Rolled under (2/2)
Jul. 1st, 2010 12:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maratonistaRolled under (2/2)
The Losers, Gen (implied Cougar/Jensen, if you squint)
R
There were probably more pressing things to concern himself with, and it could have been the head injury talking; instead of panicking about drowning and his silent team members, all Pooch could do was wonder whether or not Honduras was home to any giant, man eating snakes.
Shameless h/c :p
Up until six months ago, Roque’s experiences of family had consisted of a collection of relations who made the Manson’s look like sane, friendly folk.
He’d never bought into crap the Army spouted about turning your fellow soldier into a brother. He had brothers, and they were all fucked in the head. There was no need for him to gain any more.
Then Clay brought him into the Losers and put under his command three fucking kids – Cougar might be twenty-eight, but that still made him nine years younger than Roque – and despite all efforts to resist, he’d fallen for each and every one of them.
Pooch was just a likable guy. He loved his job, he loved his woman, and he treated folk without prejudice. He called Roque ‘bro’, bought into that brothers in arms shit Roque had always avoided, and made him want it.
You couldn’t not like Pooch, and the same was true for Cougar. He might be a quiet sonovabitch, and a fucking scary one on top, but there were times when Cougar seemed so haunted even Roque felt stirred to compassion. When he tried acting on it, Cougar looked surprised, grateful, and always refused his sympathy. Somehow that made Roque like him even more.
Clay fueled the fire in their make shift camp as Roque drew out one of his favorite knives. It was smooth and sharp down both edges, used for a clean, fast kill, unlike his serrated counterparts.
He held the blade over the flickering flames and waited for the metal to glow.
Between his legs, Jensen twitched weakly, lost to a level of unconsciousness that brought with it the harrowing brush of walking nightmares.
He’d honestly hated Jensen at first.
Jensen was everything Roque once resented. The Army had become an escape from the hell of home, but even that dream had slowly soured on him. Jensen was a living, breathing, card carrying reminder of what it meant to be an American soldier, doing what they did out of love, not obligation.
He walked the walk and talked the talk, then shook everything up with a brand of crazy Roque had never encountered before.
So yeah, Roque had hated him, and Jensen hadn’t even noticed.
The kid was so damn smart, and really fucking stupid. He’d likely not recognize hate if it was dancing under his nose in lurid pink spandex. He had no reason to dislike Roque, so could genuinely not see a reason for Roque to dislike him.
It made Roque feel like he hated a puppy, or a kitten, or some other helpless little animal that carried guns and blocks of C4 in their pocket and never shut the fuck up.
Since he liked puppies and kittens and especially liked guns and C4, he found himself slowly liking Jensen as well.
Which meant he owned it to the kid to keep him from taking the next exit out of there.
Their I.F.A.Ks had fresh packs of QuickClot, but they weren’t holding up against the speed Jensen was bleeding out, or the severity of the wound.
“Cougs.” He called out to the sniper who appeared by his side in an instant. His hands dripped with blood, and he quickly cleaned them off with sanitary wipes. “We need to cauterize.”
Cougar shot Jensen a wince of sympathy, but understood what Roque was saying without further elaboration. He stripped off his shirt and wound it tight as if he were wringing out water. The fabric was wet, but didn’t so much as drip, the air was that humid.
The blade of Roque’s knife began to glow as Cougar positioned himself behind Jensen. He tied the ends of his shirt into a gag, giving Jensen something to bite down on, and hooked his ankles over the techie’s arms, effectively pinning him down.
It was then that Roque got a look at Cougar’s left ankle. If it wasn’t broken, it sure as hell was seriously sprained. Through the ripped fabric of his ACPs, he got a look at the bloody, swollen flesh and cringed. They’d have to wrap the boot. There was no way they could risk taking it off and have Cougar’s ankle swell up too fast to put it back on again, not when they were stranded in the middle of fuck knew where.
Roque could feel the grind of his ribs grating with every move he made; no doubt Pooch’s leg was fucked, along with Cougar’s ankle, and they all had some degree of head injury.
They were all banged up.
