Half your life is over (if you're lucky)

storm_petrel

The worst part is always right after the first explosion.

Because the first explosion is only how things start. Jensen’s head is pounding, and it feels like something’s pushing him face-first down into the dirt. Concussive blast wave, he thinks, dizzily, as the secondary explosions start and flaming debris begins hitting the ground. Adrenaline gets him up, gets him moving through the choking smoke and burning grass. Jensen makes it about fifty yards past the treeline before he realizes something’s seriously wrong.

The charges, he thinks, blinks as blood drips past his eye, and it takes a moment of probing to find the two-inch gash in his scalp, just above his left temple, blood running in long rivulets down his face. His glasses are twisted askew, one lens cracked in a crazy starburst. He blinks again, drives the heel of his hand into his head and the pain momentarily clears his thoughts.

“The charges blew early,” he whispers, and his voice sounds strange, weirdly distorted to his own ears. His head is pounding, bad as a migraine on a bright day, and he feels that bad, hard-to-breathe ache that means his ribs are probably going to bruise spectacularly. Jensen takes a deep breath, runs his fingers along his abdomen gently and winces hard. Not broken, thank god. One bright spark in an otherwise shitty, shitty day.

Through the trees, Garcia’s compound is a roaring wall of flames. The warehouse where the drug shipments were packed is burning hot, spewing acrid black smoke into the air. Jensen gropes at his belt for the radio, winces when he finds only jagged plastic shards where the battery casing should be. There’s nothing in his earpiece, not even the low hum of static. His M4A1 is gone, lost somewhere between the explosion and here, and fuck, Clay is going to slowly murder him. He grabs at his shoulder holster, pulls Cougar’s S&W 629—Jensen’s now, he won it in a game of five-card stud two weeks ago—and he’s pretty damned happy he’s still got it now, both for the sidearm value and because it’s beautiful, physical proof that once, just once, he out-bluffed Cougar. Jensen checks the clip, shoves it back in the holster.

There’s thick smoke choking out the air, so visibility isn’t good, but he can’t see his team anywhere. Jensen frowns, because his pack with the binoculars, laptop, spare radio and GPS is somewhere down in that burning mess. It really is a mess, flames sheeting along, outer buildings starting to flare and burn as well. Jensen goes still, abruptly, because his first thought was right. The charges blew early. By his count, he’d had another minute and twenty seconds, and—Jensen clenches his eyes shut, tries to think, but everything is vague and kind of swimmy. Something had blown-one of the charges defective? Maybe, thinks Jensen. There was an explosion, and I went out the window, and then the rest of them went off? I didn’t get the files off the hard drives, goddamn it. He shakes his head violently, and fuck that’s a bad idea, because he’s not thinking straight. Pooch set the charges, something went wrong, they went off early, and now his team’s nowhere in sight.

There’s a bad feeling, a really bad feeling starting to creep into the pit of his stomach.

Fuck fuck fuck— thinks Jensen, because in his own head he doesn’t have to be eloquent. He scans the perimeter, shaking his head again to clear it, but it doesn’t help. Instead it makes the slash on his temple pulse another rivulet of fresh blood. Okay, thinks Jensen, trying to blink away the dizziness. Because something’s clearly wrong with him, and maybe not the kind of wrong that an icepack and eight hours of sleep is going to fix.

There’s still nobody moving in the smoke. Panic worms suddenly in his gut, but Jensen shoves it down. I was in the north wing in the offices by the generators, and Clay and Roque were in position for cover fire to the southeast, Pooch was setting the charges and Cougar went high for cover. Then-

--Then the charges blew early and my head got violently acquainted with the ground? That’s the fuzzy part. Jensen shades his eyes, checks the southeast quadrant again. He’s only twenty yards or so from the primary rendezvous point, just beyond the perimeter, moving low through the trees, but when he gets there, there’s no one there. No team.

