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‘Y’know,’ Jensen began, and Cougar kicked back, knowing that this one was going to be a long one. Between Clay’s glaring and Pooch being grouchy as all hell that he wasn’t back home with his family, Jensen hadn’t had much chance to get a word in edgewise.
Volcano. Puissant little detail.
There were volcanoes everywhere. So this one had put their only lead about Max under a pile of rubble. So what. So fucking what. That was Jensen’s take on the matter, he rambled: a big-time smallish fuck up with intel. None of them were bleeding out, just inconvenienced. Clay could go on and get off his motherfucking back. Aisha was right, probably: sooner or later this lust for revenge was going to fuck Clay over to the darkside, and there’d be no coming back from that.
Cougar got it. Probably Clay just needed to chill out. Grab a cold one and listen to the waves or some shit. They were in the Caribbean. The worst had already been done to them. Done and gone done.
Jensen went from the volcano to pirates; they were in the Caribbean, and there was little else for him to care about. Cougar listened with half an ear, more of his focus on the shape of Jensen’s lips than what was coming out. Two hundred words to every half a mutter from Cougar, that’s been what Clay had said once, a moment of rare fondness for the tech shoving past seven beers to bare its head.
Some was Cougar not understanding a word in twenty, but mostly he wasn’t one for words. Spanish, sure, but scarcely. Not shy, not ever, just softer. Hat pulled low and long hair, a pretend curtain to shelter behind. Him in the shadows, him sneaking through the cardboard-cutout scenery of the world.
Except, Jensen always noticed him. Always knew which shadow he was lurking in, which rooftop, which tunnel.
A foot collided with his shin and he jerked up to glare at Jensen.
‘You even listening to me?’ came the indignant question.
Not like Jensen was listening to himself, shirt off and laces of one boot dangling like he was about to go barefoot but forgot less than halfway through the process. His computer was the focus, conversation an afterthought, and he had headphones on so that one ear was covered, the other earpiece mussing up his hair.
Cougar wanted to fix that; instead, he ducked under his hat in some kind of nod.
He tried to remember Mexico. A nice little stint. Downtime, Clay had called it, while Clay hunted down answers like he’d lost all sense, and Pooch had hung with his family, and Jensen had hung out hacking in his underwear -
And Cougar went back to thinking about Mexico, because, yeah, nah, he was not thinking about Jensen dressed down like that.
(Aisha was there with Jensen a day earlier than the rest of them, his brain kindly reminded him.)
‘Cállate,’ he hissed, to himself, and Jensen shut up.
Cautiously, not so easily quietened, Jensen said, ‘alright, man?’
Cougar shook his head, shook his hair out down his back, and stood. He was feeling cooped up, knew Jensen would figure that out because for all his words he seemed to know an awful lot before it was ever outright stated, and so he walked out of the room without any apology.
Thing was.
Thing was, Mexico had been beaches, yeah, and not girls, like Clay and the rest liked to assume, it’d been one woman he’d run into second day there and found her gentle kind of compendious manner comfortable enough to not make excuses why they shouldn’t spend more than one martini’s worth of time together.
Less abrasive than Jensen, sure, but she’d not made brazen declarations of their similarities with cartoon characters.
He’d watched the movie. He didn’t know if he agreed.
Mazatlan, Mexico, had been less beaches filled with pretty women and more nightmares and a hotel where the A/C more pushed air around than cooled it. And that movie.
He’d not be so arrogant as to presume that no one else in the streets lighting firecrackers to chase off the dead didn’t have true and proper experience with ghosts in the corners of the night, but still.
If he was Tulio and Miguel was Jensen, then who was the horse, and who was Chel?
He thought that question immediately as he ran into Aisha, and with a horrified wonderment he backed away from her into a room, discovered it was the bathroom, and locked the door gratefully.
Two things: this wasn’t him, and if it was going to be, this wasn’t the time. They had a man who didn’t exist wanting them dead, no leads at all except what was under the mess left by a volcano, and this was not him.
He’d leave the cartoon analogies to Jensen. Cougar had his gig. He knew how to play his role, and he did it well.
Maybe it would have been easier if they’d ever talked about that time in Ukraine, a discussion simple as all that, like Cougar hadn’t listened to Jensen’s nervous admission with all the blood boiling in his head, fingers on fire, all of him wanting to flee from himself, to safety -
They’d not talked about it.
So Jensen liked men.
So Cougar liked men.
Nothing to it, apparently. Whatever. The sky was blue and Max was still trying to kill them and there was still going to be someone who tried the handle before knocking on the door to see if the bathroom was actually occupied.