Clay swapped him a pair of tweezers for the knife and took up a place besides Cougar.
Pooch had them covered as he watched their perimeter.
“We ready?” Roque asked, not sure whom he was looking to for a response. Both Clay and Cougar nodded.
Clay used the heated blade to gently widen the entry wound in Jensen’s stomach. The searing touch of the blade brought Jensen screaming back into semi-consciousness.
“Easy.” Clay calmed him, helping Cougar hold Jensen down as he bucked.
Roque didn’t waste any time in digging the bullet out and dousing the wound with the hip-flask of whiskey he kept on his person for desperate times.
Cougar’s shirt muffled much of Jensen’s responses to the rough aftercare. Roque half expected one of them to make a crack about finally shutting Jensen up, but it didn’t seem right to joke about it when Jensen wasn’t up to reacting.
The bullet was a 7.62x51mm – the same rounds Cougar shot from his SR-25, and standard NATO issue. The fact that Jensen had been shot by some two bit, backwater warlord with their own goddamn weapons made Roque’s blood boil.
Cougar looked at the metal round and blanched. He knew better than anyone just how much damage a bullet like that could do.
The fact that it hadn’t ripped a hole as it exited from Jensen’s body was a sheer miracle. The kid was a lucky bastard.
“He’s gonna need a Casevac.” Roque shook his head and took his knife back from Clay.
The colonel nodded and braced Jensen down as Roque cauterized the wound by pressing the flat of the blade firmly down on Jensen’s belly.
It would leave behind an ugly scar if Jensen survived. If he didn’t, Roque didn’t think anyone would care.
“We get this wrapped and we head up river.” Clay ordered as Jensen jerked in pain, then slipped quietly back into oblivion. “Roque, finish here. Cougar, pack up and be ready to move in fifteen. Pooch, with me.”
By the time Roque had Jensen strapped up and the bleeding stopped externally, if not internally, Clay and Pooch had rigged together a litter from their own clothing and hastily stripped undergrowth.
Cougar had kicked over the fire, burying it under the flora and fauna of the jungle floor. Where Jensen’s blood had stained the earth, he poured his collected snake blood, masking the scent from predators.
Clay took the radio equipment from Jensen’s belt and attached it to his own before he and Roque lifted the kid onto the stretcher.
Cougar was good at what he did because while he neither wanted, nor needed to kill, the act of doing so didn’t concern him the way it did others. It left him with a clear head and the ability to act without prejudice. Each decision made was rational, level headed and with a specific purpose.
Where other soldiers might freeze, or descend into the bloodlust, Cougar hovered in a state above it all.
He had never been struck by the urge to kill just because he wanted to.
They trekked through the inhospitable undergrowth of the Honduran jungle, and Cougar’s trigger finger twitched. No doubt Jensen wouldn’t like the idea that he made Cougar bloodthirsty. Not when it messed with Cougar’s head and left him open to mistakes, and not when Jensen himself still had a fairly naive idea of warfare.
The kid knew better than most of his peers what it was like to kill a man, but when it came down to the bare facts, Jensen liked things that went bang and super high-tech gadgets, but that love for killing evaded him. He was still a kid playing soldier.
He’d grow out of it. Had the talent and the strength to go far, especially with a solid team behind him.
Cougar just hoped he lived long enough to reach his potential.
Stripped down to dry out, Cougar’s gun was slung over his shoulder, the muzzle wrapped in webbing and quickly drying. Since they didn’t want to attract attention, and the undergrowth was so inhospitable, Cougar had switched sidearm’s for a machete and hacked through the foliage.
Pooch brought up the rear, with Roque and Clay carrying Jensen between them.
Cougar didn’t miss the way Pooch limped, or the tight look around the colonel’s eyes.
Heading up river would eventually bring them to a point where Jensen could be Casevac lifted, but it would still be a long trek to the final rendezvous. By Cougar’s reckoning, about a thirty click trek.
His ankle twanged at the thought.
It wasn’t broken. He’d broken ankles before, and knew this was just a bad sprain. It didn’t hurt any less to walk on, but short of major ligament damage, it wasn’t enough to stop him doing what needed to be done.