That bad, bad feeling is getting worse, but Jensen takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly and tries to force the tension and the abrupt nausea down. There’s yelling, suddenly, and Jensen snaps his head up, wishes he hadn’t, because white sparks explode across his eyes, and the sudden urge to puke almost overwhelms him. But now is not the time, because some of Garcia’s men—not from the main compound, these are the guys who were stationed at the eastern guard post on the road, maybe half a klick away— are regrouping by the main gate, and they don’t sound happy, or like men willing to listen to either bullshit or reason—on his best days, Jensen can manage both at the same time. They sound more like shoot-first, shoot-again, and kick-your-bullet-riddled-corpse angry as fuck drug runners who’ve just seen a hundred million dollars’ worth of merchandise go up in flames, and Jensen decides discretion is the better part of valour and fades back into the trees. Secondary rendezvous point’s at the truck, and if he’s fast, he can loop around and make it back to the main road before these assholes get their shit together. The vegetation’s thick here, the jungle choking up around the road, but he only has to make it a few hundred yards from the compound perimeter before it clears out enough to run. Jensen can’t even think about running right now, but he gets himself moving as fast as he can, because the truck’s under camouflage netting just around this bend, and there’s the sound of distant engines just audible over the low roar of the fire, so he’s got to move—

--and skids to a stop twenty yards away, because the truck’s blocking the road, flipped on its roof and burning. So are all the trees around the road. Jensen can’t see if there’s anyone inside.

“Okay,” he croaks, and his throat is tight with that bad, scraped-bloody feeling. The smoke is making his eyes water. “There’s a good explanation for this.” Then there’s engines roaring up the road, and Jensen has to get back in the trees fast. He makes it about a hundred yards before he drops to his knees and throws up.

***

He stays in the trees, spitting sour acid trying to keep his breathing steady while three trucks roar up the road, six men in each plus the driver, all carrying assault rifles. When they reach the car, they haul up short in a screech of brakes. There’s the sound of a loud argument in fast local Spanish, which Jensen only catches snatches—had to be at least twenty guys to hit that hard—cover the fuckin’ road, they’re not getting out—go back and see what you can salvage, make sure—cover’s too thick, can’t move that many guys—I *said* cover the road— then the men pile back in, and two of Garcia’s trucks haul up on the verge and drive around as one swings around and heads back towards the compound. The sound of the engines fade in both directions.

Jensen has a very bad moment where he’s actually physically pulled in both directions, he wants to follow both so badly, and his head is fucking killing him. He spits again, tries to clear the taste of acid and bile. Get a fucking grip, he tells himself. For extra emphasis, he thinks in Clay’s best Colonel voice. Now, assess the fucking situation.

He’s got a tac vest, and a quick check of the pockets turns up bullets, a couple of power bars—traded with Pooch earlier, because Pooch thought the peanut butter ones were an offense to god-fearing peanut butter everywhere. His miniature screwdriver set. His compass, cracked across the top plate, but still okay. A coil of monofilament, useful for tripwires and fishing lines and cat’s cradle when things get really dull. A packet of aspirin, which he dry-swallows and gets another wave of nausea in return. An adhesive gauze patch with a half-torn wrapper, but pressure’s more important than sterility, so he gingerly presses it into place on the cut on his head.

His tags are missing, and he has no idea when that happened, but there’s a thin abraded line on his throat that stings like a bitch where the chain must have torn off. Jensen tips his head back, closes his eyes for a moment because it’s a stupid thing to miss, but he’s had that set of tags since he was nineteen. He used to hang them over Emma’s stroller and shake them while she kicked her feet and laughed.

A flare of pain from his abdomen distracts him, and he pulls up his grey thermal shirt—torn across the right shoulder by some flying debris, but that cut’s shallow— and winces when he sees his ribs, bruises already starting to cluster. The worst is on his left side, halfway up his abdomen, a blue-black monstrosity a handspan across. But not broken. Good job, ribs, thinks Jensen, a bit vaguely. Protect the vulnerable squishy bits.

He pulls Cougar’s revolver again, checks the clip again, watches the light glint off the short steel barrel. “Fuck,” says Jensen out loud, and his voice sounds rough and scratched, “I hope you’re Cougar’s lucky gun.”

He wants to go back to that burning compound, every instinct screaming to go back, find his team. But he’s also got orders, long-standing protocol that Clay’s pounded into his head for the past four months. Tertiary rendezvous’s for when things are seriously and completely fucked, when the last man standing needs to report in and bring in serious backup. Jensen never figured that someone would be him.

The road. The road’s crawling with Garcia’s men, but it meanders around like an oxbow river. Jensen remembers the maps, recalls that the road’s about thirty klicks to Acacías, but you could cut across the jungle in between, cut off half the distance. The woods were cleared here, once, maybe a couple of decades back, so the terrain’s not too choked with vegetation—still a fucking nightmare, but if he keeps heading east, it should be okay.Maybe.