‘Oi,’ he said, and the handle went still.
‘Sorry,’ said Pooch.
Cougar flushed the toilet for the sound of the thing and washed his hands from sheer habit.
‘You alright, man?’ Pooch asked. If it had been Clay asking Cougar would’ve been worried, but Pooch asked that as habitually as Jensen ran his mouth off and Aisha fucked with their heads.
It had to be just to fuck with their heads. No one was actually like her.
‘Si,’ he said. He grabbed a beer from the fridge, and went to go lie on the sand to wait for the volcano to get dug up.
They were all a mite too jittery, Jensen reasoned. He’d made his song-and-dance, told his story. Wasn’t his fault if Cougar couldn’t take the bait. Even if it had been an accident. Yeah, he was pining for the guy, but he’d not thought of El Dorado as a gay musical. It hadn’t been meant as a come-on, and then it had turned into a come-on, and Jensen wasn’t someone who’d throw away an opportunity handed to him.
Miguel and Tulio: Mighty and Powerful Gods!
Yeah, right, whatever.
Gods being him here sitting on a goddamn rock with a precariously balanced laptop, and if those people down below didn’t hit whatever was gonna be hit soon the battery was gonna go and his tetris high score would remain unchallenged for the night. And they wouldn’t have the precious data all there waiting to be looked at, which also mattered.
Cougar was over there ready to shoot whichever bloke came up first, waiting for Jensen’s word. Aisha was over there, too, but she rated a fair bit lower in Jensen’s estimation.
That, really, was the sum of it.
If this all blew to shit, Max or no Max, if there was only one of them that Jensen could save, he’d leave the train and jump for Cougar, every single time. It came natural to him as breathing. It wasn’t even a question. It was part of him same as his blood and his tongue and the birthmark on the back of his thigh, just above his knee.
Him and Cougar. Cougar ‘n’ him. Partners.
Except not.
Cougar’s neck hurt. Piddly to consider it, what with all the rest of it. But, there it was. Shot at, exploded, nearly killed by a volcano, of all things! and here he was bothered by his neck. He twisted his head to one side, and then the other, but no-go.
‘Alright, Cougs?’ Jensen asked.
‘No problem,’ he returned.
Pooch was still kinda out for the count - awake, but complaining about it enough that Clay had said yes to him sitting a spell before they did anything else. Clay had that cheery kind of grimness to him that meant good work had been done, but they were still, essentially, in the fire.
‘You’re kinda twisting like it aches,’ said Jensen. He was vibrating with adrenaline that hadn’t yet left him.
‘Fell on it,’ he said, succinct. Really, all of him was an ache, but his neck was vital enough that he noticed it above the bruise on his arse or the scrape along his forearm or any of the rest of it.
‘Quiet down,’ Pooch moaned. Aisha huffed a little - humour, maybe, but it was so difficult to tell. She stalked out of the room, more catlike than Cougar had ever been.
‘She scares the shit out of me,’ Jensen said in a soft voice, shaking his head. ‘Let’s get out of here. Leave the Pooch to his misery.’
‘Hey, man, fuck you,’ Pooch said, but his heart wasn’t in it. Better to have Jensen’s chatter away from the guy half a hair from a concussion, so Cougar tucked his gun into his jeans, pulled his shirt to hide it, and herded Jensen out the door.
‘Shi-i-i-t,’ Jensen drawled, out the door and down the road a ways. ‘What a day, yeah?’ They likely stunk to high heaven, but they were headed for the shore and even if they weren’t, Cougar didn’t care. It’d been a helluva day and he wanted more than a beer.
He took a step that brought him half a foot further away from Jensen. Lead us not into temptation, and all that. Better to find some guy who’d let him blow him than to take a step too close to the heat of that skin, the rough brush of hair over his arm…
It was the Caribbean. There was probably more than one guy wanting his cock sucked, and Cougar - Cougar was in the mood to get on his knees.
‘Thought a lot about volcanoes when I was a kid,’ Jensen was yammering. ‘Dinosaurs, y’know? Maybe it was space-missiles, but not all over. Gotta have put into effect some chain event. Volcanoes all over.’ Jensen shook his head like he couldn’t believe it. ‘Coulda been worse, I guess.’ Cougar glanced at him, painful for the twist of his neck. ‘Coulda been a tidal wave,’ Jensen explained.
‘Worse,’ Cougar said, flatly.
‘Well,’ Jensen shrugged, and got distracted by a bar where he paid for a drink for each of them. They plunked themselves down into the sand close enough that going to get a refill probably wasn’t going to war too much with the concept of merely sitting. Cougar downed his beer in a single gulp and lay down in the sand, noticing uty not really giving any thought to the way Jensen just stared.
