Team Building with Jack Landors (SPD, A Squad, #1, T)
characters: SPD's A Squad (Jack/Sky)
prompt #1: beginnings
word count: 2500
rated: T (for bed-sharing)
summary: Instead of leaving during "Endings," Jack decides that what the Delta Base really needs is a new A Squad. So he picks one.
author's note: This story has already been posted, but I want to use these awesome prompts to continue it, so ♥ For the sake of continuity, here is prompt #1!
Team Building with Jack Landors (beginnings)
by *Andrea
The best thing about sleeping with Sky was not the fact that he got up a six o'clock in the morning every single day. (Six-ten, Sky would insist, which, yeah, was so completely not different at all.) It was also not the way he either turned on the light or fumbled around in the perfectly adequate light from the window until Jack wanted to hit him with a pillow.
"What're you doing," Jack mumbled, hiding his head under the pillow instead. He was vaguely aware that Sky was in more of a hurry than usual--which wasn't saying much, but he usually at least got a kiss before Sleepy Sky turned into SPD Sky for the day.
"Morning training," Sky said briefly. Jack would swear even his exercise sweats snapped when he tugged at them just so. "Pre-breakfast run."
Jack tightened his grip on the pillow. "I'm so glad I'm not on your team anymore," he muttered into the mattress.
"You're the only one," Sky informed him. Then, without warning, he yanked the pillow away and leaned down to kiss the side of Jack's face. "See you at lunch."
"Mmm." He might have tried to mumble something more coherent, but Sky was already gone.
Jack rolled out of bed at the much more reasonable hour of seven forty-five, didn't finish waking up until he was completely dressed, and was in the mess hall by seven fifty-two. (Three things he took for granted: the stairs, walking through walls, and yelling hello to people over his shoulder as he passed.) He grabbed orange juice and a blueberry muffin and headed for Kat's lab.
The muffin was gone by the time he got there. "Hi Kat!" he called, swinging through the open door and scanning for three of his four teammates. Boom, check. Kat, check. "Am I fired yet?"
"Not today," Kat replied without looking up from her holographic interface.
"Great." Jack downed the rest of his orange juice as he slid onto the stool next to Boom. "So, Boom, you and Sophie ready to hit the streets?"
Sophie obviously wasn't, since she wasn't there, but she didn't need to eat or sleep so who knew what was keeping her. Boom also wasn't, but only because he was Boom and thus was rarely ready for anything. His real strength lay in dealing with situations, not anticipating them.
Jack took them both down to New Tech PD before they went on patrol, on the grounds that the more people they were introduced to the harder it would be to fire them later, and also because the police tended to be less likely to ditch Rangers they could name in the middle of a firefight. (Sophie, it turned out, had stopped to rescue a stray cat that had found its way into the base courtyard. No kidding.) They were all on their best behavior, which meant that it took them five whole minutes to wear out their welcome at the station.
By the time Jack made it back from patrol, Sky's team had staged a revolt, deposed him as team leader, and reluctantly re-elected him on the grounds that no one else wanted the job. Jack decided not to mention that he'd brought his teammates home the long way, via duck boat tour on the river, as a celebration of their new understanding of justice. Or as a bribe to keep them from telling Cruger about the kid they'd caught shoplifting in Parkington Market.
He'd been wearing a Samuels jacket, and Jack had let him go.
"I knew you must have gotten out of bed eventually because I stopped by the room," Sky said, as Jack put his tray down and slid into a chair across the table. "Where have you been?"
Jack gave this question the consideration it was due. "Team building activity," he said easily. "Long morning."
As expected, Sky frowned. But Jack almost choked on the first bite of his sandwich when Sky said, "Maybe B Squad would benefit from a team building activity."
"Sky," Jack said, eyeing him with amusement. "You don't need to bond with your team. You're all friends already. You've been working together for almost a year."
"Not like this," Sky muttered. "And not the new guy, either."
"The new guy?" Jack echoed.
"I have to pick someone for B Squad Blue," Sky reminded him. "Since someone had to shoot off his mouth and leave me with an impromptu promotion, now we're a Ranger short."
"You can't bring in someone new to be your Second," Jack said. "No matter how much team building you do, you're not gonna want to leave a new guy in charge of an established team every time you have other stuff going on."
"Unless his name is Jack Landors," Sky replied. "Because the rules are always different for you, aren't they."