He runs his thumb over the butt of Cougar’s revolver again. He’s suddenly desperately, pathetically grateful that he has it, I just fucking wish Cougar was here instead—and his mind veers away from that thought hard. He stares through the trees, smoke drifting on the wind as the jungle surrounds him, too wet to burn.

***

Jensen’s really trying hard not to think about, anything, really. His ribs throb with each step, and his head is killing him. His vision keeps blurring, and he’s not sure how much of that is his broken glasses, and how much is coming from the concussion. Mild traumatic head injury, he thinks, emphasis on the mild. Oh god, please, emphasis on the mild.

There’s a swarm of flies buzzing around his face, tiny black flecks of parasitic misery, and Jensen takes a moment think longingly about the hundred-percent Deet buried at the bottom of his lost pack, the stuff that’s so strong it’s not even legal in the States. Sarah had told him once that logging in Latin and South American rainforests jacked up the population of mosquitoes and other biting insects since it opened up more stagnant water bodies for them to lay eggs in, and The Devastated Forest by S.K. Jensen sold ninety thousand copies, so she probably knew what she was talking about.

He starts reciting the weapons specifications for every fighter in the Air Force, but stalls on the F-22 Raptor and has to switch to the Rebel Alliance X-wing, which is simpler. He’s trying very hard not to think about his team, because he’s only maybe three klicks out and he can still smell the smoke from Garcia’s compound. So when Jensen drops to his heels to catch his breath, his bruised ribs catching painfully, and looks up to see Clay staring at him, he doesn’t yell, but it’s a near thing.

“Fuck, boss—” Jensen starts, then cuts himself off, because something’s wrong. Clay’s got a cigar jammed between his teeth, and Jensen has never seen Clay smoke, not once in the four months he’s been on this team. His flak jacket’s gaping open, and the white shirt underneath is riddled with shrapnel holes and fucking soaked with blood. His expression is weird, just subtly wrong and sort of stretched out, like someone’s used the wrong resolution settings on a monitor. He’s a little wavy around the edges, too, and Jensen blinks hard.

“Fuck,” Jensen says again, because some things just bear repeating. “You’re not real,” and Clay grins around the cigar, blood on his teeth, too.

“True,” says Clay, and his voice is right, even if nothing else is. “You got your bell rung pretty hard, kid. Sure you should be running around in the woods like this?”

Clay’s never once called him kid. He was corporal for the first two days, and after that, it was Jensen, get the radios working, and Jensen, stop hacking the Department of Defence all the way. Jensen had actually been grateful for that, because his previous luck with father-figures is better left unmentioned. He pushes to his feet, winces as his ribs flare with pain. “You’re not real,” he says again, and damn, he’s got to stop this broken record shtick, he’s going to lose his reputation as a smart mouth. Then Jensen realizes he’s worried about impressing a hallucination, and he digs his nails into his palms.

Not-Clay’s fallen into step beside him, blood dripping off the hem of his shirt and pattering on the leaves. As if on cue, the cut on Jensen’s head starts bleeding again, and he irritably wipes the blood away. Clay wavers at the corner of his vision, then solidifies. “If you’re heading for Acacías, you’d better adjust your vector by ten degrees or so. You’re veering too far south.”

“How the fuck would you know?” Jensen asks, maybe a little more irritably than he has to, but his ribs feel like eight lines of fire and his head will not stop bleeding. “You are a product of my overactive imagination, and also a moderately severe concussion and traumatic stress. How do you know I’m ten degrees off course?”

“Watch where you’re walking,” Clay says, apropos of nothing, then shrugs. “You know it, I know it. Besides—” he grins around the cigar again, and blows out a cloud of smoke. “You know I’m the first commanding officer you ever thought was worth listening to.”

“Worth a lot of things,” says Jensen, so low he almost can’t hear it himself. Out of the corner of his eye, Clay almost looks fond. Jensen’s breath hitches. “All right, put that fucking cigar away. My subconscious is fucking Freudian today.” Then he turns his head, and there’s no one there. He looks back, and there’s one narrow trail where’s he’s pushed through the undergrowth, blood dotting along the leaves.

***

Jensen has to stop after another klick or so when it gets hard to breathe. His head is pounding, so he closes his eyes and tips his head back against the thick trunk of a tree. There’s a cluster of lianas and vines creeping around the base, and he tips water from one cupped leaf into his mouth. It’s soothing on his parched throat, even after he has to stop and spit out a couple of dead beetles.

