Team Building with Jack Landors (SPD, A Squad, #28, T)
characters: SPD’s A Squad (Sky/Jack)
prompt #28: you only hurt the ones you love
word count: 2500
rating: T
summary: "I think the party's self-sustaining by now. Want to go have our own?"
Team Building with Jack Landors (you only hurt the ones you love)
by *Andrea
“Wrong way,” Z said, appearing in front of him with no warning whatsoever.
Sky tried not to jump, but no matter how long he’d known her he still couldn’t get used to that. “It’s not a one-way street,” he told her. “People are allowed to walk through this particular doorway in either direction.”
“Jack’s here,” she said.
“Yeah, I guessed that from the angelic choir. Can I go now?”
“He’s on the balcony,” she continued. “I’ve been sent specifically to make sure you’re also on the balcony in the next five minutes. I’ve been authorized to bribe you.”
Sky couldn’t help it. He looked up at the balcony.
“It’s an unspecified bribe of your choosing,” Z was saying. “To be redeemed with Jack at any time. I’d take advantage of it, if I were you. He can be kind of obnoxious, but he usually makes good on offers like that.”
“Does he know about the--”
“Thrones?” Z finished for him. “Yeah. He sent C Squad off in search of cameras. I think he has an escape route planned from the balcony.”
Sky held up a hand. He didn’t need to hear any more, and he was pretty sure he didn’t want to. This was the part of being a Red Ranger that they never told you about beforehand: the parties, the groupies, and the really weird publicity that went with them.
Or, in fairness, this was what they didn’t tell you about Jack Landors being a Red Ranger. Sky couldn’t imagine drawing this much attention on his own, no matter what color he wore. He sometimes suspected he could be anyone off the street and get the same treatment, as long as he was dating Jack.
“Psst.” The balcony was empty, save for the whisper that came out of the wall. Jack followed, quickly enough that Sky couldn’t locate his voice before he saw his face. “I hear I’m supposed to fight for you.”
“I hear the punch was spiked five too many times,” Sky retorted. “You throw a hell of a party, Jack.”
“I think it’s self-sustaining by now,” Jack observed. “Want to go have our own?”
Sky tried to frown at him, but he looked utterly unintentional. “I was just leaving.”
“It’s safer up this way,” Jack told him. “Not so many people in the halls. Also, I want to show you something.”
Sky didn’t move. “I swear to god,” he said, “if you’re setting me up? If there’s a group of people somewhere, waiting to leap out and yell ‘surprise’--”
“Everyone is here,” Jack interrupted. “Look.”
When Sky didn’t, Jack held out his arm and swept it across the mess hall. “Seriously, who else could I find? Everyone I could possibly want to embarrass you in front of is here. And if we leave before they notice us up here, they’ll still be here when we’re somewhere far away.”
“How far?” Sky demanded suspiciously.
Jack eyed him. “You’re mad at me for something,” he said. “What? The pictures? I wasn’t even there; I have no idea what they look like. You’re the one who got caught making out with Syd.”
“There was no making out,” Sky snapped. “I knew I should have grabbed that camera the second Z set it down.”
“I heard there was tequila, too,” Jack remarked. “Did the camera show up before or after that?”
Sky paused, surprised enough by this that he just looked at Jack for a long moment. “What tequila?” he asked, when he was sure Jack actually meant two nights ago. “There wasn’t any tequila.”
“I heard there was,” Jack said. “And kissing.”
“Syd kissed me on the cheek,” Sky told him. “I kissed her hair. It was just for some stupid pictures Z wanted to take to give to you. Because we were dressed up, she said. I assumed you’d already seen them.”
“Nope.” Jack looked exactly the way he’d looked throughout the entire conversation, which Sky was only now starting to realize was a bad sign. Jack wasn’t playing with him, he was just looking for reassurance. And Sky wasn’t giving it.
“There wasn’t any tequila,” he repeated. “Z and Dan made some hard lemonade, and they shared it around. It wasn’t tough stuff. Everyone had some, except for Bridge and Rose. And Charlie. Rose wouldn’t let her. Something about her meds.”
“Z said she was going to tell on you,” Jack said. “About the tequila. She seemed surprised when I didn’t know.”
