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1.
“The hell, Pooch? Injured person, remember? Quit it with the death grip.” Jensen swats at the hand in his hair twisting his head forward.
“Keep moving around like that and I’ll show you injured.” Pooch grumbles, eyes steady on the needle piercing Jensen’s skin, and if Jensen leans a just little to the right and tilts his neck just so he can almost see the sucker stab home. He can sure as hell feel it, dragging dull through the bloody mess that’s marking up his thigh.
They’re all telling him it’s nothing, it’s a scratch, it could’ve been way, way worse; that he deserved way, way worse for being fool enough to go running into the blast zone like that, like every last one of them wasn’t relieved as shit that the goddamn files they’d been working their asses off to get a hold of weren’t currently dust in the wind, along with the rest of Jensen’s workstation. Personally he thinks there ought to be some kind of medal in his future.
Jensen quits trying to peek at Pooch’s handiwork long enough to let a certain pissy sniper in on this theory, and while he’s at it, remind him that maybe he wouldn’t need to be so pre-menstrual about the whole thing if he hadn’t gone and got all wanna-be action hero and chased Jensen down like some over-protective dad on prom night. You know, if prom night ended with explosions and shrapnel wounds instead of drinking and underage car sex.
He can already feel Cougar scowling at him from his perch on the desk, but somewhere between turning to face him and seeing the guy all taped up with bandages and a splint of his own, Jensen loses a little of that indignant fire. There are superficial cuts crisscrossing their way down Cougar’s side, save for a Jensen-ish shape of unmarked skin where he’d been holding onto Jensen while Jensen held onto his computer. And yeah, okay, maybe he did feel a little bad about that. But it all worked out fine in the end, right? Anway—
“Cheer up, buddy,” Jensen grins at him from under Pooch’s renewed assault with the needle. “Chicks dig scars.”
Cougar growls.
2.
Cougar’s rifle is in pieces, spread over the half of the table not currently being occupied by the whirring, beeping collection of laptops and hard drives that usually litters Jensen’s desk
He’d shoved a few things over earlier when Cougar had wandered in with a rag and a bottle of gun oil, looking for a place to sit. He remembers now why it’s always a mistake to let other people mess with your space—like it’s not hard enough to find any goddamn thing in this rathole of a motel room Clay’s booked them into without having to search through stocks and sights and barrels and— dammit!
Jensen grabs hold of Cougar’s hand, flipping his palm until he has a flat space to write out the code flashing across his screen. Cougar flinches like he’s about to pull his arm back but Jensen just tightens his hold, scribbling numbers into his skin as they blink and then disappear into the green neon of his monitor.
Cougar sits staring for a beat or two, then lets his hand relax in Jensen’s grip.
3.
Explosions never used to be a regular thing in Jensen’s life.
He‘s always liked them well enough on a movie screen where the cool guy struts away from them without looking back, or when it’s a stupid prank and the worst of the damage comes from a shaken up can of diet soda, but lately...
Lately all the explosions in Jensen’s life have meant very bad, not good things are going down.
Tonight, though. Tonight he’s going to have to come up with some new kind of category for his good vs. bad explosion catalogue, because this... he’s not really sure what you’d call this.
Cougar is scowling at him (again), still scrubbing at his arm where the skin looks raw and chafed and... blue. Jensen’s just glad that none of the ink spattered Cougar’s hat. He’s pretty sure there’s no coming back from something like that, especially given the fact that he’s already ruined Cougar’s shirt (again) and his jeans (again). Not to mention the spray of ink from his home-made (exploding) printer that hit Cougar directly in the face, leaving him coughing, spitting and, some might say, decidedly more Smurf-like than he had been when he’d first dropped by holding a still-warm cup of coffee in his hand that would have been heaven on the tension headache pounding away at the base of Jensen's skull.
Jensen figures it's probably gonna take the better part of a week for the marks to fade, and at least eight times that long before he'd get Cougar to even consider bringing him coffee again.
Yeah, Jensen thinks, watching Cougar pull his ruined shirt over his head so he can use it to mop at the ink trailing down his neck, across his shoulders— he’ll probably be leaving all the pimp-my-ride stuff to Pooch from now on.
4.
Cougar barely bats an eye when Jensen overshoots his aim a little and the tip of a dart ends up lodged in his neck. He doesn’t even scream.
But there’s a strain around his eyes that says he’d like to.
5.
Jensen told Cougar once that chicks dig scars.
He wasn’t lying. He’s met plenty of girls who only ever seemed interested in him because of the bullet-graze on his bicep, or the burn mark on his ankle. He’s always thought of it as a kind of consolation prize to the getting-hurt part of the whole scar-acquiring process.
Scars mean mystery; mean danger. Scars are exciting. Even when they belong to a hyperactive computer nerd with glasses.
He’s been staring at the angry-red gash on Cougar’s chest for three hours now and he knows without a doubt there’ll never be anything exciting about this scar. It’s not sexy, not mysterious. Dangerous, sure. But only in the sense that, had it been two inches to the left, it would’ve been Cougar’s heart that got pierced. A little higher and his throat would have been ripped out.
All because Jensen stayed when he should’ve run. Tried to fight when he should have taken off. Froze when he should have...
Jensen’s seen plenty of Cougar’s scars before, he’s even been the cause of one or two of them. None of them have ever made him feel physically sick before.
Cougar shifts, barely noticeable, but Jensen’s been watching for it; waiting. He calls for Clay and in a heartbeat they’re all there, just in time to see Cougar’s eyes blink open. He’s awake, lucid enough to nod at them, ask for water. All up, he’s with them for about three minutes before he passes out again, the drugs in his system winning out over his inherent stubbornness and need to be an infuriating bastard. For three minutes, his eyes are open. He’s breathing and he’s alive and Jensen feels like maybe he can start breathing again, too.
