - all of which Clay knows nothing about, so don't bother asking)
Roque seems to actually like the kid. Or he tolerates him exceptionally well. It's hard to tell with Roque, but Jensen is suspiciously free of knife holes so Clay figures something has been worked out between the two and chalks it up as a win.
And Cougar. Well, Jensen and Cougar get drunk the first weekend. Then they spend most of their first offical mission talking, well, Jensen talks about four times as much as Cougar, but the sniper actually plays along with him, and when their first big leave comes up Cougar flys off to Mexico, like he always does, but this time Jensen follows him like a little stray puppy.
They come back three weeks later, Cougar's a little darker and actually looks a little relaxed. Jensen's an interesting shade of red, has a black eye, tells increasingly wild stories about accidently insulting people's mothers while misusing the word 'cheese' and is still following Cougar around like a pup.
I should stop this thing, he thinks when Cougar laughs at something Jensen is saying to him and Pooch nearly kills them all by swerving off the berm at a break-neck speed.
It's their second mission since they added the loud (clothing, words, personality) hacker to the team but it's the first time any of them have heard Cougar spontaneously break into loud laughter.
When they realise they aren't going to die (Pooch's driving skills are not to be scoffed at - even if it's his fault they might be crashing) Cougar's laugh turns into the quiet chuckle they're all used to, Jensen cackles in a decidedly juvenile manner, Roque hits Pooch's shoulder harder than neccessary and Pooch sheepishly looks at everyone and tells Cougar off for startling the shit out of him.
I should stop this thing, he thinks when he finds them knocking over furniture wrestling, while Jensen yells in spectacularly terrible spanish.
Pooch catches sight of the two, Jensen's yelling "El, elaaah, aah, rom-per-se el...? Fuck I can't, I don't remember!" while Cougar sits on his back and twists his arm, all Pooch does is laugh and enquire about whether or not Jensen has a safeword.
(it's Quesa.. Wait. No, Queso!)
Clay lets it slide because Jensen's spanish is terrible, Cougar's teaching tactics are surprisingly effective and mainly because he can't think how to word his order for them to stop.
He does get Pooch alone to bitch about it though
"They're making googly eyes at each other."
Clay is pretty sure he shouldn't have started his arguement with the term 'googly eyes'.
"Colonel, you could say you and Roque do that."
"What? No!"
"Where's Roque right now?"
Clay doesn't even have to think about it. "In the gym, we'll probably be sparring in an hour or two."
"See? Googly eyes!"
"That's different, he's my SIC." Somehow Clay is on the defensive. How the hell did his calm sensible arguement turn to this?
"GOOGLY EYES!" Pooch shouts, actually raising his hands in the air like he's a one man mexican wave, and walks off cackling to himself.
That's it. Clay is putting 'googly eyes' on the list of words they're not allowed to use anymore. Right below BFF.
Jensen and Cougar go missing in Georgia and turn up a month later in a maximum security prison. Clay moves heaven and hell (and uses the dirty emails of a senator and calls in every fucking favour he's ever accumlated) but it's still another month before the paperwork comes through for an exchange.
I should've stopped this thing, he thinks for the barest second when the cell door opens.
The cell is dark and Jensen's crouched over something laying in the floor.
jesus
Clay realises it's Cougar on the ground as Jensen bolts upright, holding himself in a loose stance, palms upraised in the universal lie of 'I'm harmless'.
He's blinking at the corridor light and babbling in a low pleading voice.
"Listen, I know I was shouting alot, I was very noisy, but my buddy, there's something wrong with him. He's sick, or something. He's all feverish and, I swear this isn't a trap, he won't wake up. You gotta take him to a hostpital, fix him up. I swear, I'll. I'll behave" - He says the word like its the worst thing he's ever said - "Just. Just let him get better, okay?"
The guard enters the room and Clay feels the bitter feeling of pride mixing with shame, that they've made all the guards jumpy of them, that they've held strong, that he's let them stay here for so long - admittedly, he's been as quick as he possibly could, but it's not been fucking quick enough.
A single day would not have been quick enough.
Jensen's body language subtly changes as they come closer, from loose non-threatening to preparing to lash out at the slightest provocation. Clay can't quite figure out why Jensen's so jumpy with Clay here, but as the hacker starts talking again - hands raising up slowly as he backs up - Clay realises he's lost his glasses. Making him effectively blind.
mother fuckers
"It's okay, I'm just backing up against the wall, see? Out of the way, see my hands? I'm not trying anything, just help him. Please?"
"Jensen."
"Colonel?" He squints at them, as if he looks hard enough one of the blobs in front of him is going to suddenly shout BEHOLD! YOUR COLONEL!. "What's going on, Colonel."