“Oh, for the--” Sky rolled his eyes. “You do know. That story about Charlie came up again. The night before Dru left, with the tequila... we all played Spin the Bottle? I swear, we’re never going to live that down.
“Z’s giving me the signal,” Jack said. “We gotta get out of here.”
“Jack--” Sky reached for him, trying to apologize without saying the words.
Jack grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the nearest door. “Later,” he said over his shoulder. “Unless you want C Squad to be posting their own pictures all over the mess hall.”
That was a convincing argument. Sky let himself be led, but they didn’t make it far down the hall before Jack shoved into a stairwell and let the fire door clang shut behind them. He’d never spent as much time in stairwells as he had since knowing Jack.
“Up,” Jack said, letting go of his hand to grab the railing and swing around. “Coming?”
“Where?” Sky asked, but of course he was coming. He just didn’t race up and down stairs as much as Jack did. There were lifts, after all. He’d rather incoming cadets didn’t see him running for no reason.
“If I promise there’s no one there waiting to yell ‘surprise,’” Jack said, “can it be a surprise?”
He tried not to smile. Jack did get it, sometimes. When he forgot, he only forgot because he was trying too hard.
“I’ll take that as a yes!” Jack was grinning as he spun away up the stairs, happy for the first time since their dance had been interrupted earlier. “You’ll like it,” he called back down the stairwell. “It’s your kind of thing.”
Which was fine, until Jack got off on a restricted level, paying no attention to the signs and urgent warnings or even to Sky’s look as he followed. When Jack walked through a barred door, though, Sky put his foot down. Metaphorically. He didn’t really want to make enough noise for Jack to hear him on the other side--he had only the vaguest idea of where they were, and he didn’t want to call attention to either of them if he could help it.
Then the electronic lock on the door turned blue, the bar retracted, and Jack pulled the door open from the other side. The outside. Sky’s protest faded in his throat as he realized he was looking through the outer wall of the base. Jack was standing on an external maintenance access, the night pressing in around him even as the tiny safety lights at his feet tried to keep it at bay.
“I asked the others if you’d ever been up here before,” Jack said, studying his face. “They didn’t know what I was talking about, so I’m guessing not.”
“Where--” Sky stepped carefully out onto the walkway, putting a hand on one of the struts to steady himself. He could feel adrenaline, cold sweat on his hands, the sharp feeling of danger as the Power responded to his body’s instinctive recoil. They were standing in open air on an access that clung to the outside of the base some sixteen stories up. He was pretty sure no one was allowed up here without safety equipment.
“Under the observation deck,” Jack said, pointing up. He was holding onto the next strut down, leaning casually against it while he followed the direction of his finger with his eyes. “Ruins the stargazing, but it’s still the best view of the city there is.”
Sky shot a quick look above them. It was closer than it felt. There were no lights in the supports over his head--the ones at his feet were the observation deck lights, he realized. The same ones that appeared to line the upper levels of the base from the street.
Up close, it was a different story.
“You actually can stargaze from higher up,” Jack was saying. “And it’s worth it to get away from the city lights, but the cameras are a lot better up there. No one pays much attention to this level.”
“I didn’t even know you could get out here.” His fingers clenched reflexively on the support as he stared down, wondering if the Power would do anything for someone who took a dive from a height like this. “If we fell from here, we could die.”
“Don’t fall,” Jack advised.
Sky lifted his gaze to the only other person crazy enough to enjoy a place like this, and he felt his expression softening without his conscious consent. Jack was dark and elusive here on this narrow walkway of wind and shadow. The safety lights washed out the red in his uniform until only his silhouette remained, black braids whipping wild and free as he leaned out over the edge.
Sky suppressed the urge to call him back, to get Jack away from danger like this. They were Jack’s shadows to haunt, if he chose. And if he chose to bring Sky with him... well. He was here, wasn’t he?
“Too late,” Sky said softly.
Jack turned, pulling himself back before he brushed his braids out of his face and looked at Sky. In the dim light of the safeties and the sharper spill of illumination from the door behind them, Jack’s smile was quirky and strangely peaceful. “I got you something. In Brazil.