When he opens his eyes again, Sarah is standing in front of him, wearing jeans and her old Beatles t-shirt, HELP signed out in defiant arm gestures. He hasn’t seen that shirt since she was sixteen and Dad cut it up for oil rags. Her blue brocade ballet flats are covered in mud. “Jake, you have to get up.” There’s that worried line between her eyebrows, but like Clay, there’s something subtly off about her face.

“Good to know we’re not through with today’s requisite weirdness,” Jensen croaks, pushing to his feet. The world spins giddily for a moment or two, and Jensen clenches his jaw, trying to keep the water he just drank from coming up again.

Sarah touches one knuckle to her mouth, that old childhood gesture still transmitting distress now, years later in the middle of the Columbian rainforest. “Come on, oh Jake, come on,” she says, and when Jensen doesn’t immediately respond, she grits her teeth at him. “I swear to god, you’re worse than Emma in the morning. Get up!” and something in his hindbrain pulls him to his feet, some old resonance from when they were kids, because she’s two years older and thus in charge.

“Gotta keep moving, honey,” she says, and bounds ahead of him, blue slippers kicking up clots of mud. Jensen follows her, because she’s leading him along some kind of animal path, even though this whole forest has been strangely empty of large, toothy predators. Sarah strikes a sudden tree pose, blocking part of the path, and he remembers doing yoga with her in her living room last Christmas while Emma played with her Legos, and he blinks away the memory. He has to step around her, his back scraping a tree. Sarah grins at him. “Flexibility, Jake,” she says, and winks.

“What the hell are you even saying?” asks Jensen, because he’s in pain, going out of his mind, and his team’s maybe gone. And maybe it’s only been four months, but he’s been carrying that low, crippling panic in his gut since he woke up on the ground. Sarah rolls her eyes at him, drops back behind him.

“I’m saying,” she enunciates clearly, somewhere behind him, “Shit happens, and now you gotta roll with it.”

Jensen snorts. “You’d break my nose if I talked like that in front of Emma.” But when he turns back, Sarah’s gone.

“She wasn’t there in the first place,” Jensen says out loud, mostly for his own benefit. His voice doesn’t sound so good. More assertive, he thinks, less crazy next time.

***

The bugs get worse. There’s a constant buzzing drone, which combines with the pounding in his head until Jensen wants to scream. He doesn’t, because that would be bad for all sorts of reasons, one of which being he might not stop.

Roque’s lingering near the road when Jensen creeps close to assess the situation, an hour or so later. Jensen can’t really tell, because his watch is broken, but it’s getting dark, a fading tropical twilight. He’s not really surprised to see him. Roque’s face is slashed and half-sheeted with blood, right where his scar should be. There are flies buzzing around the wound. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“Any more fucking words of wisdom from my subconscious?” asks Jensen, because it’s better than silence. He grips Cougar’s revolver and edges out of the trees carefully. Roque shrugs, points down the road. “I’d say Garcia’s guys’ll have a roadblock down that way, maybe a quarter-mile? Good ambush point.” Roque shakes his head, and blood spatters Jensen’s face. “Keep to the trees, stay low and try to pass in the dark. And watch your step.”

Jensen moves on, staying low, staying quiet because the twilight’s a riot of birds and frogs and a hundred other animals all yelling at the top of their stupid lungs, but he’s pretty sure he can hear voices, speaking fast local Spanish, not far off. For once they’re not coming from his head.

Speaking of which, Roque’s still with him, moving quick and silent at his six. “You got a sister, right?” asks Roque, voice low. His eyes flash in the gloom. “That’s good, man. Gotta have something that makes it worth it.”

Jensen swats a fly crawling in the sweat on his neck. Under his palm, his skin feels hot and wet. “If you’d been here an hour ago,” he whispers, “You could have said hello.” Roque doesn’t answer him, because of course, Roque isn’t there.

***

It gets a little fuzzy, then. Jensen comes back, and the rain is pounding down, soaking him to the skin. He has no idea where he is. So he curls in, tight and pained and miserable against the trunk of a tree, mud and old leaves and sickly rotting grey mushrooms sliding under his boots. It’s pitch-dark, but at least the rain is keeping the animals away, because Jensen saw Anaconda in the theatre with Sarah when he was thirteen, and it made an impression.