He'd known it was stupid the second he said it, but as usual, Sky didn't give him a chance to take it back. (Like he ever would, Sky would say. Jack and Cruger didn't clash because they were different; they fought because they were exactly the same.) So he could either own it or he could ignore it.
"Yeah," Jack said. "I was the new guy in charge of an established team. And look how well it didn't work. I screwed up your dynamic so bad, I practically invited Grumm to Earth myself."
Sky paused. "That wasn't you," he said, giving Jack an odd look. "If anything, Cruger's convinced it was my fault."
"If he'd put you in charge of the team to begin with," Jack pointed out, "you wouldn't have thought you had something to prove."
Sky scoffed. "I didn't do it because I had something to prove," he said, reaching out to snag Jack's jello and replace it with his own. "I did it because you were being a jerk."
Jack looked from one jello cup to the other. "You do realize those are both red, don't you?" (Habit, Sky would tell him. B Squad had a jello thing.)
"Habit," Sky muttered around a spoonful of jello. Swallowing, he added, "We can't be a four person team, anyway. Squads are five people. We'll have to bring someone new in at some point."
"Not for Second," Jack insisted. "Promote Bridge. Make Bridge your Second and get someone new for Green."
Sky considered that, pulling the spoon out of his mouth absently and holding it up like he was going to use it to illustrate his point. As soon as he figured out what it was. "Why Bridge?" he asked at last.
"Mostly because he'd make a good Second," Jack said with a shrug. "Partly because Cruger wants it to be Syd, and you know I live to make him crazy."
Sky raised an eyebrow at that. "Can you imagine what Syd would be like if she had to wear blue everyday?"
"It's not the blue she'd mind," Jack said. Because he'd seen Syd wear blue, and if she didn't see fashion first and Ranger colors second, he might have been more suspicious. "It's watching someone else wear pink that'll piss her off."
By the end of the day, Bridge was wearing a blue SPD t-shirt under his green jacket. Jack missed the revolution again, because he had training with Ally that afternoon and he'd promised to stop by and see Charlie afterward. Kat told him later that he was lucky Cruger hadn't been able to find him.
All he knew was that Ally was bemused by the attention she was suddenly getting at work, and Charlie found the entire situation hilarious. "Seriously," she said, when he dropped in just before dinner. "You guys are the best entertainment SPD's seen in years."
"You're selling yourself short," he drawled, throwing himself down in an armchair. (A Squad had their own suite in the section of rehab currently devoted to "unexplained psychic alien triggers that cause people to kidnap and attack without warning.")
"I hear you and Sky lit up the practice fields a few times," Jack continued. "Blew up an entire training room... Oh, and there was that thing in the mess with the pudding. I'm still not totally clear how you managed to involve the kitchen."
"Those forcefields of his are more powerful than you'd think," Charlie remarked. "He can blow out windows with those things."
"Yeah, and you'd know," Jack said with a grin. "Is it true the training room wasn't usable for weeks?"
"Month and a half," Charlie agreed. "Mostly because we were the ones that had to fix it. Whatever else Sky can do, construction isn't his specialty."
"More like the opposite," Jack suggested. He wasn't sure she'd recognize the reference, but he couldn't be the only one on base who knew about Sky's fondness for old James Bond movies.
Charlie gave him a look that said, no, he wasn't. "Did he make you watch those things?"
"Sky was hard to date before we were actually, you know, dating," Jack told her. "It was either sit on the couch with him for hours or let him kick my butt at lightball. Again. I went with the couch."
Rose wandered through while he was filling Charlie in on their side of the latest squad shakeups, mentioned that they'd gotten permission for the poolside barbecue that night, and invited Jack to join them. He got stuck on "pool" for several seconds. "Barbecue" didn't penetrate until afterwards.
"Wait," he said. "You have a pool?"
Charlie grinned at him, a lazy look full of satisfaction that he wasn't sure he'd ever seen from her before. (Which, given the circumstances when they'd met, was maybe understandable.) "Getting us into rehab was easy," she told him. "It's getting us to leave that'll be hard."
He wouldn't have minded staying. But leaving Sky to face Cruger alone, while funny, also struck him as kind of cruel, so he said his goodbyes and headed out. He made it all the way back to base--into B Wing, even--before the day started to catch up with him.
"Jack!" Syd ambushed him the moment he stepped out of the elevator. "You let Sky out of his cage before breakfast!"
"Whoa." Jack paused where he was and stared at her. "Hey, Syd. How's it going?"