“Well,” Jack amended. “On one of the islands. I’ve been trying to figure out how to give it to you. Since I screwed up so badly the first time, I mean.”
He knew. Just like that, he knew what Jack was doing. He had no idea what to do about it. He didn’t know what to say, how to look at him, when to breathe.
Because Jack wasn’t kidding this time.
“They have this tradition,” Jack offered, putting his hands in his pockets. “Nothing lasts forever, right? But you can choose to keep going. You can choose to change when someone else changes. You can choose to start over, when you have to.”
Jack pulled something out of his pocket, straightened up, and went down on one knee in front of Sky. He looked very smooth, but Sky saw his free hand go to the walkway. Steadying himself. So that was what you noticed at a time like this, Sky thought.
“Will you keep going with me?” Jack was saying. He held something up, in the safeties’ shadow but it caught the light from the door and Sky knew perfectly well what it was. “For as long as we can?”
“How long is that?” His voice sounded strange in his ears, uncertain and not strong at all. Not even slightly like someone who knew what they were doing.
“I hope for the rest of our lives,” Jack said. For once, he sounded completely serious. “But the ring’s not made of metal, Sky. It’s made of shell, and it’ll break. Just like us. We’ll get mad, we’ll fight, something will happen and one or both of us won’t be the same. We’ll have to make this choice, over and over again. To keep going. To stay with each other.
“Nothing lasts forever,” Jack repeated, “and one promise isn’t gonna be enough. It’s gonna take a lot of them. Not one big promise at the beginning, but lots of little ones, all along the way. It’ll probably be a lot of work. But I’m ready to do it if you are.”
He really had no idea what to do. Or what to say. Mostly what to do, though. Was he supposed to take the ring? Was he supposed to let Jack give it to him?
He couldn’t tell if he hesitated too long, of if Jack had always planned to end with, “Will you marry me?”
“We haven’t even talked about it,” Sky blurted out. “How do we--we live on an SPD base. We--you have a cat! Do you want kids? What if Time Force comes back?”
“Whoa, stop,” Jack said. “So not the question, Sky. Focus.”
“But--”
“Look,” Jack interrupted. “You just said we haven’t talked about any of those things. So consider this your invitation to start and just take the ring, okay? You can always break it later.”
Sky stared at him. “You’re not serious.”
“I’m proposing to you with no net and no safety ropes,” Jack reminded him, and Sky was suddenly sure that he wasn’t talking about the location. “I’m pretty damn serious.”
“Okay,” Sky said. It was so quiet he wasn’t sure Jack heard it, so he added, “Yes,” and awkwardly offered a hand to help Jack up.
Jack just smiled up at him. “Wrong hand.”
Sky swallowed. He supposed that answered the question. Without a word, he offered Jack his left hand, and he watched his... fiance? He watched Jack ease it onto his finger. It fit tighter than he expected, and it occurred to him suddenly that--the way Jack explained it--it was as much a wedding ring as it was an engagement ring.
“Do you get one?” he asked abruptly.
Jack just tilted his hand to one side in the light, apparently inspecting his effort. “I guess that’s up to you,” he said.
Sky’s fingers curled around his, and Jack looked up. “Can we kiss now?” Sky wanted to know.
Jack grinned. “Not out here. You know if we fell from up here, we could die?”
Sky tried not to smile, but it was losing battle. “Don’t fall.”
“Too late,” Jack replied. He let Sky help him up, jerking his head toward the open door. “Inside for kissing? It’s not as romantic, but the drop isn’t quite as terrifying, either.”
“Being practical can be romantic,” Sky told him. He almost let Jack’s hand slide out of his, but he remembered the feeling of Jack pulling him off of the balcony and down the hall. He would have followed Jack anywhere. So he adjusted his fingers and clasped Jack’s hand again, tugging him gently back through the side of the base.
“Also?” Jack said from behind him. “I don’t have a cat.”
“Just because B Squad thinks it’s their mascot doesn’t mean it isn’t your cat,” Sky replied.
“Oh, Sophie’s kitten?” Jack stepped up close as Sky turned, not bothering to close the door behind them. Lights twinkled through the darkness just beyond the open door, winking in and out as Jack leaned into him. “She isn’t mine.”
