Losers Fic: Walk a While With Me, 6/6
Jun. 25th, 2012 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyjanellyTitle: Walk a While With Me 6/6
Author: LadyJanelly
Fandom: The Losers
Rating: Mature
Characters/Pairing: Jake Jensen/Carlos “Cougar” Alvarez
Warnings: Bullying, hazing, homophobia, racism, internalized homophobia, violence, language, mentions of previous assault and sexual assault, Jeff Foxworthy paraphrase, Leverage cameo
Notes: Thanks to Peaceful_sands for her hand-holding, cheer-leading and beta-reading
Title from the Led Zeppelin song “Over the Hills and Far Away”
Feedback is always cherished, from squee to con-crit to lovely thinky thoughts.
Summary: AU—Jake Jensen left the Army before he ever had a chance to be a Loser. Cougar meets him anyway.
Sometimes what a man needs to be happy is losing the battle he’s been fighting his whole life.
This is the end, except for a post with a few notes and the "Taste-tour of Dallas." I swear, I got almost all of my favorite restaurants in there. :)
It takes an hour for Clay to drive him onto the base, get his finger taped and splinted, to fill out the paperwork. The story is he slipped on some ice and caught it wrong when he fell, and the embarrassment of such a stupid accident is a small price to pay to be able to go to Jake.
Roque and Pooch are still up when Cougar and Clay get back to the house.
“Were you just not gonna tell us?” Roque asks as he walks in the door, and Cougar pushes past him without a word. “Six months, man, we’ve killed for you, we’ve bled for you and you don’t tell us shit like this?”
There’s a thump and Cougar thinks Roque just punched the wall, hears the low rumble of Clay’s voice telling him to stow it.
Cougar pulls open his closet and grabs his go-bag and the case that holds his rifle, the one he owns himself and doesn’t have to check out of a weapons locker to use. It’s not as sweet as the M40, but it’ll do in a pinch.
He drops his dog tags on the bed, because they don’t match any of the names he’s traveling with. He leaves his wallet too and the only things to link him to Carlos Alvarez are his fingerprints and his phone, but neither can be helped.
Clay is waiting outside his bedroom door with the keys to the car.
“What are you going to do, Cougar?” he asks and Cougar shakes his head.
“Whatever Jake needs.”
Clay frowns, and glances pointedly at the rifle case.
Cougar shrugs. His hand throbs. “The man was god-damn special forces. He’s not calling me to hold his hand.”
Clay crosses his arms. “This guy would ask you to kill for him?”
“I said what he needs, not what he asks for.”
Clay doesn’t like it still, but knowing that Cougar isn’t off to play hitman at another’s orders seems to reassure him some. Enough. He clasps Cougar’s shoulder, passes him the keys and then lets him go. “Vaya con Dios, Carlos,” he says and Cougar turns to leave.
Pooch intercepts him on the way to the door, a bottle of Tylenol in his hand and such a worried expression on his face that Cougar softens, just for a second. “I’ll be back,” he promises without knowing for sure if it’ll be possible.
Pooch nods. “Printed you a map,” he says and tucks the folded papers into the top of Cougar’s bag, and then he steps back, obviously not liking standing there while a team-mate goes off into uncertain danger.
Roque stands and glares, arms crossed over his chest. If Cougar had more time, he’d be worried about that.
Cougar backs out of the driveway and already this life feels far away, and only Jake is real.
He drives. West by south-west, just over the speed-limit. If he gets stopped, the trip will be over before it’s begun; a Mexican in a sports car with a high-powered rifle and handguns has to be careful, driving anywhere, but especially in the Deep South.
Around three, the lack of sleep starts to override the burning need to get to Jake and he pulls off to get gas, buys a coffee and digs in his bag for one of the stimulants he filched from the stock the Army has assigned to him on when it could be days before his target appeared.
Outside of Tyler, he buys a pay-as-you-go phone and calls Jake’s cell phone, to let Teresa know he’ll be in in a few hours. She gives him the last directions up to the hospital, and he thinks she sounds better, now that she knows he’s on the way.
===========
Cougar takes just a second in the hospital parking lot, reties his hair and settles his hat on his head, making sure he looks more like a worried family member than a crazy person who drove seventeen hours straight to get there. He goes into the hospital’s lobby and up to the information desk.
“Jacob Jensen,” he says, and the receptionist types on a computer. The winter sun is shining through the five-story tall windows of the edifice, bright when Cougar expects all the world to be dark with worry.
“Mrs. Jensen is with him now, and he’s only allowed one at a time. Should I let her know you’re here, Mr…”
“Carlos,” he says, “Just tell her Carlos is here.”
He finds a seat and sits to wait, hat in his hands as he turns it slowly, feeling the worn-smooth rim between his middle-finger and thumb, the seam at the edge that marks a full rotation. He counts eighteen rotations and then Teresa is there, her dark eyes red-rimmed but dry.
“Carlos,” she says and he stands. She steps in and hugs him and he catches her weight. “Come on.” She pulls herself together after only a second. “I’ll take you up to the room. If you want to stay, I’ll go to the hotel. I just—I don’t want him to be alone.”
“I don’t know yet,” he says as they get into the elevator. “Let me talk to him.”
Teresa nods and when the elevator stops they get out. She leads him past the nurses’ station, down a maze of hallways and then knocks on a door. When there’s no answer, she opens it and nods Cougar in. “He looks like hell,” she warns him, “But he’s going to be okay. Don’t be worried if he doesn’t wake up. He kept getting upset. They had to sedate him a little while ago.”
Cougar steps in and is glad for the warning. Jake. Dios, it was four days ago that they were lying in bed together, four days ago that Jake was smiling, healthy, happy. Now there are bandages on his head, bruises everywhere that Cougar can see. One eye is swollen shut, a line of sutures running almost the full length of his eyebrow. An oxygen tube is looped under his nose, a cast on his left arm and an ice-pack on his right hand. Cougar has to stare at the readout from the heart monitor for a minute or more, to reassure himself that Jake is only sleeping.
He can smell the smoke over the disinfectant and medicinal odors of the hospital.
“Jake,” he says at last, sitting in the chair beside the bed. “I am here, mi amor. I have come.”
He sits in the chair and he stares at Jake, watching the rise and fall of his chest, the utter stillness of his body. When he can’t take it anymore he stands and goes out again, sits down beside Teresa on a padded bench down the hall, Jake’s door still in sight. She leans her shoulder against his and he lets her, lends her his strength.
“Your husband?” he asks at last, more for something to take his mind from his worries than from any burning need to know.
She chuckles, a mirthless sound. “Technically.”
He raises an eyebrow, to see if she’ll continue or not.
“He was my best friend, and I had the biggest crush on his brother.” She shrugs. “I turned up pregnant the year Jake went to basic. Nick, the douche, went to Vegas. Jake said he didn’t want his niece growing up without family. He wanted to give her as much as he could, so he put a ring on my finger.”
She looks at Cougar, her tone firm so there are no misunderstandings. “It was never more than that. A way for him to take care of us, for us to take care of him. We never—we spent our wedding night sitting in a hotel room watching The Princess Bride, with me seven months pregnant, and that’s as romantic as it got.”
He expects to feel relief, and when he doesn’t, realizes it was because he never worried, not about this, not with Jake.
“What happened to your hand?” Teresa asks, and he shrugs.
“Slipped on the ice. Landed badly.” He gives his lips the little twist at the corner that makes the words a joke instead of a lie and she looks sad.
He goes back into Jake’s room a little while later. Teresa goes to her hotel room to nap.
“Jake,” he calls again, soft, and Jake’s face twitches; the blip of his heart rate picks up and he takes a deeper breath, sighs it out past his split lip.
“I am here,” Cougar says, wanting to reach out, to touch him, but afraid of startling him, afraid of Jake hurting himself fighting back.
Jake’s good eye blinks open and he lies so still as he reorients himself, figures out where he is.
“Cou?” he rasps, a hurtful, awful sound.
“Si. Teresa called. I came.” He sees a plastic cup with a straw on the bedside, fills it with water from the bathroom sink and puts it to Jake’s lips. Jake sips and then closes his eye again. Cougar sits and rests his hand on Jake’s upper arm, above the cast. The blip of the heart monitor slows by a few beats per minute.
“Sexy, huh?” Jake jokes and Cougar would shake him if he didn’t look so bad.
“Don’t,” he says. “It will heal.”
Jake is quiet and Cougar thinks he may have fallen asleep again, until he says “Cougar, I need a favor.”
“Jake. Anything.”
Jake’s lips twitch into a painful-looking smile. “Got a pen?”
“I’ll get one,” he says, and expects Jake to be asleep again when he returns from the nurses’ station.
“Are we alone?” Jake rasps and Cougar realizes that between the swollen eye and not having his glasses, Jake is practically blind.