He’d been lucky when the crash had thrown him free of the vehicle, but Jesus fuck, he’d never been so scared in his goddamn life to wake up on his back in the middle of the jungle, no sight nor sound of the rest of his unit.
Searching, he would have found them, dead or alive no matter how long it took him. Alive, and he’d praised God. Had they been dead, Cougar didn’t doubt that he and the people responsible would have quickly followed.
“Never thought I’d say this,” Roque said, his voice labored with pain and exhaustion. “But it’s too fucking quiet.”
Cougar agreed.
Jensen’s chatter took some getting used to, but once it had worked its way into your subconscious, being without it felt like losing a limb.
Looking back at Jensen would only have made Cougar face that he’d failed to do what he’d promised himself he would. When he accepted the fact that Jensen actually kept him sane, instead of driving him round the bend, Cougar had vowed to return the favor.
Since Jensen’s sanity was a ship long ago sailed, Cougar substituted that vow by keeping Jensen alive.
At times, he felt he’d picked the hardest of two trials.
By fuck, Jensen attracted trouble like no one Cougar had ever met.
They walked through the night and into the day, stopping only to piss and wolf down the meager rations they had salvaged from the crash. The seconds that passed while they remained standing felt wasted – they were seconds Jensen didn’t have to spare.
After four hours, they switched. Clay took point, and Cougar and Pooch carried Jensen between them.
Cougar took the front, his back to Jensen. He didn’t want to look at the kid.
When they finally reached neutral territory, Pooch looked set to cry. He didn’t, but Cougar shared the sentiment.
Clay was on the radio, calling in the Casevac, one hand on Jensen’s shoulder as he relayed their co-ordinates.
One hundred and nine minutes later, and the whirring propellers of a Blackhawk helicopter became the most beautiful sound Cougar had ever heard.
Whilst Casevac had improved significantly with the start of the Iraq war, the main focus of their activities were the Middles East, and the crew that winched down to their aid were members of the U.S Navy who were trained to stabilize a casualty, but not operate. The best they could do was keeping Jensen alive until he was transported to a shock trauma unit.
Cougar couldn’t help growling at the kid –barely older than Jensen – who strapped the fallen member of their team to a more sturdily built litter than theirs and secured him down in preparation for the winch. He hoped it made his feelings clear – Jensen died, and Cougar would hunt them down.
After that, it was all out of their hands.
Clay was skirting the edge of exhaustion when they touched down and Jensen was rushed away from them in a flurry of activity.
The flight had been the longest hour of his life. Extra fuel had to be taken on board in order to see them through the round trip, and it had been a cramped, hellish trip.
Pooch and Roque has crashed out once they were in the air. The heightened urgency that had kept them both standing vanished once Jensen was in the hands of someone more qualified. Only Cougar and Clay stayed awake.
Clay half wished the sniper had slept.
The slightest twitch from Jensen, and Cougar growled like his namesake. Pain, fear and exhaustion made him an irritable bastard, and added to the helplessness Clay shared, it combined to make Cougar an absolute fucking nightmare.
The sniper barely managed to contain himself until Jensen flatlined and the panic that followed woke the rest of the team.
It probably hadn’t helped the medics do their job, but each and everyone one of them alternated between bitching at Jensen, and screaming at the team trying to save his life.
After three hellish minutes where Jensen had stopped fucking breathing, the tenacious little shit responded to the adrenaline injected into his heart and fought his way back to life.
Those three minutes aged Clay by a decade.
The others too, by the looks of them.
Clay and the remains of his battered unit were quickly swept forwards amongst the swarm of medical personnel. Cougar’s ankle had completely seized up during the flight, and he had to lean on Clay as they limped towards the trauma center.
They soon attracted the attention of fresh medics and were swiftly separated and herded into assessment rooms.
Clay dimly heard Roque threaten to kick the shit out of anyone who touched him – Roque got really testy about being touched when he was hurt – before Clay had his own shit to deal with.