Sometimes, Sky thought, arms sliding around him, they were all Jack’s.
prompt #28: you only hurt the ones you love
word count: 2500
rating: T
summary: "I think the party's self-sustaining by now. Want to go have our own?"
Team Building with Jack Landors (you only hurt the ones you love)
by *Andrea
“Wrong way,” Z said, appearing in front of him with no warning whatsoever.
Sky tried not to jump, but no matter how long he’d known her he still couldn’t get used to that. “It’s not a one-way street,” he told her. “People are allowed to walk through this particular doorway in either direction.”
“Jack’s here,” she said.
“Yeah, I guessed that from the angelic choir. Can I go now?”
“He’s on the balcony,” she continued. “I’ve been sent specifically to make sure you’re also on the balcony in the next five minutes. I’ve been authorized to bribe you.”
Sky couldn’t help it. He looked up at the balcony.
“It’s an unspecified bribe of your choosing,” Z was saying. “To be redeemed with Jack at any time. I’d take advantage of it, if I were you. He can be kind of obnoxious, but he usually makes good on offers like that.”
“Does he know about the--”
“Thrones?” Z finished for him. “Yeah. He sent C Squad off in search of cameras. I think he has an escape route planned from the balcony.”
Sky held up a hand. He didn’t need to hear any more, and he was pretty sure he didn’t want to. This was the part of being a Red Ranger that they never told you about beforehand: the parties, the groupies, and the really weird publicity that went with them.
Or, in fairness, this was what they didn’t tell you about Jack Landors being a Red Ranger. Sky couldn’t imagine drawing this much attention on his own, no matter what color he wore. He sometimes suspected he could be anyone off the street and get the same treatment, as long as he was dating Jack.
“Psst.” The balcony was empty, save for the whisper that came out of the wall. Jack followed, quickly enough that Sky couldn’t locate his voice before he saw his face. “I hear I’m supposed to fight for you.”
“I hear the punch was spiked five too many times,” Sky retorted. “You throw a hell of a party, Jack.”
“I think it’s self-sustaining by now,” Jack observed. “Want to go have our own?”
Sky tried to frown at him, but he looked utterly unintentional. “I was just leaving.”
“It’s safer up this way,” Jack told him. “Not so many people in the halls. Also, I want to show you something.”
Sky didn’t move. “I swear to god,” he said, “if you’re setting me up? If there’s a group of people somewhere, waiting to leap out and yell ‘surprise’--”
“Everyone is here,” Jack interrupted. “Look.”
When Sky didn’t, Jack held out his arm and swept it across the mess hall. “Seriously, who else could I find? Everyone I could possibly want to embarrass you in front of is here. And if we leave before they notice us up here, they’ll still be here when we’re somewhere far away.”
“How far?” Sky demanded suspiciously.
Jack eyed him. “You’re mad at me for something,” he said. “What? The pictures? I wasn’t even there; I have no idea what they look like. You’re the one who got caught making out with Syd.”
“There was no making out,” Sky snapped. “I knew I should have grabbed that camera the second Z set it down.”
“I heard there was tequila, too,” Jack remarked. “Did the camera show up before or after that?”
Sky paused, surprised enough by this that he just looked at Jack for a long moment. “What tequila?” he asked, when he was sure Jack actually meant two nights ago. “There wasn’t any tequila.”
“I heard there was,” Jack said. “And kissing.”
“Syd kissed me on the cheek,” Sky told him. “I kissed her hair. It was just for some stupid pictures Z wanted to take to give to you. Because we were dressed up, she said. I assumed you’d already seen them.”
“Nope.” Jack looked exactly the way he’d looked throughout the entire conversation, which Sky was only now starting to realize was a bad sign. Jack wasn’t playing with him, he was just looking for reassurance. And Sky wasn’t giving it.
“There wasn’t any tequila,” he repeated. “Z and Dan made some hard lemonade, and they shared it around. It wasn’t tough stuff. Everyone had some, except for Bridge and Rose. And Charlie. Rose wouldn’t let her. Something about her meds.”
“Z said she was going to tell on you,” Jack said. “About the tequila. She seemed surprised when I didn’t know.”