“We are,” Cougar tells him.
“There were three of them,” Jake says when Cougar sits down again. “Remember those guys? The ones in the alley that were gonna burn you?”
Cougar goes cold and hard inside. God-damn. This is his fault too, that they even targeted Jake.
“I remember them,” he says.
Jake coughs a laugh. “I may have fucked with them a little too hard. I dunno, man. They must have followed me home from the club. The night after you left. I dunno how long they’ve been looking for me, but they found me. Burned my place, kicked my ass.
“I need you to talk to them, Cougar. I couldn’t ask anybody else to do it. Nobody else could be safe and do it. Couldn’t trust the cops. A lot of shit can go down when a man’s out on bail. Just gonna get worse.” He flicks his tongue out to moisten his lips, and Cougar offers him the straw again. He sighs and lays his head down again when he’s done drinking. “I can’t risk them looking up the owner of that house and seeing that I own another one. I can’t have them find Teresa and Sophie. I need you to go and tell them it’s over. They win. I’m sorry. I’ll fix what I can and not fuck with them anymore.”
Cougar takes a deep breath, trying to calm himself. He nods, because Jake needs him to. “I will take care of this,” he promises, and it’s even the truth.
One by one, Jake whispers out the names, addresses, phone numbers, last places of employment, vehicle descriptions, tag numbers. Cougar writes it all down in his neat, tiny print.
“Sleep now,” he tells Jake when the list is through.
“’Kay,” Jake agrees, but he fights it anyway. “Cougs. It’s okay, right? That Teresa called you?”
“Si,” Cougar tells him, although he has no idea. “Sleep.”
And Jake does.
Cougar stays. Sits at Jake’s bedside as the nurses change shift and rush hour churns up the traffic on the road he can see from Jake’s window. Teresa comes back, a few hours after she’d left, looking less tired.
“He was awake for a while,” Cougar tells her. “He should be calmer now.”
“Carlos…” she says, her concern for him obvious.
He shakes his head. “Jake would not ask for anything that couldn’t be done.”
She hugs him again and then he goes.
============
He picks up a city map with cash at the gas station down the street from the hospital, then gets a room in a seedy hotel in a heavily Hispanic corner of town. He switches the uppers he’s on for downers and sleeps for six hours, leaving the alarm on his phone to wake him up.
The bars are closing and the prostitutes on the corner looking tired when he gets out of bed, washes his face and pulls out the map. He marks his objectives, two of them less than a mile apart, the last only a little further. He considers his approaches and exit possibilities, but without seeing the lay of the land it’s impossible to be certain he’s making the best choices. He checks through his available armament. Six-shot revolver, knife, garrote, rifle.
He drives, one slow pass by each location and then parks Clay’s car far out of the way. The winter sun is breaking the horizon, pale and anemic. Cougar finds a spot on the first man’s apartment-porch to wait, behind the short wooden fence, out of sight of the neighbors. Waits until he can see the shadow of the man behind his blinds. He taps on the door, pistol held down and out of sight, awkward in his left hand. He hears the security chain slide and the doorknob turns and Cougar hits it hard with his shoulder, bowling the man back, sprawled on the floor, face bloodied. Cougar remembers him, remembers being on his knees as this man poured alcohol over him, as this man was ready to burn him.
He closes the door behind him and chases him into a corner, this man who has hurt Jake.
“Quiet!” he hisses and the fear of the gun catches the breath in the man’s throat, keeps him from shouting.
There is a moment of crystal clarity, that of all the things Cougar has done in his life, what he’s about to do is the thing that Jake will not be able to forgive him for. Will not be able to forget.
But men like this, they don’t stop while they’re behind, always convinced that one more attack will leave them the victor. Jake may hope, but Cougar knows, no amount of reason, of surrender, of compromise is going to get through to them.
“You will not hurt him again,” he says, and the man nods, frantic, and Cougar can see the lie in his eyes.
He steps forward, snaps his foot up and out and the man chokes around his crushed throat, curls and kicks.
Cougar leaves the man still twitching out his death-throes, turns the knob with his shirt-tail and tucks the pistol in his pocket.
There are a few other people leaving for work, walking bleary-eyed from door to car, but none of them gives him a single glance, much less a second.
He’s waiting in the second man’s apartment when he comes home after work, and the garrote is a trick to use with one hand injured, but he makes it work, holding on tight and taking the elbows the man whips back into his ribs.
The last guy lives in a third-storey loft in a renovated textile factory, all brick walls and wide-open spaces. Cougar just shoots him from the abandoned warehouse down the street, the rifle awkward to use with his left hand and right eye. He hits the guy once in the arm and twice in his center-mass, with a last shot to the head, a shameful mess, but it looks more amateur this way. He wonders if the CIA handlers he’s worked with would be proud or ashamed of the crime scene. He picks up his brass and is across the roof and three blocks away before he hears sirens. He slides behind the wheel of Clay’s car and drives slow and easy out of the parking lot.
He criss-crosses the city for a while, eyes on the rear-view, but nobody’s following him.
Jake is awake when Cougar gets back to the hospital, Teresa sitting at his bedside, laptop open, reading him real-estate listings.
“Carlos,” she says, her dark eyes looking him over as if for wounds.
“Hey, ‘Resa,” Jake rasps, “Can you see if they have another of those apple juices?”
She frowns but doesn’t object. “I’m going to go see if they have a cure for bullshit in the gift-shop,” she adds, “You guys take your time.”
Cougar gives her a grateful nod and sits in the seat that she abandoned, his hat in his hands.
“It’s done,” he says when the room is clear. He’d take Jake’s hand, but his knuckles are all busted, split, swollen and black with bruises.
“You’re okay?” Jake asks, and Cougar nods.
“Thank God,” Jake sighs, and relaxes back against his pillows. “I didn’t want to ask you for that. I didn’t want you taking that kind of a risk, but I didn’t know what else to do…”
“Shhh,” Cougar hushes him. He finds an uninjured spot on Jake’s shoulder and rests his fingertips there.
“I have to get back to base,” Cougar says in the quiet. “I’ll go after I leave here.”
“I’m sorry,” Jake says again and Cougar cuts him off.
“You needed me. I came.”
“I love you,” Jake says and Cougar squeezes his shoulder, unwilling to hear these words when he doubts they would be said if Jake knew what he’d done.
“Be well,” Cougar says and he stands, slides his hat onto his head and walks to the door. He passes Teresa in the hall.
“You can take your daughter home now,” he says, and walks away before she can reply.
It’s a long damn drive back to North Carolina, as he leaves behind everything that makes him real.
===============
He stops at a hotel in Georgia, listens as the woman at the desk warns him about loud music or smoking pot or having other people in his room. When he finally gets the keys, the place reeks of cigarettes and the air-conditioner ticks as it runs, but he locks the door and takes a pill and doesn’t wake up until checkout time.
He smashes the phone he’d used in Dallas, makes sure the little card is broken in half, and drops it in the hotel dumpster out back.
It’s dark when he gets back to the house, but the lights are still on. He fumbles his keys in the lock, hands still buzzing with the hum of the road, and too many hours behind the wheel.
Clay comes into the living room to see who it is, looks him up and down. “You okay?” he asks and Cougar nods.
“Si. Tired.”
“Thought you’d be gone longer.”
He shakes his head, not willing to explain that he didn’t want to be there when Jake found out what he’d done. “Mission get scrapped?”
Clay nods. “Not gonna run it with a comms guy on loan and a sniper we’ve never worked with before. They put another team on it.”
“Good,” Cougar says, relieved, and then he runs out of words, turns and goes down the hall to his room. Stows his bag and his rifle in the closet and gathers his dog-tags from the bed. He hesitates for a second, and then pulls them on. Waits for that feeling of right and home that they’ve always given him but it doesn’t come.
He lies down on top of his blankets and stares at the ceiling, remembering Jake’s smile and Jake’s kiss and trying to reconcile himself to never knowing these things again.
===========
Roque’s fist banging on his door wakes him in the morning. “Breakfast!” he yells and Cougar knows it’s bullshit because they have yet to have breakfast together in the morning unless there was a mission that day and Clay wanted to make sure they’d all packed on some good slow carbs.
He rolls out of bed anyway. Figures he’ll let them interrogate him now instead of later.
The kitchen smells of pancakes and Cougar slides into the chair closest to the door. Pooch flips a couple onto a plate and they let Cougar get the syrup poured before the questions start. Pooch is the one to break the ice, being the one least likely to get punched in the nuts.
“So, your um, your Jake. He okay?”
Cougar nods and cuts his pancakes. “He will be. Busted up pretty good.”
“So how long has it been? You and this hairdresser?” Roque’s voice is accusing. Good cop, bad cop then, with Clay watching it all.