Cougar looked up at the sky. The sun was low enough that he didn’t have to squint.
‘Reckon Clay’s gonna chill?’ Jensen asked. Cougar quirked his lip in a smile and Jensen shook his head. ‘Yeah, figures.’
There was still too much mess in his mind and his veins to want to relax, but it was easier to lie here and listen to Jensen than it was to try and find someone willing to take his mind off matters.
‘Sure beats Mexico, huh?’ Jensen said, flicking Cougar’s wrist close to the bands of leather tied there. The contact was unexpected, and Cougar almost couldn’t breathe. Jensen didn’t seem to care if he got a response or not, but stupid, stupid. Not the time. Not that kind of guy, and anyway, not the time.
At least a hundred times happier with a scent to follow, like a bloodhound, Clay was feeling close to actual happy when it was determined where their lead would pull them next. Pooch had done the cooking, a solid positive in everyone’s mind, and while Jensen figured out the last niggly particulars of stealing a plane the lot of them could even be called cheerful.
Across the room, Aisha and Cougar were playing cards. They’d not done a lot of that since the whole Roque incident, but while Aisha might have been crazy as shit she filled the space left by Roque like she’d been meant for it. Like he’d only been keeping the seat warm.
Clay was practically grinning, a beer in one hand and a cold slice of pizza in the other. He plonked himself down next to Jensen, who was less doing work and more watching Aisha and Cougar try to out-stare each other.
Clay looked where Jensen was looking and thought to make a smart comment about how he’d already been there, and totally got the attraction, but then he saw where Jensen was really looking.
‘Shit,’ he blurted. ‘You’re bent.’
Jensen fumbled so fast his laptop went skittering half off his lap. He grabbed it and pulled it in close, like a baby, and cradled it staring wide-eyed at Clay. ‘No I’m not.’
‘You are,’ Clay said. How he’d not seen it before he didn’t know. He’d always figured that Jensen’s attachment to Cougar was more along the lines of opposites attracting than anything more complicated. You made friends; that was life. This, this was a level to things Clay had only just realised, and now that he had, he knew it was the truth and wasn’t about to let it go.
‘I’m not,’ Jensen insisted again. They weren’t in the army anymore and Clay said as much, but he said it softly, because the others were still in the room and Clay wasn’t that kind of asshole. ‘I’m not, not like you’re thinking.’ But he darted a glance at Cougar, so his denials fell flat.
‘You should tell him,’ Clay said.
Jensen flinched like he’d been shot at. ‘I’m not,’ he repeated, and then, because Clay wasn’t having any of that shit, he added, ‘he knows.’
‘Then what’s the holdup?’ Clay asked. Jensen had about as much game as a run-over rabbit, but Cougar was Cougar and it didn’t really take game to snag him. Not to call him easy, but far as Clay had seen all it took was asking.
‘Liking doesn’t mean getting,’ Jensen gritted out, an unwilling admission, and Clay dropped it.
Getting extorted wasn’t fun. Jensen had always thought he’d be on the other side of the equation, but here they were, doing work they didn’t wanna do for a man they didn’t like in return for a handful of suspect information, all because that asshole had raised his eyebrow and grinned a suggestive little grin when Clay dared ask what would go down if the Losers walked out.
So there they were, end-side to a gunfight, and yes he’d joined the army but he’d expected there to be a lot more downtime than he was getting. Hurry up and wait was the supposed motto, but Jensen hadn’t been properly bored in probably years. He’d cleaned his gun already, faster than he should’ve, and he’d need to do it again later.
Aisha, she’d just tossed a few ears down onto the table and stalked off to take a shower.
Whatever had been going on with Aisha and Clay seemed to have petered out, or just got put on the backburner while Clay dealt with this new obsession of wanting to kill Max without killing anyone else along the way.
Minimum human casualties. Jensen was seeing more and more sense in Aisha’s concern, and that alone was pretty well bothersome. Clay was gonna go get himself done and dead the way he was going. Not that Aisha was really one to talk. Collecting ears was a pretty fucked up way to go about dealing with anything.
He’d seen a lot of things in his time, so Jensen opted to turn his back on those bloody bits of dead flesh and focused on catching up on a sport. Any sport. The internet was a vast place, and there were dozens of sport scores to distract himself.
Distract himself from Cougar. The man had a name like that for a reason. Jensen knew that. He’d seen him in action before, so watching him somersault off a goddamn roof to kill the guy with an RPG aimed right at their van shouldn’t have hit him so hard. Once in the van all crowded close, with the hot stink of sweat and gunfire and — Christ-on-a-stick, Jensen needed to take a breather with Clay, maybe, find his goddamn chill and ease off this crush.