"Prisoner exchange." Because, they've got an audience, and at it's barest minimum, that's what this is.
Jensen obviously gets it because he swallows and looks like he wants to ask the going price for two non existant combatants in a country they're not supposed to be in.
Clay's not ready to discuss prices, or make jokes, there's a prison guard whose eagerly listening to their exchange, but more importantly Cougar hasn't fucking moved since he got here.
"Does this mean I get my glasses back now?" He says it lightly, picking the 'make light of it' way, because that's what Jensen does.
"You took his glasses?" Goddammit, Clay had figured on Jensen losing them while being captured, he whirls on the guard, who stammers,
"He stabbed a guard with them! We had to!"
There's a snort from the corner of the cell.
"Guy had grabby hands." It's said in the fakest light voice Clay's ever heard and Jensen does a little duck and hop as he speaks, like he's trying to dodge an unseen but expected blow.
The guard smiles a watery smile and Clay thinks about hitting him until he has splinters of the guard's skull in his knuckles.
The flight home is long and quiet, Cougar still hasn't woken up from his surgery and Jensen alternates between pacing up and down the plane and brooding over the unconcious Cougar, sitting next to him, head on the makeshift bed, forehead pushed up against Cougar's shoulder.
If it had been anyone else Clay might've worried about Cougar waking up and trying to kill whoever was touching him - they'd all learned that lesson over the last couple of years - but there was a level of familiarity in the way Jensen rested against Cougar, Clay guessed it wouldn't be the first time the sniper had woken up with Jensen touching him.
Besides, Clay wasn't sure he'd be able to tear the hacker away without a serious and unnecessary fight.
On leave they disappear into South America, far more thoroughly than ever before. Clay thinks fuck this thing, I'm just going to kill them.
He spends the week after they're supposed to be back calling every south-of-the-border contact he has. (and no, he won't admit to ringing a random number in Sao Paulo and asking if they had two complete fuckheads in the house)
He leaves increasingly profane messages on both of their phones. (wherever the fuck you are, you fucks are fucking late, for fuck's sake.)
And he definitely isn't worrying. Except that he is.
Pooch is the only one not freaking out, he just laughs softly and says 'They're on island time, man, probably don't even know what day it is', and okay, Pooch is the only one of them that has actually been on one of their trips, so he probably knows best. Clay still sees him checking his phone when he thinks no ones watching.
Roque says he doesn't care. (Well, he actually says 'fuck them.') But from the looks of the techs in command have been giving him, Roque's spent alot of his 'free' time threatening harrassing the button pushers into discreetly finding where the fuck their two missing members are.
They've only just been released from hospital - Clay's pretty sure it was all above board, the amount of fucking times that Jensen's screwed with his charts and talked his doctors into letting him go early has made Clay super fastidious about checking those sorts of things.
He should've made them stay in the country, maybe just cuffed them to their bunks.
They had seemed okay, head-wise, and it had seemed a great idea to let them go. They had the leave coming and no one really wanted to throw them straight back into work.
Now Clay wondered whether he wanted them to be okay because it was more convenient.
He's still beating himself up about it (arguing about what he would've done differently, he maybe even promised not to date crazy women anymore - although many would argue that the women he dates aren't crazy when he starts dating them - plus he's met a pretty nice EOD Specialist named Emma who seems really stable, so maybe the promise was moot anyway) when they walk in.
Bags slung over their shoulders, Jensen attempting to talk while laughing. They look good, healthy, Clay thinks, comparing them to the image of them from before. Jensen unnaturally still, Cougar stoking a fire of anger in him, the kind of rage that comes from not being at fault for what happened but still feeling fucking guilty for it.
Clay lets them put their bags down before walking over and tearing them both new ones. They both listen, look suitably chastised, nod in all the right places but neither say a word. Clay worries that it's too early and wonders if he should send them back until Jensen and Cougar come back.
A week later a remix of all the messages he left on Jensen's phone goes around the base. Everywhere Clay goes, his voice is some cherry's ringtone or being used in cadence.
When Clay is finished killing them, he's going to be really proud.
The first time Clay thinks maybe this thing isn't so bad comes after one of their shitty jobs. One of those 'simple in and out' jobs that turn into a clusterfuck that everyone feels bad about. They've been holed up in a tiny room on base, it's dirty but so are they, and everyone's sacked out on the little space they've been given. Bone tired and on edge.
They get maybe an hour and a half before Cougar's breath picks up, the room's tiny, they're practically on top of each other and are all annoyingly attuned to each other.
All of them had nightmares, terrors, whatever-the-fuck you wanted to call them, and while Roque's rare ones tended to make any witnesses want to change their names and flee the country, since Georgia especially, Cougar's just happened to be the worst and most frequent.