“Es complicado.” Even he doesn’t know how to measure it. From the time they first met, and Cougar stopped looking for other men to fuck him? From the kiss, from when they started talking about it? Has it been eight months or three or only two weeks?
“You serious about him?” Pooch asks and the question is a stab to the guts. Because he is, more serious than he’s been about anything in his life except for maybe the military or protecting his family with his absence.
“It doesn’t matter.” He stabs a stack of pancake chunks and stuffs them in his mouth.
“The hell does that mean?” Roque demands, and if he wasn’t so torn up, Cougar would smile to hear his voice go from belligerent to protective. “What the fuck, he calls you to come running to Dallas and he’s just fucking around?”
Cougar is on his feet before he’s thought of standing, the flats of his hands slamming down on the table, making the cutlery jump and Clay’s glass spill over. Fresh pain stabs through his broken finger, sharp and clear.
“I fucked up!” he shouts, unable to have his team think of Jake as faithless, as less than the man that Cougar knows him to be. And then he turns and leaves the kitchen, before he loses his temper and goes over the table at Roque.
They don’t corner him about it again, but he catches Clay looking introspective, Pooch outright worried and Roque constipated often enough. He knows it’s because of him, he just doesn’t know what to do about it.
He goes in to the base every day for the rest of the week. Hits the sniper range and works on shooting off-handed, just for something to do. He’s been back at Bragg for nine days when Jake leaves a message on his phone. Five words. “Jesus, Cougar,” his tone soft with awe or horror. And then firmer, “Call me, okay?”
Cougar holds the phone in his hands, but can’t bring himself to dial. Can’t bear to hear the words he expects.
He puts it off another two weeks, and then he’s out of the splint and the team’s given another mission. South America this time, body-guarding some CIA guys as they negotiate with guerrillas for the return of a trio of rain-forest tourists turned hostages. It ends up with the Losers slipping into the camp while the CIA makes some noise, but all they find are shallow graves.
They fly back to Bragg, landing in the cool light of dawn. Cougar sits for his debriefing and he’s tired, so fucking tired. Tired of missions and killing and feeling nothing. Of hiding and pretending. He signs onto one of the unassigned computers and prints out a stack of forms. He spends every free moment thinking about them, or about Jake. He thinks about calling his madre.
The army is all he knows, and his heart isn’t in it any more. He fills the blanks in with his small, tidy print. Hand-delivers them to Clay instead of dropping them in his in-box.
Clay takes the papers, and puzzlement turns to surprise as he reads. “Cougar,” he sighs, “Are you sure about this? If you need another week, to go make up with your hairdresser, I’ll see what I can swing…”
But he’s shaking his head already. “This isn’t about Jake. The fight’s gone out of me,” he says. “I’m no use. To myself or my team.”
Clay rubs a hand over his stubble, and he looks so unhappy. “Okay,” he says at last. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll put my signature on it, but it has to be approved by the higher-ups.”
Cougar expects this. For it to be a struggle. Men like them seldom retire. He has always expected to die with his rifle in his hand.
“Gracias,” he says and Clay shoos him out of the office.
He goes back to his room and dials Jake’s number.
=========
“Cougar?” Jake’s voice is breathy, like he ran for the phone.
“Si.” He can barely say the word for the tightness in his chest.
“I need to see you,” Jake says, soft and open and hope flares because he doesn’t think Jake would make him come face-to-face just to dump him. Cougar tries to tell himself that it doesn’t mean Jake wants to keep him. It could be about the three bodies he left on the ground in Dallas, an incriminating conversation that Jake doesn’t want to have over cell phone towers.
“I have no more leave,” Cougar says, even though Clay would probably fly him to Dallas himself if it meant a chance of Cougar not taking that early discharge.
“I’ll fly out,” Jake offers. “It’ll be another week or two before I’m up to it, but I’ll text you when I’ll be there. I’ll get a hotel room, and you can come by whenever you’re not needed on base.” Cougar thinks on it too long and Jake adds “If that’s okay. If you want to see me.”
“I’ll come,” he promises.
They are quiet on the phone then, Cougar just listening to Jake breathe. Then Pooch is banging on his door, letting him know the game’s starting and the beers are cold and to get his ass out there before Clay eats all the chips.
“I have to go,” he says and Jake replies, “Okay. I’ll see you soon.”
==============
On Tuesday, Cougar is told to report for a psych evaluation, and he has to smirk at the idea that they think a man would have to be crazy to want to leave a job where he goes to far away lands and shoots people in the head as the entirety of his occupation. The shrink asks him questions and he answers, yes, he’s tired, no, nothing has changed recently, no he hasn’t seen or done or suffered anything outside of the usual.
“You were injured recently?” The shrink asks, “A fall at home? Would you like to talk about that?”
Cougar looks down at his splinted hand and snorts his derision. Like such a small injury could have any bearing on his mental fitness.
“Do you have anything to add?” the man asks at the end of the session or evaluation or whatever the hell they’re calling it.
“If I could feel for the deaths I cause, I would not be able to do my job,” Cougar says. “But feeling nothing? Is no way to live.”
The man seems to take him seriously and signs him off as mentally fit to serve.
On Friday, Clay tells him there’s an interview set for noon, and to wear his dress greens. He unpacks them from the suit bag Teresa had loaned him and brushes the construction dust off of the knees, the dog hair off of his sleeve. He dresses up and goes in, stands at attention in front of Clay and his two superiors, and wonders what Clay has told them about Jake. If they know Cougar’s just a maricón playing at being macho.
He thinks of telling them, that he’s desviado, deviant, but he thinks that he kills people for the CIA on a regular enough basis that nobody will care who he wants to suck his dick.
The questions are more specific from the brass, but he says again, how tired he is, how long he’s served, how he doesn’t feel he can protect his team to the best of his ability. The guilt burns at him, because he’s honest enough to admit that even his impaired is better than some of the army’s snipers on their best days.
“So what exactly do you think you’re going to do out there in civilian life?” the man on Clay’s left asks, and Cougar’s lips twist into a smile for the first time since the interview started.
“I don’t know. Maybe buy a house and fix it up.”
“We’ll let you know,” one of them says eventually, “Dismissed.”
He goes, and even with the final decision still up in the air, he feels more free.
Pooch drives him back to the house and on the way he checks his phone. There’s a text from Jake: “Thursday, noon, flight 663.”
“I will pick you up,” he sends back, careful on the keys so he doesn’t look foolish.
=============
On Saturday Cougar takes his personal rifle to a civilian range for a couple hours and shoots off a hundred rounds or so. Enough wear on the rifling that he’s confident the ballistics will never match to any bullet recovered at a crime scene in Dallas.
=============
The official word comes down on Tuesday, and Clay drives Cougar in to the base to turn in his security badges, sign the final paperwork, receive his handshake and honorable discharge. He closes his eyes on the ride back, and feels disconnected from everything, all the weight gone from him. He doesn’t know where he’s going now, or who he’ll be, only that he’ll be free for the first time in his life.
Clay waits with him in the living room when Pooch and Roque get in. Faces serious enough that Pooch sits down right away and Roque reaches for the comfort of a knife.
“I’m out,” Cougar tells them. “I did not want to say before it was official, in case they denied me.”
Roque stands and leaves without a word, kicking the coffee table sideways on his way out and Clay sighs. “Give him a day or two.”
“Is this about your guy?” Pooch asks, trying to understand, and Cougar has to wonder why nobody thinks he could leave for himself. “I mean, I know first-hand that long-distance relationships are hard on you both, but…”
“No,” Cougar says, quiet but firm. “He understood, from the beginning. Who I was and what I could give to him. He’s only asked me to stay once, and only because he doesn’t know my team.”
Pooch nods and thinks on it and finally reaches out his hand. “Then you take care, and good luck. However things work out with you and him, remember you have friends.”
Cougar takes his hand. "Invite me,” he says, “When you find the courage to ask Jolene to marry you,” and Pooch laughs and looks flustered at the change of topic.
“I promise, man. An invitation for you and your Jake too.”
=============
Cougar rents a car to pick Jake up from the airport. It feels inappropriate to keep borrowing Clay’s when the man isn’t his CO anymore; he’s not allowed to drive the army’s loaner cars, and the roads are still too icy for the bike, even if he knew what shape Jake was going to be in. He gets to the arrivals door an hour early and watches the marquee as Jake’s plane gets closer and closer. Security won’t let non-travelers out to the gate, but he does wait at baggage claim, hat in his hands.
Spotting Jake in the incoming crowd isn’t hard, the man is so damn tall. He’s lost weight since Cougar last saw him standing, muscle-mass that he’ll have to work at to put back on. He looks healthy otherwise, standing straight and strong, arm out of the cast and only held a little stiff against his side, more like he’s afraid of getting hurt than in actual pain.