+1.
It takes nine hours for Jensen to break through the firewalls set up by the man who hurt Cougar, and six days to use the information he found to track him down.
He takes his time, making sure the guy feels every bit of pain he’d put Cougar through and then some.
It’s months before Cougar gets wind of any of this. Clay knew—of course he knew, he's Clay after all. Clay took it well though. All Jensen heard from him on the subject was a grunt and a nod and a thinly veiled warning that he’d better not run off for any more ‘family emergencies’ any time soon.
Cougar, on the other hand, seems... less than pleased.
He isn’t shouting, which with anyone else would seem like a blessing, but with Cougar—he has this way of somehow becoming more silent, and that... That’s just plain scary.
“Look, Cougs, I know what you’re thinking,” Jensen’s hands go up in a way that might seem placating but is really more about him getting ready to fend off an angry surprise tackle. “It’s not like I think you can’t defend yourself, or that you needed any kind of, like, knight in shining armour or whatever, that’s not what this was about. I know--”
Cougar takes advantage of the break in Jensen’s defence caused by his unfailing need to talk with his hands, lunging at him and knocking him off balance until the only thing keeping him up is Cougar’s hand fisted in his tee shirt.
“You,” Cougar’s voice rumbles, and seriously, how does he do that, “don’t know a damn thing.” He lets his gaze fall to where Jensen’s shirt has ridden up over his hipbone, revealing the yellowed remains of a bruise. Cougar’s eyes narrow, an unhappy frown tightens his lips and then he’s leaning forward and pressing a thumb into the bruise.
“Hey!” Jensen slaps his hand away. “What the hell? Look, if you’ll quit acting crazy for half a second and let me explain...”
“So explain.” Cougar thumbs the bruise again, his other hand pushing against Jensen’s shoulder, walking him backwards until he feels the hard line of the wall against his back.
“I.” Jensen swallows, throat dry. “He. Hurt you. And I.”
Cougar steps back just far enough to get a hand between them, flicking open the top two buttons on his shirt until the raised tip of his still-red scar comes into view. “You mean this?”
“Yeah.” Jensen eyes the mark, wishing his voice didn’t sound so broken. “You... you have that because of me. It’s my fault, Cougs. I was just trying to... to make it...” Jensen runs a hand over his eyes. “Jesus, Cougar.”
“I have this because of you,” Cougar repeats, voice flat, and Jensen’s not sure if it’s a question or an affirmation. Before he can reply, Cougar’s undoing the next few buttons on his shirt and pulling it wide. “And these?”
Jensen runs his eyes over the near-invisible pale scratches crisscrossing Cougar’s ribs. “That was different, that was--”
“And this?” Cougar pulls his hair back from his neck, letting Jensen see the tiny indentation left behind from the tip of a dart. He drops his hand, lets his hair fall back. “He hurt me. Not you. This is not your scar. These are not your marks.”
“I was there. I was right there and I didn’t... I should’ve...”
“Pendejo.” Cougar spits, pushing him back into the wall. “This bruise. Who gave you this?”
“It’s nothing. It doesn’t even--”
“Who?” Cougar’s close now, his whole palm pressing hard against Jensen’s hip, and Jensen can’t think.
“Cut it out, Cougar. It’s not--”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, okay? I got it on our last job! Somewhere between crashing the jeep and rolling down that embankment.” Cougar keeps his eyes on Jensen, pressing his hand down harder.
“Who pushed you down the hill?”
“What?”
“You didn’t roll. You were pushed. Who pushed you?”
“You did. But... there were bullets.”
“I did.” Cougar finally moves his hand and Jensen thinks he should probably be able to breathe again now, only he can’t. There’s no air in the room anymore.
Cougar’s hand comes back, gentle this time. “You have this because of me.” He strokes over the bruise, fingers moving, pushing Jensen’s shirt higher.
“What’s happening?” Jensen can’t help but ask. He knows he’s missing something. He’s always missing something when it comes to Cougar.
“This--what we do--is dangerous. We get hurt.” Cougar tells him. “We will keep getting hurt.”
“Right... But,” Jensen furrows his brow, “I don’t want you getting hurt because of me. I can’t... I don’t want that.”
“Tough.” says Cougar, raising an eyebrow. “Because it’s going to keep happening. Just like you,” Cougar drops his eyes to Jensen’s waist where his skin is bared and starting to goosebump. “will get hurt because of me. That’s how it works.”
“How what works?”
Cougar actually smiles then, not just a twitching of lips but a full blown smile. Then he drops his hold on Jensen’s shirt and turns away.
“How what works?” Jensen calls after him. When Cougar doesn’t turn around, Jensen moves after him, grabbing his shoulder. “Cougar--”
Cougar spins him til his back’s pressed to the wall again and then there’s a mouth and lips and teeth at his neck and that’s Cougar’s tongue and oh Jesus...
Full minutes pass before Cougar pulls back, leaving Jensen breathing hard and more than a little confused. He looks over the mark he’s left—dark and vivid against the pale skin of Jensen’s neck. “This,” he presses a finger against the bruise, “you have because of me.” Cougar leans in, placing one last sucking kiss on already tender skin and Jensen can’t help the moan that breaks past his lips.
“Wow. So. Uh... I.” Jensen comments intelligently when his throat is no longer being mauled. Cougar takes a minute to fix his shirt before he turns to leave again. “Wait, don’t I get to mark you now?” Jensen calls.
Cougar doesn't turn around, but there's a huff of air that might be a laugh, and Jensen doesn't have to see his face to know he's smiling.
THE END.