"Jack, why was there a cat in your room?" Z asked, poking her head out of the lounge. Bridge was right behind her, the aforementioned cat in his arms.
"Uh, Sophie found it in the courtyard this morning?" he offered, edging around Syd. (He wondered if the real question was what Z had been doing in his room.) "Kat wouldn't let it stay in the lab, so..."
"The commander's been looking for you," Bridge remarked. He was cuddling the little cat against his--blue shirt? "Well, not so much looking as asking everyone he sees if we know where you are. Which doesn't make a lot of sense, really, since you have a morpher, unless he's just doing it as a form of venting. As opposed to actually trying to find you."
"Hey, am I talking to the new Blue Ranger?" Jack asked, because the fact that Cruger was "looking" for him was no surprise to anyone. "Congratulations, Bridge."
"Yeah, thanks." Bridge smiled at him. "Really, Jack. Thanks."
Because Bridge could see right through him if he tried, and there was no use pretending he hadn't had anything to do with it. "You deserve it," Jack told him. "Try to keep Sky from eating the rest of the team, okay?"
"Only if you do your part," Syd interrupted, not waiting for Bridge to answer. "We all figured you'd be able to keep him in bed until at least seven. Imagine our surprise when someone came banging on our doors at six-thirty! My hair wasn't even done!"
"Like it mattered," Z scoffed. "You did it when we got back anyway."
"Which I barely had time for!" Syd exclaimed. "Honestly, Jack, you can't just leave us and leave us with Sky. That is so not fair."
"Come on, Syd." Jack rolled his eyes. "He's just trying to find his own style. I was way worse when I started as Red Ranger."
There was a moment of silence as they all contemplated this.
"Well, yes," Bridge agreed at last. "That's true."
"Way worse," Z repeated.
"I guess that's a point," Syd said, still pouting. "But you had Sky to make you change. Who does Sky have?"
"All of you," Jack reminded them. (Sky would agree, he supposed, amused by the thought. That whatever success he'd had leading B Squad had been because of Sky.) "You're a team. You just have to remember that, and it's all good."
"'Good' being relative," Z added. "Better or worse depending on how early in the morning we have to be a team on any given day."
"Where is Sky, anyway?" Because this was an argument he still wasn't having with Z. "I thought we were all meeting here for dinner."
His Sky sense turned out to be as good as ever. And later, when he realized how much of that conversation Sky had overheard, he had to wonder--aloud--if Sky eavesdropped on purpose. The question made Sky laugh.
"Yeah, right," he said, in the privacy of Jack's room. "Because I could ever keep my mouth shut long enough to convince people I'm not really there."
Jack grinned. "So, we really are that loud, then."
"By 'we' do you mean Red Rangers?" Sky asked. "Or B Squad's inability to hold a private conversation?"
"Yes," Jack said, sinking down onto the side of the bed. "Hey, is there any way I can requisition an actual double bed? SPD must have them, right?"
"You have Kat on your team," Sky reminded him. "You can requisition anything you want."
Jack yawned, deciding it was easier not to think about that right now. (He had a team. That wasn't B Squad. Kat answered to him. In theory. And "A Squad" was patrolling with no set rotation, dispatch that was informal at best, and zero official backing.) "Tomorrow," he said. "This is all going to look so much better tomorrow."
"Keep a good thought," Sky told him, toeing off his shoes. Which was sort of incongruous, Jack decided, watching him. Because Sky never just stuffed his feet into his shoes. But he did kick them off.
He'd avoided Cruger another day, Jack realized suddenly. He wondered what that meant. It wasn't like Cruger couldn't find him if he actually wanted to.
"How did you make it look so easy?" Sky asked.
Jack looked up in surprise. "What?"
"Leading B Squad," Sky said. "You told us what to do, and we just... did it."
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask when, exactly, that had been. Instead he just smiled tiredly. "Sky, you were the only person everyone on my team consistently listened to. Including me."
Sky snorted. "Well, yeah. Because I'm the loudest."
"A great quality in a team leader," Jack said, pushing a pillow behind him to pad the hard middle of the bed before he let himself fall back onto it. (He was learning.) With any luck, he wouldn't still be alone there when he fell asleep approximately thirty seconds from now. A period of time he was sure could be indefinitely extended by company.