He looks pensive, uncertain, and then Cougar lifts his hat to catch his attention and Jake’s face lights up with such joy and hope and love that Cougar can’t help but smile back despite his worries. Jake walks up to him and Cougar should take the small bag off of his shoulder, should turn to walk with him to the baggage claim conveyor belt, but he can’t look away, even as Jake steps into his personal space, as they stand face to face.
Cougar reaches out and Jake doesn’t pull back, not when Cougar’s hand loops behind his neck, not when Cougar’s lips crash into his. The kiss is brief, and heat flares from Cougar’s neck to his cheeks as they pull away, at the audacity of what he’s done. He pulls back and looks around but nobody seems to care.
“Wow,” Jake says, and he reaches out to touch Cougar’s arm, like he can’t believe he’s real.
“I have a car,” Cougar says, and it’s not the smoothest change of topic, but Jake nods.
“Just need to get my bag. I didn’t want to be stuck carrying more than I was up to, on the plane.”
They stand side-by-side and watch the luggage go around, and when Jake points out his bag, Cougar plucks it off the turnstile and shoulders it, leading Jake out to the car.
“I wasn’t sure,” Jake says as he sits down, as the car doors close and Cougar slides the key into the ignition. “If you wanted me here. Not until just now. I thought I’d spend a week alone in a hotel room catching some fresh mountain air.”
Cougar hears a bark of laughter come from his own mouth. “Dios. I’d be a fool to not want you. Idiota.” His smile falters and they sit in the idling car, still in the parking spot. “I thought. After Dallas, what I did there…”
Jake’s hand whips out, fast as a snake, covers Cougar’s mouth. “No,” he says, firm and final. “That’s just—no. I shouldn’t have put you in that position, and I’m sure as hell not going to blame you for how it all went down. I’ve thought about this, Cougar. If it had been you in that hospital bed, I don’t know if I could have done any different.”
Cougar closes his eyes, letting Jake’s unexpected forgiveness wash over him. Then Jake’s lips are on his again, slow and gentle, more intimate than anybody but Jake has ever touched him.
“I have something for you,” Cougar says as they finally part. He reaches down the front of his shirt, catches the chain of his dog-tags and pulls them over his head. Jake looks stunned, lost, so Cougar takes Jake’s hand and opens it, lying the tags carefully in his palm, pooling the chain on top of them.
“Are you…” Jake starts to ask but the words catch in his throat, hope warring with caution in his eyes.
“I’m out,” Cougar says, and Jake breaks with the relief of it, pulling Cougar back for another kiss, rough and desperate.
=========
They spend all of that first day in the hotel room, Cougar reassuring himself that Jake’s okay, that he’s healed and getting stronger, acquainting himself with Jake’s new scars. Jake spends the time showing Cougar just how good the fucking can be when he’s not intentionally choosing assholes to do it to him, how good it can feel when his lover cares as much or more about his pleasure than their own.
They sprawl against each other, after, and Jake asks, “You coming back to Dallas with me?” all casual like he didn’t just have his dick up Cougar’s ass, like he didn’t just give him the orgasm of his life.
“Si,” Cougar nods. “If you’ll have me.”
“Now who’s being the idiot?” Jake asks, and holds him close.
They sleep tangled up in each other that night, and even with the pill he took to sleep, Jake’s awake before Cougar in the morning.
“You got anything you need to take care of here?” Jake asks, and Cougar thinks but can’t come up with anything, so they trade the rental car for a U-Haul van. Cougar can see the tension rising in Jake’s shoulders, in the way he carries himself as they get out of the van at the Losers’ house, light on the balls of his feet.
“Jake,” he says, soft, “These are my brothers.”
Jake nods but seems no more reassured.
Nobody is home so they pack Cougar’s things, what few there are. He leaves the rifle, better to not have it even in the same city as a trail of bodies he dropped. There are only clothes, a few books. He’s not attached to any of the furniture. It takes both of them to load the motorcycle in the van, and Jake is wincing and breathless by the time they get it strapped down. When it’s done Cougar gets a pair of beers out of the fridge and sits out on the front porch with Jake, sprawling in a pair of deck chairs even though it’s too damn cold for it. The house doesn’t feel like his anymore; sitting on the couch would be awkward.
Clay’s sports car is the first to pull up, Pooch and Roque behind him in a second vehicle. Cougar stands to greet them and Jake does too, and Cougar’s smart enough to notice that Jake keeps a hold of his beer bottle, even though it’s been empty for half an hour.
“You out of here?” Clay asks, and Cougar nods.
“Stuck around to say goodbye.”
Clay climbs the steps to the porch and offers Jake his hand. “Franklin Clay, nice to finally meet you,” he introduces and Jake switches the bottle to his left hand and takes Clay’s, eyes wary.
“Jake Jensen,” Jake says back, and Cougar sees things connect behind Clay’s eyes.
“Shit,” he says, something like regret in his voice. “I was interested in your file. Trying to get you for an op, hoping you’d click with the team and we could get you on permanent. That was a while ago.”
“That’s a shame, sir,” Jake says like it’s really not. Pooch and Roque are out of their car by now, crowding the stairs, curious to see the man who’s taking their sniper away.
“They say you started a brawl in the barracks. Broke one man’s collarbone and another’s jaw,” Clay adds, pushing, testing.
“They say that, do they?”
Cougar raises a hand and rests it on the small of Jake’s back, can feel the tension thrumming through him.
“We need to go,” Cougar says and Clay steps back.
“I’ll let you boys get on the road then.” He looks Jake in the eye, “You take care of him, you hear?”
“Yes sir,” Jake says, says it like he means it.
They walk to the van.
“Keep in touch, asshole!” Roque yells after them, and Cougar thinks that really, that could have gone so much worse.
================
Jake says that Dallas weather in the spring is like Thunderdome justice, completely random and mostly sucky. Cougar doesn’t think it’s so bad though. Days like this, in the high-seventies, sweet and sunny, make up for the cold snaps, days of drizzle and sudden late-season snow, and no matter how Jake complains about the fickleness of the weather, Cougar thinks he’s been in the south long enough that he forgets the unrelenting frigidity of a northern winter.
Still, it’s beautiful out and perfect for an after-school trip to the park, Jake and Sophie and Sugar playing chase over the dead grass. Cougar sits on the picnic table and watches them play. Jake is looking better, stronger, getting his wind back. They’ve talked about going back to the MMA gym soon, even if Jake’s the one that’s more up to watching than fighting now.
Cougar thinks everything will be better, when they get a room in the house they’re closing on next week livable, when Jake can cut back on the pills he’s using to sleep. It’s been hard on him, sleeping in Teresa’s house, with no gun and afraid of waking up fighting, even though Cougar’s the only one on the same side of the bedroom door lock as him.
Sugar yips and Sophie laughs and Jake takes a pratfall, rolling and flailing down the slight slope, coming up to his knees with dried grass in his hair. “Cougar!” he yells as Sophie climbs up on him and Sugar grabs his sleeve and shakes. “Cougar, help me!”
Cougar shakes his head and waves him off, laughing. He takes his phone out of his jacket pocket, and can’t imagine a better day for this. He takes a deep breath and centers himself and then he dials.
She answers on the third ring, the chatter of children at play behind her. He smiles to hear her voice, a warmth that he’s so long denied himself.
“Mamá,” he says before he can stop himself, “It’s me, Carlos.”
==========
Author: LadyJanelly
Fandom: The Losers
Rating: Mature
Characters/Pairing: Jake Jensen/Carlos “Cougar” Alvarez
Warnings: Bullying, hazing, homophobia, racism, internalized homophobia, violence, language, mentions of previous assault and sexual assault, Jeff Foxworthy paraphrase, Leverage cameo
Notes: Thanks to Peaceful_sands for her hand-holding, cheer-leading and beta-reading
Title from the Led Zeppelin song “Over the Hills and Far Away”
Feedback is always cherished, from squee to con-crit to lovely thinky thoughts.
Summary: AU—Jake Jensen left the Army before he ever had a chance to be a Loser. Cougar meets him anyway.
Sometimes what a man needs to be happy is losing the battle he’s been fighting his whole life.
This is the end, except for a post with a few notes and the "Taste-tour of Dallas." I swear, I got almost all of my favorite restaurants in there. :)
It takes an hour for Clay to drive him onto the base, get his finger taped and splinted, to fill out the paperwork. The story is he slipped on some ice and caught it wrong when he fell, and the embarrassment of such a stupid accident is a small price to pay to be able to go to Jake.
Roque and Pooch are still up when Cougar and Clay get back to the house.
“Were you just not gonna tell us?” Roque asks as he walks in the door, and Cougar pushes past him without a word. “Six months, man, we’ve killed for you, we’ve bled for you and you don’t tell us shit like this?”