Pooch drops down next to him. Jensen can’t really see his face in the darkness, but he can smell blood, and something really awful, like that time he’d been on winter manoeuvres after basic and Craigson, the stupid asshole, hadn’t kept his feet dry and ended up with trench foot. Jensen closes his eyes tight, wants to wrap around himself around Pooch, wants to feel another warm, steady body against him because today has just been a shitty, shitty day, but he suddenly can’t bear to think about Pooch disappearing under his hands. He thinks that might actually break him, and it’s the most lucid thought he’s had in hours.

When he opens his eyes, Pooch is still there, solid as the tree behind him. “You don’t look so good, man,” he says, stretching out his legs and crossing his arms behind him, “I think you’d really better make a push for it tomorrow.”

“A rush and a push and the land that we stand on is ours,” says Jensen, and he has no idea what he’s saying. The rain is making his vision blur, and there’s a fine, insidious tremor setting into his muscles.

Pooch is suddenly in his face. “Jensen, I know you’re already halfway nuts, but snap the fuck out of it.” Jensen can see him clearer, up close. His eyes are intense, like when he’s leaned over the wheel, tearing out with bullets flying around them. “Listen to me. Stay awake.”

Jensen squeezes his eyes shut. “I really, really don’t want you guys to be dead,” he whispers.

He hears Pooch make a soft sound. “I know, man, I know. Get yourself out of the woods first, maybe we can sort this mess out.”

When the rain stops, minutes or hours later, Pooch is gone. Jensen strains his eyes, staring into the darkness, the cracked lens of his glasses distorting the trees into jagged nightmare shapes.

Then there’s a huge gaping section of terrifying nothing, but he snaps back into himself somewhere during the grey light of dawn. There’s an enormous black cat, seriously fucking huge, ears laid back and eyes gleaming in the pale light. Jaguar, jaguar, not a cougar, holy fucking god. Jensen blinks a few times. “Okay,” he croaks, and slowly, carefully pulls Cougar’s revolver from his shoulder holster. “It’s entirely possible that you’re real.”

The cat just looks at him, and bounds past into the trees. It’s so fast, so silent that he could have imagined it. But there’s deep paw prints in the litter, so it was probably the realest thing he’d seen in hours.

Jensen’s not sure how he gets himself up and moving, but somehow he manages it.

Time goes fuzzy for a while.

When Jensen comes back, his boots are sliding over a moss-wet rock and he flails, adrenaline spiking his system, but his balance is shot and he goes down, ribs flaring white-hot with agony as he hits the ground. He can’t even scream, can hardly breathe. His head is bleeding again. The insects are back.

He doesn’t know how long he’s down, staring at the light filtering in through the distant green canopy. Long enough to think, half-lucidly, about putting the cool metal barrel of Cougar’s gun against the burning skin of his temple.

“Don’t you even fucking think it.” Jensen tips his head to the side, and there’s Cougar, his hat angled low, a scowl pulling his mouth sharply downward. Par for the course, expression-wise, at least when he’s around Jensen. Jensen laughs, and it’s not a good sound.

“Figured you’d be here glaring a while ago, Cougar, you’re late to the fucking party.” Jensen sits up on his elbows, takes a careful breath. It fucking hurts, surprise. “Besides, what do you care? Four months, you’ve maybe said five words to me the whole time.”

To his vague surprise, Cougar’s not a walking dead man, like the rest of his team had been. He’s crouched in front of Jensen, his SR-25 propped in front of him, because apparently Cougar goes armed even in his subconscious. His mouth tightens, but he’s not glaring anymore, he just looks unhappy. “Get up,” says Cougar, his right trigger finger tapping on the barrel of his rifle, and if Jensen were far gone enough to think he was real, that little movement would give it away in a second. Cougar has stillness down to an art and a science, with a Pulitzer and a Nobel on his metaphorical mantle.

“Jensen.” His eyes snap back to Cougar, who’s still there. “Get up.” A beat. “Please.”

“There’s the magic word,” Jensen rasps, and somehow gets up. His calf muscles are trembling, but his boots stay under his body. Progress.

Cougar nods once, sharply. “Compass,” he says, “The road’s southwest. You fell, but you didn’t turn around. Go.”

Jensen starts walking. Cougar stays at his six, wavering in and out of the corner of his vision. “Still alive?” he asks, his voice a little wry.

“Still walking,” says Jensen, keeping his eyes fixed ahead, where the trees have started to thin a little. It helps with the dizziness, a little. The road can’t be far. He doesn’t know how many miles to get to Acacías, but he’ll deal with that. Well. Eventually.