“You fucking check my team first!” He demanded, swatting away a young nurse who tried to shine a light in his eye and assess for a head injury.
“Someone is seeing to them, colonel.”
Clay knew he was a shit when he was hurt and worried, but that didn’t stop him yelling at her. “You ain’t treating me until I get the all clear on my corporal, you understand?”
He must have been completely off his game. Something sharp pricked his arm, but before Clay could turn around and break the neck of the person stupid enough to try drugging him, the tide of exhaustion he’d been battling against finally pulled him under.
Contrary to popular belief, Jensen didn’t hate drugs.
He hated hospitals, being injured, and enforced bed-rest, but drugs were one of those long-standing friends that sometimes fucked you over, but always came through for you in the end. Especially after you'd been shot.
Floating on a cloud and slowly coming back to earth, the first thing that came to Jensen’s mind was the urge to reprogram the beeping of the ECG machine.
Then came the knowledge that if he was hooked up to an ECG machine, he was probably pretty fucked.
Following that came everything else – Honduras, fucking Honduras, man, shit going fubar, getting shot and then the vague recollection of bitching about Pooch’s driving skills.
Jensen groaned. If this was what happened when he chewed Pooch a new one, he’d learn how to keep his mouth shut.
“Ow.” Given the given, he felt that was a pretty eloquent response.
“Holy shit!”
The Pooch was fucking loud. Jensen must have really pissed him off if the fucker was screaming in his ear while Jensen’s brain was leaking out onto the pillow.
Cracking open one eye, Jensen stared up into the blurry face of Pooch. “I’m sorry I bitched about your driving.” He said meekly.
“Hijo de puta!” Jensen knew just enough Spanish to know that Cougar sounded as pissed with him as Pooch must have been.
Still unable to open his eyes more than a crack, Jensen tried for a lopsided smile – the kind that usually got him out of trouble. “That’s not nice, Cougs. My mother was a perfectly respectable woman.”
He heard Roque laugh his rare, booming laugh and was surprised. Of all the people he expected not to be pissed at him, Roque was bottom of the list. Roque was always pissed at him.
“Glad to see you in the land of the living, kid.”
“Makes one of us.” Jensen groaned, forcing his eyes open. Something flashed in front of his eyes before Cougar set a spare pair of his glasses on his nose. “Awesome! Cheers buddy!” A black glare was all his got from Cougar. “Wow.” Jensen said, looking at them all in turn now he could see. “Y’all look like shit.”
The colonel was in the far corner, closest to the door and the first in line for any threat that might enter the room. “Funny thing that.” Clay grumbled. Jensen saw the cards scattered out on the foot of the bed. He must have interrupted a game.
How long had he been out?
Cougar had his leg in a cast, which likely explained the look of extreme irritation on his face. Cougar did not like enforced inactivity. “Shit Cougs, what happened to your leg?”
“Stupid fucker doesn’t know a broken leg when he walks thirty k on one.”
"Not broken." Cougar snarled. Jensen blinked up at him in surprise, but the rest of the unit didn't seem fazed.
"Thank fuck you're awake, that's all I'm saying." Clay shook his head. "Cougar's been fucking bitchy all damn week."
Jensen did not want to be the colonel right then. That look Cougar had in his eyes...never ended well for the person on the receiving end.
"I was out for a week?" Jensen asked, surprised.
"Nine days." Roque said. "Soon as you done here, I'm kicking your scrawny ass."
Jensen tried shifting on the bed so he could sit up. "That's awfully," a flare of pain rose above the cloud of painkillers and he winced, "counter-productive."
"Do I look like I give a shit?" Roque asked.
"Honestly, no. No shit given."
"Exactly."
Jensen couldn't help but crack a smile. Goddamn, he loved these assholes. It was probably a good thing then - the happy drugs making him a whole lot more open to the idea of saying so - that when he came to blink his eyes, exhaustion hit, and he didn't open them again for another four hours.
The End.
Coming next...
As the team recover from their time in Honduras, Pooch suffers a crisis of confidence, while Cougar's past becomes a whole lot more confusing when he's sent off on a solo mission.