There’s a thump and Cougar thinks Roque just punched the wall, hears the low rumble of Clay’s voice telling him to stow it.
Cougar pulls open his closet and grabs his go-bag and the case that holds his rifle, the one he owns himself and doesn’t have to check out of a weapons locker to use. It’s not as sweet as the M40, but it’ll do in a pinch.
He drops his dog tags on the bed, because they don’t match any of the names he’s traveling with. He leaves his wallet too and the only things to link him to Carlos Alvarez are his fingerprints and his phone, but neither can be helped.
Clay is waiting outside his bedroom door with the keys to the car.
“What are you going to do, Cougar?” he asks and Cougar shakes his head.
“Whatever Jake needs.”
Clay frowns, and glances pointedly at the rifle case.
Cougar shrugs. His hand throbs. “The man was god-damn special forces. He’s not calling me to hold his hand.”
Clay crosses his arms. “This guy would ask you to kill for him?”
“I said what he needs, not what he asks for.”
Clay doesn’t like it still, but knowing that Cougar isn’t off to play hitman at another’s orders seems to reassure him some. Enough. He clasps Cougar’s shoulder, passes him the keys and then lets him go. “Vaya con Dios, Carlos,” he says and Cougar turns to leave.
Pooch intercepts him on the way to the door, a bottle of Tylenol in his hand and such a worried expression on his face that Cougar softens, just for a second. “I’ll be back,” he promises without knowing for sure if it’ll be possible.
Pooch nods. “Printed you a map,” he says and tucks the folded papers into the top of Cougar’s bag, and then he steps back, obviously not liking standing there while a team-mate goes off into uncertain danger.
Roque stands and glares, arms crossed over his chest. If Cougar had more time, he’d be worried about that.
Cougar backs out of the driveway and already this life feels far away, and only Jake is real.
He drives. West by south-west, just over the speed-limit. If he gets stopped, the trip will be over before it’s begun; a Mexican in a sports car with a high-powered rifle and handguns has to be careful, driving anywhere, but especially in the Deep South.
Around three, the lack of sleep starts to override the burning need to get to Jake and he pulls off to get gas, buys a coffee and digs in his bag for one of the stimulants he filched from the stock the Army has assigned to him on when it could be days before his target appeared.
Outside of Tyler, he buys a pay-as-you-go phone and calls Jake’s cell phone, to let Teresa know he’ll be in in a few hours. She gives him the last directions up to the hospital, and he thinks she sounds better, now that she knows he’s on the way.
===========
Cougar takes just a second in the hospital parking lot, reties his hair and settles his hat on his head, making sure he looks more like a worried family member than a crazy person who drove seventeen hours straight to get there. He goes into the hospital’s lobby and up to the information desk.
“Jacob Jensen,” he says, and the receptionist types on a computer. The winter sun is shining through the five-story tall windows of the edifice, bright when Cougar expects all the world to be dark with worry.
“Mrs. Jensen is with him now, and he’s only allowed one at a time. Should I let her know you’re here, Mr…”
“Carlos,” he says, “Just tell her Carlos is here.”
He finds a seat and sits to wait, hat in his hands as he turns it slowly, feeling the worn-smooth rim between his middle-finger and thumb, the seam at the edge that marks a full rotation. He counts eighteen rotations and then Teresa is there, her dark eyes red-rimmed but dry.
“Carlos,” she says and he stands. She steps in and hugs him and he catches her weight. “Come on.” She pulls herself together after only a second. “I’ll take you up to the room. If you want to stay, I’ll go to the hotel. I just—I don’t want him to be alone.”
“I don’t know yet,” he says as they get into the elevator. “Let me talk to him.”
Teresa nods and when the elevator stops they get out. She leads him past the nurses’ station, down a maze of hallways and then knocks on a door. When there’s no answer, she opens it and nods Cougar in. “He looks like hell,” she warns him, “But he’s going to be okay. Don’t be worried if he doesn’t wake up. He kept getting upset. They had to sedate him a little while ago.”
Cougar steps in and is glad for the warning. Jake. Dios, it was four days ago that they were lying in bed together, four days ago that Jake was smiling, healthy, happy. Now there are bandages on his head, bruises everywhere that Cougar can see. One eye is swollen shut, a line of sutures running almost the full length of his eyebrow. An oxygen tube is looped under his nose, a cast on his left arm and an ice-pack on his right hand. Cougar has to stare at the readout from the heart monitor for a minute or more, to reassure himself that Jake is only sleeping.
He can smell the smoke over the disinfectant and medicinal odors of the hospital.
“Jake,” he says at last, sitting in the chair beside the bed. “I am here, mi amor. I have come.”
He sits in the chair and he stares at Jake, watching the rise and fall of his chest, the utter stillness of his body. When he can’t take it anymore he stands and goes out again, sits down beside Teresa on a padded bench down the hall, Jake’s door still in sight. She leans her shoulder against his and he lets her, lends her his strength.
“Your husband?” he asks at last, more for something to take his mind from his worries than from any burning need to know.
She chuckles, a mirthless sound. “Technically.”
He raises an eyebrow, to see if she’ll continue or not.
“He was my best friend, and I had the biggest crush on his brother.” She shrugs. “I turned up pregnant the year Jake went to basic. Nick, the douche, went to Vegas. Jake said he didn’t want his niece growing up without family. He wanted to give her as much as he could, so he put a ring on my finger.”
She looks at Cougar, her tone firm so there are no misunderstandings. “It was never more than that. A way for him to take care of us, for us to take care of him. We never—we spent our wedding night sitting in a hotel room watching The Princess Bride, with me seven months pregnant, and that’s as romantic as it got.”
He expects to feel relief, and when he doesn’t, realizes it was because he never worried, not about this, not with Jake.
“What happened to your hand?” Teresa asks, and he shrugs.
“Slipped on the ice. Landed badly.” He gives his lips the little twist at the corner that makes the words a joke instead of a lie and she looks sad.
He goes back into Jake’s room a little while later. Teresa goes to her hotel room to nap.
“Jake,” he calls again, soft, and Jake’s face twitches; the blip of his heart rate picks up and he takes a deeper breath, sighs it out past his split lip.
“I am here,” Cougar says, wanting to reach out, to touch him, but afraid of startling him, afraid of Jake hurting himself fighting back.
Jake’s good eye blinks open and he lies so still as he reorients himself, figures out where he is.
“Cou?” he rasps, a hurtful, awful sound.
“Si. Teresa called. I came.” He sees a plastic cup with a straw on the bedside, fills it with water from the bathroom sink and puts it to Jake’s lips. Jake sips and then closes his eye again. Cougar sits and rests his hand on Jake’s upper arm, above the cast. The blip of the heart monitor slows by a few beats per minute.
“Sexy, huh?” Jake jokes and Cougar would shake him if he didn’t look so bad.
“Don’t,” he says. “It will heal.”
Jake is quiet and Cougar thinks he may have fallen asleep again, until he says “Cougar, I need a favor.”
“Jake. Anything.”
Jake’s lips twitch into a painful-looking smile. “Got a pen?”
“I’ll get one,” he says, and expects Jake to be asleep again when he returns from the nurses’ station.
“Are we alone?” Jake rasps and Cougar realizes that between the swollen eye and not having his glasses, Jake is practically blind.
“We are,” Cougar tells him.
“There were three of them,” Jake says when Cougar sits down again. “Remember those guys? The ones in the alley that were gonna burn you?”
Cougar goes cold and hard inside. God-damn. This is his fault too, that they even targeted Jake.
“I remember them,” he says.
Jake coughs a laugh. “I may have fucked with them a little too hard. I dunno, man. They must have followed me home from the club. The night after you left. I dunno how long they’ve been looking for me, but they found me. Burned my place, kicked my ass.
“I need you to talk to them, Cougar. I couldn’t ask anybody else to do it. Nobody else could be safe and do it. Couldn’t trust the cops. A lot of shit can go down when a man’s out on bail. Just gonna get worse.” He flicks his tongue out to moisten his lips, and Cougar offers him the straw again. He sighs and lays his head down again when he’s done drinking. “I can’t risk them looking up the owner of that house and seeing that I own another one. I can’t have them find Teresa and Sophie. I need you to go and tell them it’s over. They win. I’m sorry. I’ll fix what I can and not fuck with them anymore.”
Cougar takes a deep breath, trying to calm himself. He nods, because Jake needs him to. “I will take care of this,” he promises, and it’s even the truth.
One by one, Jake whispers out the names, addresses, phone numbers, last places of employment, vehicle descriptions, tag numbers. Cougar writes it all down in his neat, tiny print.
“Sleep now,” he tells Jake when the list is through.
“’Kay,” Jake agrees, but he fights it anyway. “Cougs. It’s okay, right? That Teresa called you?”