“When you get to the road,” says Cougar quietly, somewhere behind him, “watch out for Garcia’s men. They were there last night, they might still be there. Be quiet.”

Jensen has to laugh, just a little. It hurts his throat, but what the hell? “Figures you talk more in my subconscious than you do in real life. Out there you just look at me, from under your hat, which is a badass fucking hat, I don’t know if I ever told you. But, yeah. You just stare at me sometimes.”

There’s a soft huff, something that might be a laugh, Jensen can’t tell. Then Cougar says, almost casually, “Maybe I just like looking at you.”

“What?” says Jensen. There’s no one there.

***

When he hits the road, Jensen has a very bad moment where he’s not sure which direction leads back to Acacías, even though he’s been walking in that direction since yesterday. There’s the distant slow rumble of an engine, Garcia’s men, maybe. He’d passed their checkpoint sometime last night, he half-remembers. He’s not sure how far back that was.

He could follow the road out, but it’s still miles back to town, and the probability that the way’s being patrolled by angry men who’d like to introduce their bullets to his brainpan is just too high. Jensen gropes at the pockets of his vest, closes his fingers around the little roll of screwdrivers, perfect for breaking down a laptop or disassembling a hard drive with their sharp, pointy tips—

Jensen digs his fingertips into the closest tree, and pries off a wide strip of rigid, cork-like bark.

The screwdrivers punch through the bark easy, and then stand propped upright like perfect matte-metal spikes. He knots the monofilament around the base a few times, and gives it a sharp tug.

When the truck comes around the corner, creeping along with six armed men scanning the trees, it’s just a matter of tugging the makeshift caltrop into the path of the front tire. Jensen lies on his belly, hidden in the underbrush, and his vision’s blurred as fuck, but he hears the low series of pops as the screwdrivers punch into the tire. The truck keeps going.

Jensen would punch the air victoriously, but he’d probably just fall over. He gets up, carefully, and follows the truck, moving through the cover as quietly as he can.

Half a klick down the road, the truck is jacked up, two men arguing as one wrestles lug nuts into place, the other dragging the flat back to the trunk. Two guys are standing to the back of the truck with their rifles in position and are scanning the road. If there’s anyone else, they’re not in sight.

Low on his belly and his elbows, Jensen creeps up towards the edge of the road. His ribs are compressed and he can hardly breathe, but he makes himself go slowly, tries to hold on to that uncharacteristic stillness. He thinks of the snipers he used to see in Afghanistan, thinks of the one time he saw Cougar lining up a shot, steady and sure and purposeful. He lines up the little snub-nosed revolver, lets out one slow breath until his vision stops wavering, and squeezes the trigger.

Jensen might not care much about guns, a fact that got him an entirely expected shitstorm of mockery in basic, but he’s a good shot. Assault rifle one goes down with a bullet right in the center of his mass. Assault rifle two is just getting his gun up when he steps right into Jensen’s line of fire and he drops him.

One, two, thinks Jensen, the little gun kicking back harder than he expected. That second guy was mostly luck. The reverberation in his ears almost drowns out the other men yelling, and he sees the jack skittering away as someone kicks it hard.

The last two men go for cover behind the truck, and Jensen fires, misses. He knows if they can get to their rifles from back there, he’s dead, so he launches out of the undergrowth, pain and adrenaline driving him up and out into the road, and he’s got one hand on the driver’s door handle when the ugly black muzzle of an AKM shoves through the other window, and Jensen doesn’t think, just swings his gun up and fires, three. Then someone knocks him hard and Jensen’s finger tightens on the trigger as he goes down, the shot ricocheting uselessly away, and when he hits the ground, his ribs explode with white-hot pain, and for a second, everything’s dark.

He comes back when someone kicks the gun out of his hand, his fingers clutching hard an instant too late. The gun skitters away across the dirt road, and he looks up, the last man’s standing over him, the barrel of his dirty AKM pointed right at Jensen’s face.

“Open your fuckin’ mouth,” the guy sneers, and moves one step closer.

Jensen kicks the side of his knee hard, and the rifle kicks up, bullets spraying as the guy starts to drop. Jensen throws one arm out, have to get the gun, Jesus Christ—and his fingers close around cold rigid metal. The tire iron.

Jensen doesn’t actually remember what happens next. When he comes back, he’s sitting leaned against the driver’s side door, his legs sprawled out in front of him. The tire iron’s next to his hand, and there’s a lot of blood. It isn’t his, for once. No one is moving. Flies are starting to buzz around.