The Losers, Gen (implied Cougar/Jensen, if you squint)
R
There were probably more pressing things to concern himself with, and it could have been the head injury talking; instead of panicking about drowning and his silent team members, all Pooch could do was wonder whether or not Honduras was home to any giant, man eating snakes.
Shameless h/c :p
Up until six months ago, Roque’s experiences of family had consisted of a collection of relations who made the Manson’s look like sane, friendly folk.
He’d never bought into crap the Army spouted about turning your fellow soldier into a brother. He had brothers, and they were all fucked in the head. There was no need for him to gain any more.
Then Clay brought him into the Losers and put under his command three fucking kids – Cougar might be twenty-eight, but that still made him nine years younger than Roque – and despite all efforts to resist, he’d fallen for each and every one of them.
Pooch was just a likable guy. He loved his job, he loved his woman, and he treated folk without prejudice. He called Roque ‘bro’, bought into that brothers in arms shit Roque had always avoided, and made him want it.
You couldn’t not like Pooch, and the same was true for Cougar. He might be a quiet sonovabitch, and a fucking scary one on top, but there were times when Cougar seemed so haunted even Roque felt stirred to compassion. When he tried acting on it, Cougar looked surprised, grateful, and always refused his sympathy. Somehow that made Roque like him even more.
Clay fueled the fire in their make shift camp as Roque drew out one of his favorite knives. It was smooth and sharp down both edges, used for a clean, fast kill, unlike his serrated counterparts.
He held the blade over the flickering flames and waited for the metal to glow.
Between his legs, Jensen twitched weakly, lost to a level of unconsciousness that brought with it the harrowing brush of walking nightmares.
He’d honestly hated Jensen at first.
Jensen was everything Roque once resented. The Army had become an escape from the hell of home, but even that dream had slowly soured on him. Jensen was a living, breathing, card carrying reminder of what it meant to be an American soldier, doing what they did out of love, not obligation.
He walked the walk and talked the talk, then shook everything up with a brand of crazy Roque had never encountered before.
So yeah, Roque had hated him, and Jensen hadn’t even noticed.
The kid was so damn smart, and really fucking stupid. He’d likely not recognize hate if it was dancing under his nose in lurid pink spandex. He had no reason to dislike Roque, so could genuinely not see a reason for Roque to dislike him.
It made Roque feel like he hated a puppy, or a kitten, or some other helpless little animal that carried guns and blocks of C4 in their pocket and never shut the fuck up.
Since he liked puppies and kittens and especially liked guns and C4, he found himself slowly liking Jensen as well.
Which meant he owned it to the kid to keep him from taking the next exit out of there.
Their I.F.A.Ks had fresh packs of QuickClot, but they weren’t holding up against the speed Jensen was bleeding out, or the severity of the wound.
“Cougs.” He called out to the sniper who appeared by his side in an instant. His hands dripped with blood, and he quickly cleaned them off with sanitary wipes. “We need to cauterize.”
Cougar shot Jensen a wince of sympathy, but understood what Roque was saying without further elaboration. He stripped off his shirt and wound it tight as if he were wringing out water. The fabric was wet, but didn’t so much as drip, the air was that humid.
The blade of Roque’s knife began to glow as Cougar positioned himself behind Jensen. He tied the ends of his shirt into a gag, giving Jensen something to bite down on, and hooked his ankles over the techie’s arms, effectively pinning him down.
It was then that Roque got a look at Cougar’s left ankle. If it wasn’t broken, it sure as hell was seriously sprained. Through the ripped fabric of his ACPs, he got a look at the bloody, swollen flesh and cringed. They’d have to wrap the boot. There was no way they could risk taking it off and have Cougar’s ankle swell up too fast to put it back on again, not when they were stranded in the middle of fuck knew where.
Roque could feel the grind of his ribs grating with every move he made; no doubt Pooch’s leg was fucked, along with Cougar’s ankle, and they all had some degree of head injury.
They were all banged up.
Clay swapped him a pair of tweezers for the knife and took up a place besides Cougar.
Pooch had them covered as he watched their perimeter.