“Si,” Cougar tells him, although he has no idea. “Sleep.”
And Jake does.
Cougar stays. Sits at Jake’s bedside as the nurses change shift and rush hour churns up the traffic on the road he can see from Jake’s window. Teresa comes back, a few hours after she’d left, looking less tired.
“He was awake for a while,” Cougar tells her. “He should be calmer now.”
“Carlos…” she says, her concern for him obvious.
He shakes his head. “Jake would not ask for anything that couldn’t be done.”
She hugs him again and then he goes.
============
He picks up a city map with cash at the gas station down the street from the hospital, then gets a room in a seedy hotel in a heavily Hispanic corner of town. He switches the uppers he’s on for downers and sleeps for six hours, leaving the alarm on his phone to wake him up.
The bars are closing and the prostitutes on the corner looking tired when he gets out of bed, washes his face and pulls out the map. He marks his objectives, two of them less than a mile apart, the last only a little further. He considers his approaches and exit possibilities, but without seeing the lay of the land it’s impossible to be certain he’s making the best choices. He checks through his available armament. Six-shot revolver, knife, garrote, rifle.
He drives, one slow pass by each location and then parks Clay’s car far out of the way. The winter sun is breaking the horizon, pale and anemic. Cougar finds a spot on the first man’s apartment-porch to wait, behind the short wooden fence, out of sight of the neighbors. Waits until he can see the shadow of the man behind his blinds. He taps on the door, pistol held down and out of sight, awkward in his left hand. He hears the security chain slide and the doorknob turns and Cougar hits it hard with his shoulder, bowling the man back, sprawled on the floor, face bloodied. Cougar remembers him, remembers being on his knees as this man poured alcohol over him, as this man was ready to burn him.
He closes the door behind him and chases him into a corner, this man who has hurt Jake.
“Quiet!” he hisses and the fear of the gun catches the breath in the man’s throat, keeps him from shouting.
There is a moment of crystal clarity, that of all the things Cougar has done in his life, what he’s about to do is the thing that Jake will not be able to forgive him for. Will not be able to forget.
But men like this, they don’t stop while they’re behind, always convinced that one more attack will leave them the victor. Jake may hope, but Cougar knows, no amount of reason, of surrender, of compromise is going to get through to them.
“You will not hurt him again,” he says, and the man nods, frantic, and Cougar can see the lie in his eyes.
He steps forward, snaps his foot up and out and the man chokes around his crushed throat, curls and kicks.
Cougar leaves the man still twitching out his death-throes, turns the knob with his shirt-tail and tucks the pistol in his pocket.
There are a few other people leaving for work, walking bleary-eyed from door to car, but none of them gives him a single glance, much less a second.
He’s waiting in the second man’s apartment when he comes home after work, and the garrote is a trick to use with one hand injured, but he makes it work, holding on tight and taking the elbows the man whips back into his ribs.
The last guy lives in a third-storey loft in a renovated textile factory, all brick walls and wide-open spaces. Cougar just shoots him from the abandoned warehouse down the street, the rifle awkward to use with his left hand and right eye. He hits the guy once in the arm and twice in his center-mass, with a last shot to the head, a shameful mess, but it looks more amateur this way. He wonders if the CIA handlers he’s worked with would be proud or ashamed of the crime scene. He picks up his brass and is across the roof and three blocks away before he hears sirens. He slides behind the wheel of Clay’s car and drives slow and easy out of the parking lot.
He criss-crosses the city for a while, eyes on the rear-view, but nobody’s following him.
Jake is awake when Cougar gets back to the hospital, Teresa sitting at his bedside, laptop open, reading him real-estate listings.
“Carlos,” she says, her dark eyes looking him over as if for wounds.
“Hey, ‘Resa,” Jake rasps, “Can you see if they have another of those apple juices?”
She frowns but doesn’t object. “I’m going to go see if they have a cure for bullshit in the gift-shop,” she adds, “You guys take your time.”
Cougar gives her a grateful nod and sits in the seat that she abandoned, his hat in his hands.
“It’s done,” he says when the room is clear. He’d take Jake’s hand, but his knuckles are all busted, split, swollen and black with bruises.
“You’re okay?” Jake asks, and Cougar nods.
“Thank God,” Jake sighs, and relaxes back against his pillows. “I didn’t want to ask you for that. I didn’t want you taking that kind of a risk, but I didn’t know what else to do…”
“Shhh,” Cougar hushes him. He finds an uninjured spot on Jake’s shoulder and rests his fingertips there.
“I have to get back to base,” Cougar says in the quiet. “I’ll go after I leave here.”
“I’m sorry,” Jake says again and Cougar cuts him off.
“You needed me. I came.”
“I love you,” Jake says and Cougar squeezes his shoulder, unwilling to hear these words when he doubts they would be said if Jake knew what he’d done.
“Be well,” Cougar says and he stands, slides his hat onto his head and walks to the door. He passes Teresa in the hall.
“You can take your daughter home now,” he says, and walks away before she can reply.
It’s a long damn drive back to North Carolina, as he leaves behind everything that makes him real.
===============
He stops at a hotel in Georgia, listens as the woman at the desk warns him about loud music or smoking pot or having other people in his room. When he finally gets the keys, the place reeks of cigarettes and the air-conditioner ticks as it runs, but he locks the door and takes a pill and doesn’t wake up until checkout time.
He smashes the phone he’d used in Dallas, makes sure the little card is broken in half, and drops it in the hotel dumpster out back.
It’s dark when he gets back to the house, but the lights are still on. He fumbles his keys in the lock, hands still buzzing with the hum of the road, and too many hours behind the wheel.
Clay comes into the living room to see who it is, looks him up and down. “You okay?” he asks and Cougar nods.
“Si. Tired.”
“Thought you’d be gone longer.”
He shakes his head, not willing to explain that he didn’t want to be there when Jake found out what he’d done. “Mission get scrapped?”
Clay nods. “Not gonna run it with a comms guy on loan and a sniper we’ve never worked with before. They put another team on it.”
“Good,” Cougar says, relieved, and then he runs out of words, turns and goes down the hall to his room. Stows his bag and his rifle in the closet and gathers his dog-tags from the bed. He hesitates for a second, and then pulls them on. Waits for that feeling of right and home that they’ve always given him but it doesn’t come.
He lies down on top of his blankets and stares at the ceiling, remembering Jake’s smile and Jake’s kiss and trying to reconcile himself to never knowing these things again.
===========
Roque’s fist banging on his door wakes him in the morning. “Breakfast!” he yells and Cougar knows it’s bullshit because they have yet to have breakfast together in the morning unless there was a mission that day and Clay wanted to make sure they’d all packed on some good slow carbs.
He rolls out of bed anyway. Figures he’ll let them interrogate him now instead of later.
The kitchen smells of pancakes and Cougar slides into the chair closest to the door. Pooch flips a couple onto a plate and they let Cougar get the syrup poured before the questions start. Pooch is the one to break the ice, being the one least likely to get punched in the nuts.
“So, your um, your Jake. He okay?”
Cougar nods and cuts his pancakes. “He will be. Busted up pretty good.”
“So how long has it been? You and this hairdresser?” Roque’s voice is accusing. Good cop, bad cop then, with Clay watching it all.
“Es complicado.” Even he doesn’t know how to measure it. From the time they first met, and Cougar stopped looking for other men to fuck him? From the kiss, from when they started talking about it? Has it been eight months or three or only two weeks?
“You serious about him?” Pooch asks and the question is a stab to the guts. Because he is, more serious than he’s been about anything in his life except for maybe the military or protecting his family with his absence.
“It doesn’t matter.” He stabs a stack of pancake chunks and stuffs them in his mouth.
“The hell does that mean?” Roque demands, and if he wasn’t so torn up, Cougar would smile to hear his voice go from belligerent to protective. “What the fuck, he calls you to come running to Dallas and he’s just fucking around?”
Cougar is on his feet before he’s thought of standing, the flats of his hands slamming down on the table, making the cutlery jump and Clay’s glass spill over. Fresh pain stabs through his broken finger, sharp and clear.
“I fucked up!” he shouts, unable to have his team think of Jake as faithless, as less than the man that Cougar knows him to be. And then he turns and leaves the kitchen, before he loses his temper and goes over the table at Roque.
They don’t corner him about it again, but he catches Clay looking introspective, Pooch outright worried and Roque constipated often enough. He knows it’s because of him, he just doesn’t know what to do about it.
He goes in to the base every day for the rest of the week. Hits the sniper range and works on shooting off-handed, just for something to do. He’s been back at Bragg for nine days when Jake leaves a message on his phone. Five words. “Jesus, Cougar,” his tone soft with awe or horror. And then firmer, “Call me, okay?”
Cougar holds the phone in his hands, but can’t bring himself to dial. Can’t bear to hear the words he expects.