Jensen gets his feet under him, and walks, very carefully, to where Cougar’s gun is glinting in the road. He picks it up, very carefully. He checks the clip.

“Huh,” he says, “One to spare.” His voice sounds really bad, maybe irrevocably-fucked-up bad. It’s hard to tell, though. He’s not really thinking.

***

Jensen once drove a humvee through a night rocket attack in Afghanistan with no batteries in his NVGs. This is probably worse.

***

He drops on the floor in the safehouse in Acacías, blood on his clothes and his boots clotted with mud, his fingers wrapped tight around the butt of Cougar’s revolver. He doesn’t remember anything else.

***

There’s a sound in the room, and Jensen snaps up, gun in hand because his fingers are still clutching it bloodlessly. Three feet away, Pooch freezes.

“Jensen? Jensen, buddy, put the gun down.” He reaches out very carefully, and pushes the blunt little barrel down. He looks dirty, exhausted. He looks mostly alive. He looks worried. “Oh, hell, Jensen, your head.”

Jensen would get up and make sure Pooch is real, but he’s absolutely certain that he’ll fall over if he does.

Pooch might look like he spent the night under a rock, but his hands are steady, bracing Jensen’s neck as he very gently tips his head to the side, assessing. He tips Jensen’s head to the side, and Jensen grits his teeth, makes a small, pained sound. “You were much nicer last night, you know. Even the fucking cat was gentler than you right now.”

“Oh, man,” says Pooch, “How the hell did you get back here?” He’s moving through the room, picking up the first aid kit. “How much blood did you lose?”

Jensen must blank out for a minute or two, because next thing he knows, Pooch is shining a penlight in his eyes, muttering, “Fuck, your pupils are uneven. How hard you hit your head?”

“Busted my glasses?” Jensen offers, and apparently that’s still a bit too nonsensical, even for him, because Pooch looks worried. He disappears into the other room, and Jensen drops back to the floor. The room is turning, gently.

Pooch is talking in the other room. “—yeah, he was at the safehouse when I got here. His head’s messed up pretty bad, I gotta get him to Villavicencio, get him an MRI.” A pause and a crackle of static on the radio, something he can’t hear. “No, I have no fucking clue how he got back here. Garcia’s guys were all over the road.”

When Pooch comes back, Jensen’s pretty sure he’s real. Not a hundred percent, but pretty sure. Maybe eighty percent. That number starts to creep up when he latches on to Pooch’s arm and Pooch does that thing with his eyebrows, like he’s not sure whether to shrug Jensen off or grab him back.

“I am really, really glad that I got to see your eyebrows again.” Jensen tells him, and maybe that’s the weirdest thing he’s said today, but Pooch seems to actually get it this time.

“Same, man,” he says softly, as he braces Jensen’s arm over his shoulder and pulls him up.

Jensen doesn’t remember much for a while after that, just has flashes of being in the truck, Pooch steady over the wheel, talking, talking to him.

“Cougar found your tags by the truck, Roque figures one of the guys at the east guard post got a rocket off. Just a lucky fucking shot, he figures, but man, he royally trashed our ride. Jensen. Jensen. I got pinned down with the colonel on the south side when those damn charges went early, the fire was spreading into the woods and then we had to go around the long way. Your side got the worst of it, and you didn’t answer your radio. Jensen!”

“What?” says Jensen, when he realizes maybe a response is expected, “I thought I talked too much. You tell me that at least twice a day.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m missing your dulcet tones over here. Tell me what happened. You weren’t answering your radio. The Colonel was going batshit.”

“Bullshit,” Jensen counters, and leans his head against the window, because Clay’s solid, Clay’s been in the game for too long for that.

Pooch snorts. “What, you think Clay was looking forward to telling the brass we broke our brand new tech guy because of manufacturer’s defects on the C4 detonators?” Then he glances at Jensen, and says, a little softer, “Fuck, man, no one was leaving ‘til we found you, whatever happened. Colonel only sent me out so I could report in to control, bring back a truck once Garcia’s guys cleared out.”

“Okay,” says Jensen, and he blinks a couple of times. The wound-up feeling in his gut is finally starting to loosen. They’ve just hit the outskirts of Villavicencio.