Sky got the message. He was on the bed with Jack a moment later, all his clothes still on because sometimes it wasn't about efficiency or progression or anything logical at all. Sometimes it was just something you felt. And the best thing about sleeping with Sky was that he felt things more deeply than anyone else Jack knew.
prompt #1: beginnings
word count: 2500
rated: T (for bed-sharing)
summary: Instead of leaving during "Endings," Jack decides that what the Delta Base really needs is a new A Squad. So he picks one.
author's note: This story has already been posted, but I want to use these awesome prompts to continue it, so ♥ For the sake of continuity, here is prompt #1!
Team Building with Jack Landors (beginnings)
by *Andrea
The best thing about sleeping with Sky was not the fact that he got up a six o'clock in the morning every single day. (Six-ten, Sky would insist, which, yeah, was so completely not different at all.) It was also not the way he either turned on the light or fumbled around in the perfectly adequate light from the window until Jack wanted to hit him with a pillow.
"What're you doing," Jack mumbled, hiding his head under the pillow instead. He was vaguely aware that Sky was in more of a hurry than usual--which wasn't saying much, but he usually at least got a kiss before Sleepy Sky turned into SPD Sky for the day.
"Morning training," Sky said briefly. Jack would swear even his exercise sweats snapped when he tugged at them just so. "Pre-breakfast run."
Jack tightened his grip on the pillow. "I'm so glad I'm not on your team anymore," he muttered into the mattress.
"You're the only one," Sky informed him. Then, without warning, he yanked the pillow away and leaned down to kiss the side of Jack's face. "See you at lunch."
"Mmm." He might have tried to mumble something more coherent, but Sky was already gone.
Jack rolled out of bed at the much more reasonable hour of seven forty-five, didn't finish waking up until he was completely dressed, and was in the mess hall by seven fifty-two. (Three things he took for granted: the stairs, walking through walls, and yelling hello to people over his shoulder as he passed.) He grabbed orange juice and a blueberry muffin and headed for Kat's lab.
The muffin was gone by the time he got there. "Hi Kat!" he called, swinging through the open door and scanning for three of his four teammates. Boom, check. Kat, check. "Am I fired yet?"
"Not today," Kat replied without looking up from her holographic interface.
"Great." Jack downed the rest of his orange juice as he slid onto the stool next to Boom. "So, Boom, you and Sophie ready to hit the streets?"
Sophie obviously wasn't, since she wasn't there, but she didn't need to eat or sleep so who knew what was keeping her. Boom also wasn't, but only because he was Boom and thus was rarely ready for anything. His real strength lay in dealing with situations, not anticipating them.
Jack took them both down to New Tech PD before they went on patrol, on the grounds that the more people they were introduced to the harder it would be to fire them later, and also because the police tended to be less likely to ditch Rangers they could name in the middle of a firefight. (Sophie, it turned out, had stopped to rescue a stray cat that had found its way into the base courtyard. No kidding.) They were all on their best behavior, which meant that it took them five whole minutes to wear out their welcome at the station.
By the time Jack made it back from patrol, Sky's team had staged a revolt, deposed him as team leader, and reluctantly re-elected him on the grounds that no one else wanted the job. Jack decided not to mention that he'd brought his teammates home the long way, via duck boat tour on the river, as a celebration of their new understanding of justice. Or as a bribe to keep them from telling Cruger about the kid they'd caught shoplifting in Parkington Market.
He'd been wearing a Samuels jacket, and Jack had let him go.
"I knew you must have gotten out of bed eventually because I stopped by the room," Sky said, as Jack put his tray down and slid into a chair across the table. "Where have you been?"
Jack gave this question the consideration it was due. "Team building activity," he said easily. "Long morning."
As expected, Sky frowned. But Jack almost choked on the first bite of his sandwich when Sky said, "Maybe B Squad would benefit from a team building activity."
"Sky," Jack said, eyeing him with amusement. "You don't need to bond with your team. You're all friends already. You've been working together for almost a year."
"Not like this," Sky muttered. "And not the new guy, either."
"The new guy?" Jack echoed.
"I have to pick someone for B Squad Blue," Sky reminded him. "Since someone had to shoot off his mouth and leave me with an impromptu promotion, now we're a Ranger short."
"You can't bring in someone new to be your Second," Jack said. "No matter how much team building you do, you're not gonna want to leave a new guy in charge of an established team every time you have other stuff going on."
"Unless his name is Jack Landors," Sky replied. "Because the rules are always different for you, aren't they."
He'd known it was stupid the second he said it, but as usual, Sky didn't give him a chance to take it back. (Like he ever would, Sky would say. Jack and Cruger didn't clash because they were different; they fought because they were exactly the same.) So he could either own it or he could ignore it.