“We ready?” Roque asked, not sure whom he was looking to for a response. Both Clay and Cougar nodded.
Clay used the heated blade to gently widen the entry wound in Jensen’s stomach. The searing touch of the blade brought Jensen screaming back into semi-consciousness.
“Easy.” Clay calmed him, helping Cougar hold Jensen down as he bucked.
Roque didn’t waste any time in digging the bullet out and dousing the wound with the hip-flask of whiskey he kept on his person for desperate times.
Cougar’s shirt muffled much of Jensen’s responses to the rough aftercare. Roque half expected one of them to make a crack about finally shutting Jensen up, but it didn’t seem right to joke about it when Jensen wasn’t up to reacting.
The bullet was a 7.62x51mm – the same rounds Cougar shot from his SR-25, and standard NATO issue. The fact that Jensen had been shot by some two bit, backwater warlord with their own goddamn weapons made Roque’s blood boil.
Cougar looked at the metal round and blanched. He knew better than anyone just how much damage a bullet like that could do.
The fact that it hadn’t ripped a hole as it exited from Jensen’s body was a sheer miracle. The kid was a lucky bastard.
“He’s gonna need a Casevac.” Roque shook his head and took his knife back from Clay.
The colonel nodded and braced Jensen down as Roque cauterized the wound by pressing the flat of the blade firmly down on Jensen’s belly.
It would leave behind an ugly scar if Jensen survived. If he didn’t, Roque didn’t think anyone would care.
“We get this wrapped and we head up river.” Clay ordered as Jensen jerked in pain, then slipped quietly back into oblivion. “Roque, finish here. Cougar, pack up and be ready to move in fifteen. Pooch, with me.”
By the time Roque had Jensen strapped up and the bleeding stopped externally, if not internally, Clay and Pooch had rigged together a litter from their own clothing and hastily stripped undergrowth.
Cougar had kicked over the fire, burying it under the flora and fauna of the jungle floor. Where Jensen’s blood had stained the earth, he poured his collected snake blood, masking the scent from predators.
Clay took the radio equipment from Jensen’s belt and attached it to his own before he and Roque lifted the kid onto the stretcher.
Cougar was good at what he did because while he neither wanted, nor needed to kill, the act of doing so didn’t concern him the way it did others. It left him with a clear head and the ability to act without prejudice. Each decision made was rational, level headed and with a specific purpose.
Where other soldiers might freeze, or descend into the bloodlust, Cougar hovered in a state above it all.
He had never been struck by the urge to kill just because he wanted to.
They trekked through the inhospitable undergrowth of the Honduran jungle, and Cougar’s trigger finger twitched. No doubt Jensen wouldn’t like the idea that he made Cougar bloodthirsty. Not when it messed with Cougar’s head and left him open to mistakes, and not when Jensen himself still had a fairly naive idea of warfare.
The kid knew better than most of his peers what it was like to kill a man, but when it came down to the bare facts, Jensen liked things that went bang and super high-tech gadgets, but that love for killing evaded him. He was still a kid playing soldier.
He’d grow out of it. Had the talent and the strength to go far, especially with a solid team behind him.
Cougar just hoped he lived long enough to reach his potential.
Stripped down to dry out, Cougar’s gun was slung over his shoulder, the muzzle wrapped in webbing and quickly drying. Since they didn’t want to attract attention, and the undergrowth was so inhospitable, Cougar had switched sidearm’s for a machete and hacked through the foliage.
Pooch brought up the rear, with Roque and Clay carrying Jensen between them.
Cougar didn’t miss the way Pooch limped, or the tight look around the colonel’s eyes.
Heading up river would eventually bring them to a point where Jensen could be Casevac lifted, but it would still be a long trek to the final rendezvous. By Cougar’s reckoning, about a thirty click trek.
His ankle twanged at the thought.
It wasn’t broken. He’d broken ankles before, and knew this was just a bad sprain. It didn’t hurt any less to walk on, but short of major ligament damage, it wasn’t enough to stop him doing what needed to be done.