“Oh, for the--” Sky rolled his eyes. “You do know. That story about Charlie came up again. The night before Dru left, with the tequila... we all played Spin the Bottle? I swear, we’re never going to live that down.
“Z’s giving me the signal,” Jack said. “We gotta get out of here.”
“Jack--” Sky reached for him, trying to apologize without saying the words.
Jack grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the nearest door. “Later,” he said over his shoulder. “Unless you want C Squad to be posting their own pictures all over the mess hall.”
That was a convincing argument. Sky let himself be led, but they didn’t make it far down the hall before Jack shoved into a stairwell and let the fire door clang shut behind them. He’d never spent as much time in stairwells as he had since knowing Jack.
“Up,” Jack said, letting go of his hand to grab the railing and swing around. “Coming?”
“Where?” Sky asked, but of course he was coming. He just didn’t race up and down stairs as much as Jack did. There were lifts, after all. He’d rather incoming cadets didn’t see him running for no reason.
“If I promise there’s no one there waiting to yell ‘surprise,’” Jack said, “can it be a surprise?”
He tried not to smile. Jack did get it, sometimes. When he forgot, he only forgot because he was trying too hard.
“I’ll take that as a yes!” Jack was grinning as he spun away up the stairs, happy for the first time since their dance had been interrupted earlier. “You’ll like it,” he called back down the stairwell. “It’s your kind of thing.”
Which was fine, until Jack got off on a restricted level, paying no attention to the signs and urgent warnings or even to Sky’s look as he followed. When Jack walked through a barred door, though, Sky put his foot down. Metaphorically. He didn’t really want to make enough noise for Jack to hear him on the other side--he had only the vaguest idea of where they were, and he didn’t want to call attention to either of them if he could help it.
Then the electronic lock on the door turned blue, the bar retracted, and Jack pulled the door open from the other side. The outside. Sky’s protest faded in his throat as he realized he was looking through the outer wall of the base. Jack was standing on an external maintenance access, the night pressing in around him even as the tiny safety lights at his feet tried to keep it at bay.
“I asked the others if you’d ever been up here before,” Jack said, studying his face. “They didn’t know what I was talking about, so I’m guessing not.”
“Where--” Sky stepped carefully out onto the walkway, putting a hand on one of the struts to steady himself. He could feel adrenaline, cold sweat on his hands, the sharp feeling of danger as the Power responded to his body’s instinctive recoil. They were standing in open air on an access that clung to the outside of the base some sixteen stories up. He was pretty sure no one was allowed up here without safety equipment.
“Under the observation deck,” Jack said, pointing up. He was holding onto the next strut down, leaning casually against it while he followed the direction of his finger with his eyes. “Ruins the stargazing, but it’s still the best view of the city there is.”
Sky shot a quick look above them. It was closer than it felt. There were no lights in the supports over his head--the ones at his feet were the observation deck lights, he realized. The same ones that appeared to line the upper levels of the base from the street.
Up close, it was a different story.
“You actually can stargaze from higher up,” Jack was saying. “And it’s worth it to get away from the city lights, but the cameras are a lot better up there. No one pays much attention to this level.”
“I didn’t even know you could get out here.” His fingers clenched reflexively on the support as he stared down, wondering if the Power would do anything for someone who took a dive from a height like this. “If we fell from here, we could die.”
“Don’t fall,” Jack advised.
Sky lifted his gaze to the only other person crazy enough to enjoy a place like this, and he felt his expression softening without his conscious consent. Jack was dark and elusive here on this narrow walkway of wind and shadow. The safety lights washed out the red in his uniform until only his silhouette remained, black braids whipping wild and free as he leaned out over the edge.
Sky suppressed the urge to call him back, to get Jack away from danger like this. They were Jack’s shadows to haunt, if he chose. And if he chose to bring Sky with him... well. He was here, wasn’t he?
“Too late,” Sky said softly.
Jack turned, pulling himself back before he brushed his braids out of his face and looked at Sky. In the dim light of the safeties and the sharper spill of illumination from the door behind them, Jack’s smile was quirky and strangely peaceful. “I got you something. In Brazil.
“Well,” Jack amended. “On one of the islands. I’ve been trying to figure out how to give it to you. Since I screwed up so badly the first time, I mean.”