"Yeah," Jack said. "I was the new guy in charge of an established team. And look how well it didn't work. I screwed up your dynamic so bad, I practically invited Grumm to Earth myself."
Sky paused. "That wasn't you," he said, giving Jack an odd look. "If anything, Cruger's convinced it was my fault."
"If he'd put you in charge of the team to begin with," Jack pointed out, "you wouldn't have thought you had something to prove."
Sky scoffed. "I didn't do it because I had something to prove," he said, reaching out to snag Jack's jello and replace it with his own. "I did it because you were being a jerk."
Jack looked from one jello cup to the other. "You do realize those are both red, don't you?" (Habit, Sky would tell him. B Squad had a jello thing.)
"Habit," Sky muttered around a spoonful of jello. Swallowing, he added, "We can't be a four person team, anyway. Squads are five people. We'll have to bring someone new in at some point."
"Not for Second," Jack insisted. "Promote Bridge. Make Bridge your Second and get someone new for Green."
Sky considered that, pulling the spoon out of his mouth absently and holding it up like he was going to use it to illustrate his point. As soon as he figured out what it was. "Why Bridge?" he asked at last.
"Mostly because he'd make a good Second," Jack said with a shrug. "Partly because Cruger wants it to be Syd, and you know I live to make him crazy."
Sky raised an eyebrow at that. "Can you imagine what Syd would be like if she had to wear blue everyday?"
"It's not the blue she'd mind," Jack said. Because he'd seen Syd wear blue, and if she didn't see fashion first and Ranger colors second, he might have been more suspicious. "It's watching someone else wear pink that'll piss her off."
By the end of the day, Bridge was wearing a blue SPD t-shirt under his green jacket. Jack missed the revolution again, because he had training with Ally that afternoon and he'd promised to stop by and see Charlie afterward. Kat told him later that he was lucky Cruger hadn't been able to find him.
All he knew was that Ally was bemused by the attention she was suddenly getting at work, and Charlie found the entire situation hilarious. "Seriously," she said, when he dropped in just before dinner. "You guys are the best entertainment SPD's seen in years."
"You're selling yourself short," he drawled, throwing himself down in an armchair. (A Squad had their own suite in the section of rehab currently devoted to "unexplained psychic alien triggers that cause people to kidnap and attack without warning.")
"I hear you and Sky lit up the practice fields a few times," Jack continued. "Blew up an entire training room... Oh, and there was that thing in the mess with the pudding. I'm still not totally clear how you managed to involve the kitchen."
"Those forcefields of his are more powerful than you'd think," Charlie remarked. "He can blow out windows with those things."
"Yeah, and you'd know," Jack said with a grin. "Is it true the training room wasn't usable for weeks?"
"Month and a half," Charlie agreed. "Mostly because we were the ones that had to fix it. Whatever else Sky can do, construction isn't his specialty."
"More like the opposite," Jack suggested. He wasn't sure she'd recognize the reference, but he couldn't be the only one on base who knew about Sky's fondness for old James Bond movies.
Charlie gave him a look that said, no, he wasn't. "Did he make you watch those things?"
"Sky was hard to date before we were actually, you know, dating," Jack told her. "It was either sit on the couch with him for hours or let him kick my butt at lightball. Again. I went with the couch."
Rose wandered through while he was filling Charlie in on their side of the latest squad shakeups, mentioned that they'd gotten permission for the poolside barbecue that night, and invited Jack to join them. He got stuck on "pool" for several seconds. "Barbecue" didn't penetrate until afterwards.
"Wait," he said. "You have a pool?"
Charlie grinned at him, a lazy look full of satisfaction that he wasn't sure he'd ever seen from her before. (Which, given the circumstances when they'd met, was maybe understandable.) "Getting us into rehab was easy," she told him. "It's getting us to leave that'll be hard."
He wouldn't have minded staying. But leaving Sky to face Cruger alone, while funny, also struck him as kind of cruel, so he said his goodbyes and headed out. He made it all the way back to base--into B Wing, even--before the day started to catch up with him.
"Jack!" Syd ambushed him the moment he stepped out of the elevator. "You let Sky out of his cage before breakfast!"
"Whoa." Jack paused where he was and stared at her. "Hey, Syd. How's it going?"
"Jack, why was there a cat in your room?" Z asked, poking her head out of the lounge. Bridge was right behind her, the aforementioned cat in his arms.