He'd been waking up every hour or so, not yelling or screaming, just a sharp intake of breath, fast panting as he came down from whatever hell his mind had created for him and then finally a grunt of annoyance, an almost apology for something none of them will mention.
Finally the sniper, awake again after a pitiful twenty minutes, started to get up - he'd skulk around the barracks and scare the living daylights out of whoever was on nightwatch. In the morning he'd be tired (so fucking exhausted) but at least he wouldn't have that paranoid look of someone being hunted.
Just as he flipped his covers aside Jensen rolls over - eyes still closed he could almost be still asleep - and reaches out a hand to stop him.
Cougar stills and the hacker starts talking.
At first he doesn't seem to be talking about anything particular, just throwing words together in the vaguest semblence of sentences. But then, all of them 'asleep' but listening in the pitch black, his low, quiet voice starts painting a picture of a beach that he and Cougar had apparently been to.
Shining white sand and the rolling waves that soaked lazily into it, the clear ocean that slowly changed into the brightest of blues as it stretched away from the coast.
He talks for ages, using every word he has to describe the air (so drenched in sun you could almost taste summer on the wind),
the family with the chubby, laughing baby (bright pink ice-cream cones, little hands leaving sticky prints across the white beach towel as the mother and father giggled and gently wiped dribbling ice-cream away with soft wet tissues),
the elaborate sand castles (wet sand dribbled into tall spires that the waves couldnt reach)
made by the girls in blue bikinis (silly shaped sunglasses perched on the ends on their noses, sand between their fingers as they moulded the sand into something grander),
wide smiled, acne faced boys (flexing their skinny arms for the girls and throwing handfuls of colourful - red - pink - purple - peach - shells at each other.)
He must have stopped sometime, because when Clay wakes the kid is asleep, half out of his sleeping bag stretched across the space between him and Cougar, but he doesn't remember hearing him go silent.
Though he'd never admit it (actually he'd rather cut out his tongue than admit it thankyou very much) he's never slept so well. It was amazing how relaxed, unwound, he was after a night's sleep, dreaming of clean beaches and summer afternoons.
He had had to stop himself from fucking whistling as he made coffee in the dark early hours of the next morning.
Roque comes in as the kettle boils and flicks itself off, the fucker seems postively fucking cheerful. Clay, never one to trust a book by it's cover, eyes him warily and keeps him in his peripheral the whole time.
He was smiling.
It's a small, barely noticeble lift to the corners of his mouth, but it was a fucking smile and Clay kind of wondered if today was the day that Roque had decided to finally make good on his many threats to kill them all.
Roque smiling at any time was disconcerting, Roque smiling before the sun was even up? That shit was downright all kinds of scary.
"You ever think about those two?" Clay asks, not only because he really, really wants to know what Roque's take on the whole things is, but also because if the disturbingly smiling Roque was distracted maybe they all miss out on knife wounds.
Roque raises an eyebrow and pretends to have no idea what the Colonel is talking about.
So Clay has to tells him about the 'spanish lesson', and he may or may not have used the words 'touching each other in a very touchy manner'.
Roque snorts into his coffee cup and gives Clay his patented bored, dead-eye look.
"What, were their cocks out?"
Clay chokes on his coffee and shakes his head as he tries not let scalding hot beverage come out of his nose - really, by now, he should fucking know better than to ask Roque's advice on shit like this.
"Did you catch them indulging in a little sweet blue on blue action?"
Clay shakes his head. No, they were fully clothed, no, no sweet friendly fire - god he is going have that fucking mental image in his head everytime blue on blue incidents happen.
"What's your fucking problem then?"
And what's more interesting than Roque's apparent acceptance of his team mates relationship is the fact that Clay can't answer that question.
It seems impossible, but over the last year and a half that he's been properly noticing this thing, it's never come up in conversations between him and either his sniper or his hacker.
That winning streak of faux ignorance comes to a crashing halt after Clay has half carried Jensen for most of a mile over what must be the most fucking deserted farmland in the world. The kid's spitting out bits off shattered teeth between the breaks in his colourful rant.
(fucking teeth, sharp little white bits in the blood that keeps dribbling down his chin everytime he opens his mouth)
His current tangent seems to be about the sniper, mostly.
"God, have you ever noticed how fucking pissed he gets, at me? Like it's my fucking fault people like to hit me in the face. Ok, maybe it might be. But they're bad guys, bad baddies, of course they're going to hit someone. Am I supposed to let them hit him? You should've seen him the first time I pissed off this big Mexican dude, hah, in my defense, my spanish isn't all kinds of awesome. Unless we're insulting and swearing, in which case, champion! But yeah, he got all mean. And pissy. He was like a big girl. Don't be so mouthy, don't piss off the big mexican man, don't steal my hat, I'm having my period! Hah. Cougar would be a totes hot chick. Cowboy hats, man. Can't ever deny a cowboy hat. You know what his problem is? With me, I mean, not with his hat, his hat is a whole 'nother kettle of fish."