He puts it off another two weeks, and then he’s out of the splint and the team’s given another mission. South America this time, body-guarding some CIA guys as they negotiate with guerrillas for the return of a trio of rain-forest tourists turned hostages. It ends up with the Losers slipping into the camp while the CIA makes some noise, but all they find are shallow graves.
They fly back to Bragg, landing in the cool light of dawn. Cougar sits for his debriefing and he’s tired, so fucking tired. Tired of missions and killing and feeling nothing. Of hiding and pretending. He signs onto one of the unassigned computers and prints out a stack of forms. He spends every free moment thinking about them, or about Jake. He thinks about calling his madre.
The army is all he knows, and his heart isn’t in it any more. He fills the blanks in with his small, tidy print. Hand-delivers them to Clay instead of dropping them in his in-box.
Clay takes the papers, and puzzlement turns to surprise as he reads. “Cougar,” he sighs, “Are you sure about this? If you need another week, to go make up with your hairdresser, I’ll see what I can swing…”
But he’s shaking his head already. “This isn’t about Jake. The fight’s gone out of me,” he says. “I’m no use. To myself or my team.”
Clay rubs a hand over his stubble, and he looks so unhappy. “Okay,” he says at last. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll put my signature on it, but it has to be approved by the higher-ups.”
Cougar expects this. For it to be a struggle. Men like them seldom retire. He has always expected to die with his rifle in his hand.
“Gracias,” he says and Clay shoos him out of the office.
He goes back to his room and dials Jake’s number.
=========
“Cougar?” Jake’s voice is breathy, like he ran for the phone.
“Si.” He can barely say the word for the tightness in his chest.
“I need to see you,” Jake says, soft and open and hope flares because he doesn’t think Jake would make him come face-to-face just to dump him. Cougar tries to tell himself that it doesn’t mean Jake wants to keep him. It could be about the three bodies he left on the ground in Dallas, an incriminating conversation that Jake doesn’t want to have over cell phone towers.
“I have no more leave,” Cougar says, even though Clay would probably fly him to Dallas himself if it meant a chance of Cougar not taking that early discharge.
“I’ll fly out,” Jake offers. “It’ll be another week or two before I’m up to it, but I’ll text you when I’ll be there. I’ll get a hotel room, and you can come by whenever you’re not needed on base.” Cougar thinks on it too long and Jake adds “If that’s okay. If you want to see me.”
“I’ll come,” he promises.
They are quiet on the phone then, Cougar just listening to Jake breathe. Then Pooch is banging on his door, letting him know the game’s starting and the beers are cold and to get his ass out there before Clay eats all the chips.
“I have to go,” he says and Jake replies, “Okay. I’ll see you soon.”
==============
On Tuesday, Cougar is told to report for a psych evaluation, and he has to smirk at the idea that they think a man would have to be crazy to want to leave a job where he goes to far away lands and shoots people in the head as the entirety of his occupation. The shrink asks him questions and he answers, yes, he’s tired, no, nothing has changed recently, no he hasn’t seen or done or suffered anything outside of the usual.
“You were injured recently?” The shrink asks, “A fall at home? Would you like to talk about that?”
Cougar looks down at his splinted hand and snorts his derision. Like such a small injury could have any bearing on his mental fitness.
“Do you have anything to add?” the man asks at the end of the session or evaluation or whatever the hell they’re calling it.
“If I could feel for the deaths I cause, I would not be able to do my job,” Cougar says. “But feeling nothing? Is no way to live.”
The man seems to take him seriously and signs him off as mentally fit to serve.
On Friday, Clay tells him there’s an interview set for noon, and to wear his dress greens. He unpacks them from the suit bag Teresa had loaned him and brushes the construction dust off of the knees, the dog hair off of his sleeve. He dresses up and goes in, stands at attention in front of Clay and his two superiors, and wonders what Clay has told them about Jake. If they know Cougar’s just a maricón playing at being macho.
He thinks of telling them, that he’s desviado, deviant, but he thinks that he kills people for the CIA on a regular enough basis that nobody will care who he wants to suck his dick.
The questions are more specific from the brass, but he says again, how tired he is, how long he’s served, how he doesn’t feel he can protect his team to the best of his ability. The guilt burns at him, because he’s honest enough to admit that even his impaired is better than some of the army’s snipers on their best days.
“So what exactly do you think you’re going to do out there in civilian life?” the man on Clay’s left asks, and Cougar’s lips twist into a smile for the first time since the interview started.
“I don’t know. Maybe buy a house and fix it up.”
“We’ll let you know,” one of them says eventually, “Dismissed.”
He goes, and even with the final decision still up in the air, he feels more free.
Pooch drives him back to the house and on the way he checks his phone. There’s a text from Jake: “Thursday, noon, flight 663.”
“I will pick you up,” he sends back, careful on the keys so he doesn’t look foolish.
=============
On Saturday Cougar takes his personal rifle to a civilian range for a couple hours and shoots off a hundred rounds or so. Enough wear on the rifling that he’s confident the ballistics will never match to any bullet recovered at a crime scene in Dallas.
=============
The official word comes down on Tuesday, and Clay drives Cougar in to the base to turn in his security badges, sign the final paperwork, receive his handshake and honorable discharge. He closes his eyes on the ride back, and feels disconnected from everything, all the weight gone from him. He doesn’t know where he’s going now, or who he’ll be, only that he’ll be free for the first time in his life.
Clay waits with him in the living room when Pooch and Roque get in. Faces serious enough that Pooch sits down right away and Roque reaches for the comfort of a knife.
“I’m out,” Cougar tells them. “I did not want to say before it was official, in case they denied me.”
Roque stands and leaves without a word, kicking the coffee table sideways on his way out and Clay sighs. “Give him a day or two.”
“Is this about your guy?” Pooch asks, trying to understand, and Cougar has to wonder why nobody thinks he could leave for himself. “I mean, I know first-hand that long-distance relationships are hard on you both, but…”
“No,” Cougar says, quiet but firm. “He understood, from the beginning. Who I was and what I could give to him. He’s only asked me to stay once, and only because he doesn’t know my team.”
Pooch nods and thinks on it and finally reaches out his hand. “Then you take care, and good luck. However things work out with you and him, remember you have friends.”
Cougar takes his hand. "Invite me,” he says, “When you find the courage to ask Jolene to marry you,” and Pooch laughs and looks flustered at the change of topic.
“I promise, man. An invitation for you and your Jake too.”
=============
Cougar rents a car to pick Jake up from the airport. It feels inappropriate to keep borrowing Clay’s when the man isn’t his CO anymore; he’s not allowed to drive the army’s loaner cars, and the roads are still too icy for the bike, even if he knew what shape Jake was going to be in. He gets to the arrivals door an hour early and watches the marquee as Jake’s plane gets closer and closer. Security won’t let non-travelers out to the gate, but he does wait at baggage claim, hat in his hands.
Spotting Jake in the incoming crowd isn’t hard, the man is so damn tall. He’s lost weight since Cougar last saw him standing, muscle-mass that he’ll have to work at to put back on. He looks healthy otherwise, standing straight and strong, arm out of the cast and only held a little stiff against his side, more like he’s afraid of getting hurt than in actual pain.
He looks pensive, uncertain, and then Cougar lifts his hat to catch his attention and Jake’s face lights up with such joy and hope and love that Cougar can’t help but smile back despite his worries. Jake walks up to him and Cougar should take the small bag off of his shoulder, should turn to walk with him to the baggage claim conveyor belt, but he can’t look away, even as Jake steps into his personal space, as they stand face to face.
Cougar reaches out and Jake doesn’t pull back, not when Cougar’s hand loops behind his neck, not when Cougar’s lips crash into his. The kiss is brief, and heat flares from Cougar’s neck to his cheeks as they pull away, at the audacity of what he’s done. He pulls back and looks around but nobody seems to care.
“Wow,” Jake says, and he reaches out to touch Cougar’s arm, like he can’t believe he’s real.
“I have a car,” Cougar says, and it’s not the smoothest change of topic, but Jake nods.
“Just need to get my bag. I didn’t want to be stuck carrying more than I was up to, on the plane.”
They stand side-by-side and watch the luggage go around, and when Jake points out his bag, Cougar plucks it off the turnstile and shoulders it, leading Jake out to the car.
“I wasn’t sure,” Jake says as he sits down, as the car doors close and Cougar slides the key into the ignition. “If you wanted me here. Not until just now. I thought I’d spend a week alone in a hotel room catching some fresh mountain air.”
Cougar hears a bark of laughter come from his own mouth. “Dios. I’d be a fool to not want you. Idiota.” His smile falters and they sit in the idling car, still in the parking spot. “I thought. After Dallas, what I did there…”
Jake’s hand whips out, fast as a snake, covers Cougar’s mouth. “No,” he says, firm and final. “That’s just—no. I shouldn’t have put you in that position, and I’m sure as hell not going to blame you for how it all went down. I’ve thought about this, Cougar. If it had been you in that hospital bed, I don’t know if I could have done any different.”