He’d been lucky when the crash had thrown him free of the vehicle, but Jesus fuck, he’d never been so scared in his goddamn life to wake up on his back in the middle of the jungle, no sight nor sound of the rest of his unit.
Searching, he would have found them, dead or alive no matter how long it took him. Alive, and he’d praised God. Had they been dead, Cougar didn’t doubt that he and the people responsible would have quickly followed.
“Never thought I’d say this,” Roque said, his voice labored with pain and exhaustion. “But it’s too fucking quiet.”
Cougar agreed.
Jensen’s chatter took some getting used to, but once it had worked its way into your subconscious, being without it felt like losing a limb.
Looking back at Jensen would only have made Cougar face that he’d failed to do what he’d promised himself he would. When he accepted the fact that Jensen actually kept him sane, instead of driving him round the bend, Cougar had vowed to return the favor.
Since Jensen’s sanity was a ship long ago sailed, Cougar substituted that vow by keeping Jensen alive.
At times, he felt he’d picked the hardest of two trials.
By fuck, Jensen attracted trouble like no one Cougar had ever met.
They walked through the night and into the day, stopping only to piss and wolf down the meager rations they had salvaged from the crash. The seconds that passed while they remained standing felt wasted – they were seconds Jensen didn’t have to spare.
After four hours, they switched. Clay took point, and Cougar and Pooch carried Jensen between them.
Cougar took the front, his back to Jensen. He didn’t want to look at the kid.
When they finally reached neutral territory, Pooch looked set to cry. He didn’t, but Cougar shared the sentiment.
Clay was on the radio, calling in the Casevac, one hand on Jensen’s shoulder as he relayed their co-ordinates.
One hundred and nine minutes later, and the whirring propellers of a Blackhawk helicopter became the most beautiful sound Cougar had ever heard.
Whilst Casevac had improved significantly with the start of the Iraq war, the main focus of their activities were the Middles East, and the crew that winched down to their aid were members of the U.S Navy who were trained to stabilize a casualty, but not operate. The best they could do was keeping Jensen alive until he was transported to a shock trauma unit.
Cougar couldn’t help growling at the kid –barely older than Jensen – who strapped the fallen member of their team to a more sturdily built litter than theirs and secured him down in preparation for the winch. He hoped it made his feelings clear – Jensen died, and Cougar would hunt them down.
After that, it was all out of their hands.
Clay was skirting the edge of exhaustion when they touched down and Jensen was rushed away from them in a flurry of activity.
The flight had been the longest hour of his life. Extra fuel had to be taken on board in order to see them through the round trip, and it had been a cramped, hellish trip.
Pooch and Roque has crashed out once they were in the air. The heightened urgency that had kept them both standing vanished once Jensen was in the hands of someone more qualified. Only Cougar and Clay stayed awake.
Clay half wished the sniper had slept.
The slightest twitch from Jensen, and Cougar growled like his namesake. Pain, fear and exhaustion made him an irritable bastard, and added to the helplessness Clay shared, it combined to make Cougar an absolute fucking nightmare.
The sniper barely managed to contain himself until Jensen flatlined and the panic that followed woke the rest of the team.
It probably hadn’t helped the medics do their job, but each and everyone one of them alternated between bitching at Jensen, and screaming at the team trying to save his life.
After three hellish minutes where Jensen had stopped fucking breathing, the tenacious little shit responded to the adrenaline injected into his heart and fought his way back to life.
Those three minutes aged Clay by a decade.
The others too, by the looks of them.
Clay and the remains of his battered unit were quickly swept forwards amongst the swarm of medical personnel. Cougar’s ankle had completely seized up during the flight, and he had to lean on Clay as they limped towards the trauma center.
They soon attracted the attention of fresh medics and were swiftly separated and herded into assessment rooms.
Clay dimly heard Roque threaten to kick the shit out of anyone who touched him – Roque got really testy about being touched when he was hurt – before Clay had his own shit to deal with.
“You fucking check my team first!” He demanded, swatting away a young nurse who tried to shine a light in his eye and assess for a head injury.
“Someone is seeing to them, colonel.”