Clay really wants to put the breaks on this topic, hell, this whole conversation, such as it is, really really is going in a direction that he's pretty sure he won't be able to magically unhear when they finally meet up with the rest of the team.
But everytime Jensen shuts up he starts drifting into unconciousness, which is not only really not good for the hacker and all the blows to the head he's collected tonight, but Clay's pretty sure if Jensen goes limp they're both going to drop to the ground and stay there.
He's really fucking heavy as it is and while Jensen's technically in a worse state, Clay's not really up to dragging both their asses to the secondary rendezvous.
So he listens, occasionally makes a grunt sound like his contributing to the conversation and focuses on putting one foot in front of the other.
"We're the same people. Person. Type of peoples. 'S why we get along so well. Coz we're scared, you know?"
Ok, so not where Clay thought it was going.
"Cougar's scared, is he?"
"Course. You gotta be. Do what we do. How we do it." He goes silent for a bit, sinking deeper into Clay's grip, then pulls up, stopping and grabbing at Clay so they're eye to eye.
"We should all be scared of ourselves, Colonel."
Through seriously cracked glasses Jensen looks him in the eye with most focus he's had since they started hitting him, and Clay actually feels a little unsettled.
Then the moment passes, Jensen sags back to throw up and Clay plans to dismiss it all as a delusion brought on by concussion.
Clay gets his time with Cougar not long after they get back. Jensen's been wheeled off to somewhere in this ass fuck country that has a decent MRI,
(he had pumped his fist in the air and shouted VIVA LA DENTIST!)
and Clay is watching Cougar slowly stitch up the hole in his calf.
He watches those hands, moving steadily, gently and thinks about how many people they've killed.
Clay doesn't often think about things like that, it's not that he thinks that they're all baby killing mercenaries, but nor is he naive enough to believe that they're always killing The Bad Guys.
"Do what we do. How we do it."
Cougar has nightmares. Horrible recurring ones that leave him exhausted and haunted.
Clay has no doubt that all the shit that Cougar's seen through the scope of his rifle has no doubt left an unseen stain on his mind.
He's read through the lines of the vaguely worded past reports to know that before being a Loser the sniper had been co-opted into some seriously shady company dealings.
The CIA loved using the lethal quiet types that sniper school pumped out, used them hard and without regard.
For all his not thinking about this thing, Clay's kind of been wondering what Cougar got out of it. He doesnt want to speak ill of the brain injuried but Jensen didn't really engender a 'let's be BFF's and do everything together' sort of mutual feeling.
(In fact, next time Clay sees Jensen he's going to hit him over the head because in no way should a colonel ever think, say or comprehend the term BFF)
But watching Cougar, who hasn't said a word since Pooch drove off with Jensen, Clay wonders what Jensen gets out of whatever the two of them have.
Jensen's a tactile person, likes to touch everything, gets up in everyone's personal space
(One of the few reports that had managed to not suspiciously disappear had read 'This man has no sense of personal space or private boundaries' - Clay had quoted that to the hacker when he had first called him to attention, poking him hard in the chest and telling him that in no way was Clay to ever find out what that meant)
Cougar's more focused inwards and even now, sewing up Clay's leg - an action that was quite intimate when you thought about it - he's barely touching the colonel, and even those little touches are clinical and methodical.
Cougar looks up at him, as if Clay's thinking too loud.
"He'll be okay." Clay says, partly because it's reassuring, and colonel-y, and of course Jensen's going to be okay, but mostly because he can't think of anything else to say.
The sniper's head dips, eyes disappearing under the brim of his hat. It's a nod, probably agreeing with him, Jensen would be fine, but it also says Jensen would be fine, because I need him to be okay.
Turns out Cougar was as much of an eloquent motherfucker as Jensen was.
Clay doesn't want to get all sappy and risk his dick shrivelling up and him becoming a massive fucking girl, but he does indulge in a little thinking about maybe, if the two of them are together together, despite all their differences and clashes then perhaps this thing was something that Clay was going to be okay with.
Part II
Quick spanish lesson
romperse el brazo - to break one's arm
queso - cheese.
(my spanish dictionary wants me to write cougar/jensen because everytime i look up words the phrases listed are increasingly muse!giving - for instance, whilst looking up words starting with 'el' i find
tener la boca grande & Los ojos azules
to have a big mouth & blue eyes.
directly next to each other.
..CONSPIRACY