He knew. Just like that, he knew what Jack was doing. He had no idea what to do about it. He didn’t know what to say, how to look at him, when to breathe.
Because Jack wasn’t kidding this time.
“They have this tradition,” Jack offered, putting his hands in his pockets. “Nothing lasts forever, right? But you can choose to keep going. You can choose to change when someone else changes. You can choose to start over, when you have to.”
Jack pulled something out of his pocket, straightened up, and went down on one knee in front of Sky. He looked very smooth, but Sky saw his free hand go to the walkway. Steadying himself. So that was what you noticed at a time like this, Sky thought.
“Will you keep going with me?” Jack was saying. He held something up, in the safeties’ shadow but it caught the light from the door and Sky knew perfectly well what it was. “For as long as we can?”
“How long is that?” His voice sounded strange in his ears, uncertain and not strong at all. Not even slightly like someone who knew what they were doing.
“I hope for the rest of our lives,” Jack said. For once, he sounded completely serious. “But the ring’s not made of metal, Sky. It’s made of shell, and it’ll break. Just like us. We’ll get mad, we’ll fight, something will happen and one or both of us won’t be the same. We’ll have to make this choice, over and over again. To keep going. To stay with each other.
“Nothing lasts forever,” Jack repeated, “and one promise isn’t gonna be enough. It’s gonna take a lot of them. Not one big promise at the beginning, but lots of little ones, all along the way. It’ll probably be a lot of work. But I’m ready to do it if you are.”
He really had no idea what to do. Or what to say. Mostly what to do, though. Was he supposed to take the ring? Was he supposed to let Jack give it to him?
He couldn’t tell if he hesitated too long, of if Jack had always planned to end with, “Will you marry me?”
“We haven’t even talked about it,” Sky blurted out. “How do we--we live on an SPD base. We--you have a cat! Do you want kids? What if Time Force comes back?”
“Whoa, stop,” Jack said. “So not the question, Sky. Focus.”
“But--”
“Look,” Jack interrupted. “You just said we haven’t talked about any of those things. So consider this your invitation to start and just take the ring, okay? You can always break it later.”
Sky stared at him. “You’re not serious.”
“I’m proposing to you with no net and no safety ropes,” Jack reminded him, and Sky was suddenly sure that he wasn’t talking about the location. “I’m pretty damn serious.”
“Okay,” Sky said. It was so quiet he wasn’t sure Jack heard it, so he added, “Yes,” and awkwardly offered a hand to help Jack up.
Jack just smiled up at him. “Wrong hand.”
Sky swallowed. He supposed that answered the question. Without a word, he offered Jack his left hand, and he watched his... fiance? He watched Jack ease it onto his finger. It fit tighter than he expected, and it occurred to him suddenly that--the way Jack explained it--it was as much a wedding ring as it was an engagement ring.
“Do you get one?” he asked abruptly.
Jack just tilted his hand to one side in the light, apparently inspecting his effort. “I guess that’s up to you,” he said.
Sky’s fingers curled around his, and Jack looked up. “Can we kiss now?” Sky wanted to know.
Jack grinned. “Not out here. You know if we fell from up here, we could die?”
Sky tried not to smile, but it was losing battle. “Don’t fall.”
“Too late,” Jack replied. He let Sky help him up, jerking his head toward the open door. “Inside for kissing? It’s not as romantic, but the drop isn’t quite as terrifying, either.”
“Being practical can be romantic,” Sky told him. He almost let Jack’s hand slide out of his, but he remembered the feeling of Jack pulling him off of the balcony and down the hall. He would have followed Jack anywhere. So he adjusted his fingers and clasped Jack’s hand again, tugging him gently back through the side of the base.
“Also?” Jack said from behind him. “I don’t have a cat.”
“Just because B Squad thinks it’s their mascot doesn’t mean it isn’t your cat,” Sky replied.
“Oh, Sophie’s kitten?” Jack stepped up close as Sky turned, not bothering to close the door behind them. Lights twinkled through the darkness just beyond the open door, winking in and out as Jack leaned into him. “She isn’t mine.”
Sometimes, Sky thought, arms sliding around him, they were all Jack’s.