Cougar closes his eyes, letting Jake’s unexpected forgiveness wash over him. Then Jake’s lips are on his again, slow and gentle, more intimate than anybody but Jake has ever touched him.
“I have something for you,” Cougar says as they finally part. He reaches down the front of his shirt, catches the chain of his dog-tags and pulls them over his head. Jake looks stunned, lost, so Cougar takes Jake’s hand and opens it, lying the tags carefully in his palm, pooling the chain on top of them.
“Are you…” Jake starts to ask but the words catch in his throat, hope warring with caution in his eyes.
“I’m out,” Cougar says, and Jake breaks with the relief of it, pulling Cougar back for another kiss, rough and desperate.
=========
They spend all of that first day in the hotel room, Cougar reassuring himself that Jake’s okay, that he’s healed and getting stronger, acquainting himself with Jake’s new scars. Jake spends the time showing Cougar just how good the fucking can be when he’s not intentionally choosing assholes to do it to him, how good it can feel when his lover cares as much or more about his pleasure than their own.
They sprawl against each other, after, and Jake asks, “You coming back to Dallas with me?” all casual like he didn’t just have his dick up Cougar’s ass, like he didn’t just give him the orgasm of his life.
“Si,” Cougar nods. “If you’ll have me.”
“Now who’s being the idiot?” Jake asks, and holds him close.
They sleep tangled up in each other that night, and even with the pill he took to sleep, Jake’s awake before Cougar in the morning.
“You got anything you need to take care of here?” Jake asks, and Cougar thinks but can’t come up with anything, so they trade the rental car for a U-Haul van. Cougar can see the tension rising in Jake’s shoulders, in the way he carries himself as they get out of the van at the Losers’ house, light on the balls of his feet.
“Jake,” he says, soft, “These are my brothers.”
Jake nods but seems no more reassured.
Nobody is home so they pack Cougar’s things, what few there are. He leaves the rifle, better to not have it even in the same city as a trail of bodies he dropped. There are only clothes, a few books. He’s not attached to any of the furniture. It takes both of them to load the motorcycle in the van, and Jake is wincing and breathless by the time they get it strapped down. When it’s done Cougar gets a pair of beers out of the fridge and sits out on the front porch with Jake, sprawling in a pair of deck chairs even though it’s too damn cold for it. The house doesn’t feel like his anymore; sitting on the couch would be awkward.
Clay’s sports car is the first to pull up, Pooch and Roque behind him in a second vehicle. Cougar stands to greet them and Jake does too, and Cougar’s smart enough to notice that Jake keeps a hold of his beer bottle, even though it’s been empty for half an hour.
“You out of here?” Clay asks, and Cougar nods.
“Stuck around to say goodbye.”
Clay climbs the steps to the porch and offers Jake his hand. “Franklin Clay, nice to finally meet you,” he introduces and Jake switches the bottle to his left hand and takes Clay’s, eyes wary.
“Jake Jensen,” Jake says back, and Cougar sees things connect behind Clay’s eyes.
“Shit,” he says, something like regret in his voice. “I was interested in your file. Trying to get you for an op, hoping you’d click with the team and we could get you on permanent. That was a while ago.”
“That’s a shame, sir,” Jake says like it’s really not. Pooch and Roque are out of their car by now, crowding the stairs, curious to see the man who’s taking their sniper away.
“They say you started a brawl in the barracks. Broke one man’s collarbone and another’s jaw,” Clay adds, pushing, testing.
“They say that, do they?”
Cougar raises a hand and rests it on the small of Jake’s back, can feel the tension thrumming through him.
“We need to go,” Cougar says and Clay steps back.
“I’ll let you boys get on the road then.” He looks Jake in the eye, “You take care of him, you hear?”
“Yes sir,” Jake says, says it like he means it.
They walk to the van.
“Keep in touch, asshole!” Roque yells after them, and Cougar thinks that really, that could have gone so much worse.
================
Jake says that Dallas weather in the spring is like Thunderdome justice, completely random and mostly sucky. Cougar doesn’t think it’s so bad though. Days like this, in the high-seventies, sweet and sunny, make up for the cold snaps, days of drizzle and sudden late-season snow, and no matter how Jake complains about the fickleness of the weather, Cougar thinks he’s been in the south long enough that he forgets the unrelenting frigidity of a northern winter.
Still, it’s beautiful out and perfect for an after-school trip to the park, Jake and Sophie and Sugar playing chase over the dead grass. Cougar sits on the picnic table and watches them play. Jake is looking better, stronger, getting his wind back. They’ve talked about going back to the MMA gym soon, even if Jake’s the one that’s more up to watching than fighting now.
Cougar thinks everything will be better, when they get a room in the house they’re closing on next week livable, when Jake can cut back on the pills he’s using to sleep. It’s been hard on him, sleeping in Teresa’s house, with no gun and afraid of waking up fighting, even though Cougar’s the only one on the same side of the bedroom door lock as him.
Sugar yips and Sophie laughs and Jake takes a pratfall, rolling and flailing down the slight slope, coming up to his knees with dried grass in his hair. “Cougar!” he yells as Sophie climbs up on him and Sugar grabs his sleeve and shakes. “Cougar, help me!”
Cougar shakes his head and waves him off, laughing. He takes his phone out of his jacket pocket, and can’t imagine a better day for this. He takes a deep breath and centers himself and then he dials.
She answers on the third ring, the chatter of children at play behind her. He smiles to hear her voice, a warmth that he’s so long denied himself.
“Mamá,” he says before he can stop himself, “It’s me, Carlos.”
==========
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-06-25 11:25 pm (UTC)CC
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Date: 2012-06-26 02:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 08:00 am (UTC)CC
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Date: 2012-06-26 01:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 02:14 am (UTC)I'm on to the next project, but time-stamps for this Jake/Cougar combo is my new brain-break project. They've got a lot of little stories left in them.
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Date: 2012-06-26 03:42 am (UTC)and Cougar sees things connect behind Clay’s eyes.
“Shit,” he says, something like regret in his voice. “I was interested in your file. Trying to get you for an op, hoping you’d click with the team and we could get you on permanent. That was a while ago.”
Broke my heart. Just...gah. The serendipity of the Losers struck out for once--but that made this entire universe seem so freaking real, too. That it could have been this way.
Love, too, Cougar's taking the guys out who beat up and tried to burn him, and how that's the catalyst for him finally, finally realizing he has to get out himself. And your Clay ROCKS. Bravo!
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Date: 2012-06-26 04:10 am (UTC)One of the few issues I"m not 100% happy with in this one is "What about Max?" Because without Cougar and Jensen, I don't think the Losers could have accomplished what they did in Bolivia, or gotten the hard-drive or the code to crack it, or so many other awesome things. So then what? Is whatever catastrophe Max has planned just around the corner?
I don't want to write a sequel to this one as disaster-fic (I'm busy with a Losers+Zombies+Girl Scouts fic and don't want to apocalypse myself to death), but I half-feel like I should deal with it in some way. Grumble grumble. I kind of want to read the comic so I know if there's some other way out of the conundrum.
It was really important to me for some reason that Cougar's attack came around full-circle and they paid with more than their credit-rating
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Date: 2012-06-26 04:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 04:44 am (UTC)This was beautiful and painful and personal and wonderful and everything I hoped it would be!
Thank you, again, for writing this and posting it. Am going to have to go back and read it a couple dozen times just to make sure I love it as much as I do now.
::mwah!::
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Date: 2012-06-26 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 06:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 02:19 pm (UTC)Max, man, I know. One of the few issues I"m not 100% happy with in this one is "What about Max?" Because without Cougar and Jensen, I don't think the Losers could have accomplished what they did in Bolivia, or gotten the hard-drive or the code to crack it, or so many other awesome things. So then what? Is whatever catastrophe Max has planned just around the corner? Would Clay and the rest even be the ones sent to Bolivia? If they were, would they have gotten the kids out or died in the air-strike?
I don't want to write a sequel to this one as disaster-fic (I'm busy with a Losers+Zombies+Girl Scouts fic and don't want to apocalypse myself to death), but I half-feel like I should deal with it in some way. Grumble grumble. I kind of want to read the comic so I know if there's some other way out of the conundrum.
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Date: 2012-06-26 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-27 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-28 06:22 am (UTC)Thank you for sharing it!
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Date: 2012-06-30 03:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-30 02:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-30 03:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-27 11:20 am (UTC)wow.. i just, i love this so much.. thank you ♥
no subject
Date: 2017-11-20 04:35 am (UTC)