Clay knew he was a shit when he was hurt and worried, but that didn’t stop him yelling at her. “You ain’t treating me until I get the all clear on my corporal, you understand?”
He must have been completely off his game. Something sharp pricked his arm, but before Clay could turn around and break the neck of the person stupid enough to try drugging him, the tide of exhaustion he’d been battling against finally pulled him under.
Contrary to popular belief, Jensen didn’t hate drugs.
He hated hospitals, being injured, and enforced bed-rest, but drugs were one of those long-standing friends that sometimes fucked you over, but always came through for you in the end. Especially after you'd been shot.
Floating on a cloud and slowly coming back to earth, the first thing that came to Jensen’s mind was the urge to reprogram the beeping of the ECG machine.
Then came the knowledge that if he was hooked up to an ECG machine, he was probably pretty fucked.
Following that came everything else – Honduras, fucking Honduras, man, shit going fubar, getting shot and then the vague recollection of bitching about Pooch’s driving skills.
Jensen groaned. If this was what happened when he chewed Pooch a new one, he’d learn how to keep his mouth shut.
“Ow.” Given the given, he felt that was a pretty eloquent response.
“Holy shit!”
The Pooch was fucking loud. Jensen must have really pissed him off if the fucker was screaming in his ear while Jensen’s brain was leaking out onto the pillow.
Cracking open one eye, Jensen stared up into the blurry face of Pooch. “I’m sorry I bitched about your driving.” He said meekly.
“Hijo de puta!” Jensen knew just enough Spanish to know that Cougar sounded as pissed with him as Pooch must have been.
Still unable to open his eyes more than a crack, Jensen tried for a lopsided smile – the kind that usually got him out of trouble. “That’s not nice, Cougs. My mother was a perfectly respectable woman.”
He heard Roque laugh his rare, booming laugh and was surprised. Of all the people he expected not to be pissed at him, Roque was bottom of the list. Roque was always pissed at him.
“Glad to see you in the land of the living, kid.”
“Makes one of us.” Jensen groaned, forcing his eyes open. Something flashed in front of his eyes before Cougar set a spare pair of his glasses on his nose. “Awesome! Cheers buddy!” A black glare was all his got from Cougar. “Wow.” Jensen said, looking at them all in turn now he could see. “Y’all look like shit.”
The colonel was in the far corner, closest to the door and the first in line for any threat that might enter the room. “Funny thing that.” Clay grumbled. Jensen saw the cards scattered out on the foot of the bed. He must have interrupted a game.
How long had he been out?
Cougar had his leg in a cast, which likely explained the look of extreme irritation on his face. Cougar did not like enforced inactivity. “Shit Cougs, what happened to your leg?”
“Stupid fucker doesn’t know a broken leg when he walks thirty k on one.”
"Not broken." Cougar snarled. Jensen blinked up at him in surprise, but the rest of the unit didn't seem fazed.
"Thank fuck you're awake, that's all I'm saying." Clay shook his head. "Cougar's been fucking bitchy all damn week."
Jensen did not want to be the colonel right then. That look Cougar had in his eyes...never ended well for the person on the receiving end.
"I was out for a week?" Jensen asked, surprised.
"Nine days." Roque said. "Soon as you done here, I'm kicking your scrawny ass."
Jensen tried shifting on the bed so he could sit up. "That's awfully," a flare of pain rose above the cloud of painkillers and he winced, "counter-productive."
"Do I look like I give a shit?" Roque asked.
"Honestly, no. No shit given."
"Exactly."
Jensen couldn't help but crack a smile. Goddamn, he loved these assholes. It was probably a good thing then - the happy drugs making him a whole lot more open to the idea of saying so - that when he came to blink his eyes, exhaustion hit, and he didn't open them again for another four hours.
The End.
Coming next...
As the team recover from their time in Honduras, Pooch suffers a crisis of confidence, while Cougar's past becomes a whole lot more confusing when he's sent off on a solo mission.
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Date: 2010-07-02 12:11 pm (UTC)The undertones are there, but it will be slow building, I am afraid.
Really glad you liked though, thank you!