“Look alive, man,” says Pooch, “We’re gonna get you fixed up. Clay and the others are meeting us here after they get back and break down the safehouse. You can get your tags back from Cougar. He wouldn’t let Clay take ’em.”

“Really?” asks Jensen, because Cougar in real life is not the same as Cougar in his head, and why the hell would Cougs want his tags?

Pooch nods. “Yeah, he said he’d keep them safe.” He flashes a smile. “So they’re okay. I know I’d be pissed if I lost my tags. If that ring disappeared, Jolene would probably kill me.” He laughs a little. “I wouldn’t blame her.”

Jensen resolves to think about this extensively at a later date, when his head doesn’t hurt quite so badly.

***

“New standing order,” says Roque, standing at the foot of the gurney. “As specifically applied to Radio Shack over here. If you have a head injury in the field, get out of immediate range, then sit the fuck down and wait.”

***

Seven hours later, he’s stitched up and had his ribs taped—two of the stupid sons of bitches were broken, and Jensen is never trusting his diagnostic skills after a head injury ever again—and they’re holed up in a hotel room in Villavicencio while the worst of the Garcia situation blows over. Jensen sleeps for sixteen hours, and when he wakes up, it’s dusk, and Clay’s leaning back in a chair, his boots propped on the bed because Clay was clearly raised in a barn. He raises one eyebrow at Jensen’s disbelieving look, and tosses something. Jensen’s catlike reflexes are clearly on their way back, because he grabs his spare glasses out of the air. They’re the ones with the bright yellow lenses, good for night ops, but he’s not European or pretentious enough to pull them off the rest of the time.

Clay snorts, “I found those in your pack, which was inside the blast radius, so I’m not sure how those Bono monstrosities made it out intact. Found your M4A1, too. We clearly need to have another talk about leaving your weapon in the field, Jensen.”

“This is my rifle, without it I am nothing?” Jensen offers, and Clay actually cracks a smile. He drops his boots to the floor, and pats Jensen’s shoulder on his way out.

“Next time,” Clay says, standing in the door, “Try not to break your head or your radio, okay?”

Jensen closes his eyes, smiles a little. “I do my best, boss.”

When Jensen wakes up again, it’s almost dawn. There’s a little pale light coming in, and he turns his head to look. Cougar is sitting crouched in the window, and even without the rifle, it’s so very much like the last time he saw Cougar, in the middle of the forest, that Jensen has to blink hard, convince himself that this is real.

Cougar doesn’t move from his perch by the window, just tips his hat in Jensen’s direction. Good morning, or the Cougar-equivalent. Jensen’s sure he must have seen Cougar sleep at some point, sometime in the last four months, but he can’t bring any specific instance to mind. He props himself up on his elbows, and the room stays mercifully still. Jensen is never going to take that for granted again, or at least not for a week or two. “Hey, Cougar.” His voice is still half-shot, but he’s never let that stop him before. “You got my tags? Pooch said you picked them up. I need them back, what if I end up forgetting my own name and have some kind of terrible Bourne Identity crisis? I’d be all busy running around Europe and hooking up with Franka Potente and you guys wouldn’t have anyone to hack satellite feeds for you, and then where would you be?”

One corner of Cougar’s mouth pulls up into a small smile. He doesn’t say anything, just pushes his hand under the collar of his loose grey shirt, and pulls up two sets of tags. He untwines the chains, and tosses one set of tags to Jensen, who catches it purely on reflex.

Jensen just hopes the look on his face isn’t too painfully stupid, as he runs his thumb over the stamped surface of the top tag, still warm from Cougar’s skin. “Thanks, man.” For once, it’s all he can think to say, and he has the sudden urge to pay Cougar back, somehow, in the language they both speak.

He leans over the edge of the bed—ow, fuck, his ribs—and gropes around until his hand hits the leather harness of his shoulder holster. He pulls it up onto the bed, and draws Cougar’s little snub-nose S&W 629. Still lying on his back, he holds it out, grip-first, in Cougar’s direction. “Saved my ass. It’s yours, though, really, you should have it.”

There’s the soft sound of Cougar’s bare feet on the old carpet, and then Cougar fits his fingers over Jensen’s knuckles and pushes the gun away. The pads of his fingers are warm, the pressure light. Jensen blinks. “Keep it,” says Cougar softly. Another half smile. “I’ll win it back later.”

Then Cougar’s gone, the door closing quietly behind him. Jensen looks at the revolver, the early morning light winking off the bright steel barrel, and starts to grin.