"Uh, Sophie found it in the courtyard this morning?" he offered, edging around Syd. (He wondered if the real question was what Z had been doing in his room.) "Kat wouldn't let it stay in the lab, so..."
"The commander's been looking for you," Bridge remarked. He was cuddling the little cat against his--blue shirt? "Well, not so much looking as asking everyone he sees if we know where you are. Which doesn't make a lot of sense, really, since you have a morpher, unless he's just doing it as a form of venting. As opposed to actually trying to find you."
"Hey, am I talking to the new Blue Ranger?" Jack asked, because the fact that Cruger was "looking" for him was no surprise to anyone. "Congratulations, Bridge."
"Yeah, thanks." Bridge smiled at him. "Really, Jack. Thanks."
Because Bridge could see right through him if he tried, and there was no use pretending he hadn't had anything to do with it. "You deserve it," Jack told him. "Try to keep Sky from eating the rest of the team, okay?"
"Only if you do your part," Syd interrupted, not waiting for Bridge to answer. "We all figured you'd be able to keep him in bed until at least seven. Imagine our surprise when someone came banging on our doors at six-thirty! My hair wasn't even done!"
"Like it mattered," Z scoffed. "You did it when we got back anyway."
"Which I barely had time for!" Syd exclaimed. "Honestly, Jack, you can't just leave us and leave us with Sky. That is so not fair."
"Come on, Syd." Jack rolled his eyes. "He's just trying to find his own style. I was way worse when I started as Red Ranger."
There was a moment of silence as they all contemplated this.
"Well, yes," Bridge agreed at last. "That's true."
"Way worse," Z repeated.
"I guess that's a point," Syd said, still pouting. "But you had Sky to make you change. Who does Sky have?"
"All of you," Jack reminded them. (Sky would agree, he supposed, amused by the thought. That whatever success he'd had leading B Squad had been because of Sky.) "You're a team. You just have to remember that, and it's all good."
"'Good' being relative," Z added. "Better or worse depending on how early in the morning we have to be a team on any given day."
"Where is Sky, anyway?" Because this was an argument he still wasn't having with Z. "I thought we were all meeting here for dinner."
His Sky sense turned out to be as good as ever. And later, when he realized how much of that conversation Sky had overheard, he had to wonder--aloud--if Sky eavesdropped on purpose. The question made Sky laugh.
"Yeah, right," he said, in the privacy of Jack's room. "Because I could ever keep my mouth shut long enough to convince people I'm not really there."
Jack grinned. "So, we really are that loud, then."
"By 'we' do you mean Red Rangers?" Sky asked. "Or B Squad's inability to hold a private conversation?"
"Yes," Jack said, sinking down onto the side of the bed. "Hey, is there any way I can requisition an actual double bed? SPD must have them, right?"
"You have Kat on your team," Sky reminded him. "You can requisition anything you want."
Jack yawned, deciding it was easier not to think about that right now. (He had a team. That wasn't B Squad. Kat answered to him. In theory. And "A Squad" was patrolling with no set rotation, dispatch that was informal at best, and zero official backing.) "Tomorrow," he said. "This is all going to look so much better tomorrow."
"Keep a good thought," Sky told him, toeing off his shoes. Which was sort of incongruous, Jack decided, watching him. Because Sky never just stuffed his feet into his shoes. But he did kick them off.
He'd avoided Cruger another day, Jack realized suddenly. He wondered what that meant. It wasn't like Cruger couldn't find him if he actually wanted to.
"How did you make it look so easy?" Sky asked.
Jack looked up in surprise. "What?"
"Leading B Squad," Sky said. "You told us what to do, and we just... did it."
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask when, exactly, that had been. Instead he just smiled tiredly. "Sky, you were the only person everyone on my team consistently listened to. Including me."
Sky snorted. "Well, yeah. Because I'm the loudest."
"A great quality in a team leader," Jack said, pushing a pillow behind him to pad the hard middle of the bed before he let himself fall back onto it. (He was learning.) With any luck, he wouldn't still be alone there when he fell asleep approximately thirty seconds from now. A period of time he was sure could be indefinitely extended by company.
Sky got the message. He was on the bed with Jack a moment later, all his clothes still on because sometimes it wasn't about efficiency or progression or anything logical at all. Sometimes it was just something you felt. And the best thing about sleeping with Sky was that he felt things more deeply than anyone else Jack knew.