Clay kept giving him looks like he was a puppy left out in the rain. Unable to stand it, Jensen took his sweet-ass time checking the cricket scores, and then the comments, and then the forums to find other opinions about the last one-dayer.
Cougar was Cougar, otherworldly, far beyond anything that Jensen should be allowed to smell, let alone touch.
Pooch slapped the toe of his boot. ‘We’re gonna get drunk.’
‘We’re not,’ Clay interrupted, aiming a death glare at both Pooch and Cougar, and Cougar shrugged a languid, sexy kind of shrug, one shoulder rolling - and Jensen stared right back at his computer, because no.
‘You go on ahead,’ he said. ‘I’ve got…stuff.’
‘Nah,’ said Pooch, dismissing that easily. Everyone knew sure as hell that Jensen had just as much work as any of them. ‘Night off.’
Aisha was tying her hair up, and met his eye. A challenge, almost. Fine. Fine, he’d go. It’d be cool. Cougar would peel away to find some woman to cosy up to, and Jensen would get pinned between Pooch and Clay unable to even attempt it.
That was what he thought, so he put no effort into his appearance beyond washing his face, slapping on a bit of the cologne he realised afterwards was actually Aisha’s perfume, and pulling on a clean shirt. There, done. Ideal.
Ideal enough that when he finished his first beer and was debating what brand his second should be, a guy stepped slightly too close into his personal space and said, ‘I’m a Heinekin man, myself.’
Jensen tried to step sideways but was blocked by a stool. Odd that he had to look up at the guy standing next to him, and kind of intimidating in a way entirely at odds with the sort of scary he faced in his day-to-day.
The man shrugged. ‘If you wanted to buy me one.’
‘You think I do?’ There was less macho bravery and more general bewilderment in his voice. The guy smiled. A sweet smile, a pretty face for all that it was rugged with a whole lot of stubble going on. Course, Jensen liked stubble, but he was used to looking down to find it. He wasn’t sure if he was into tall guys. Used to be that he was, but now he didn’t know.
When Jensen said nothing the guy quirked his lips like Jensen was playing the other half of a game Jensen hadn’t realised he’d been dealt into.
‘Alright, I’ll buy you one,’ the guy said. He did wait long enough for Jensen to shrug an acceptance. He’d dealt with a volcano, so some guy shelling out for a beer was nothing at all.
‘Stallion and a Heinekin,’ the guy ordered. ‘Name’s Elijah.’
‘Jake,’ said Jensen. They shook hands, and Elijah’s were all smooth and soft to Jensen’s calluses and scars.
‘What brings you to Montserrat?’ Elijah asked. Jensen thought about turning around to hook his elbows on the bar and pretend like he did this all the time, but he didn’t, and turning would mean seeing the rest of the team, so he folded one arm onto the bar and put the other hand on his beer.
‘Bit of business, bit of pleasure,’ he said. ‘Got an eye on the tourist plane run here, yeah? Could turn it into something decent. Holiday for work, every day sun and surf.’ He grinned up at the guy. ‘Kind of the dream, that’d be.’
‘Yeah?’ The guy smiled, teeth crooked and white.
‘Yeah,’ Jensen said, giddy that this guy was talking to him, which happened never, and so probably wasn’t real. Probably Max had decided to try to pull another Aisha - or another Roque - trying to hustle into their game by getting into their pants. ‘What are you here for?’ he asked, not really wanting to turn Elijah down from caution alone. He was a trained soldier; he could handle it.
‘Pleasure. Recouping, really. Bit of a disaster back on the homeland,’ he added, a swig of beer hiding his smile. ‘Business went bust. I’m here to get all my things together and figure out where to go.’ He smiled at Jensen like he’d already figured out exactly where to go, and that going was definitely going to involve Jensen.
Jensen still didn’t trust it, but could it be worse than a volcano, and since the answer was no, he let himself lean a little different on the bar, let his leg brush against Elijah’s. There was only so much one person could cram into one life, but Jensen hadn’t been getting enough of what Elijah was offering.
Cougar’d been talked into tripping down the street with a couple of women high on the idea of island living and hankering for dinner. His stomach was empty, so he let them hook their arms through his and lead him off to one of the stalls along the beach. There was the undercurrent of lust, sure, but mostly his letting the women drag him off for dinner was all about getting away from the doom and gloom that sometimes overshadowed the Losers. It could get difficult to remember what it was like to be a person with interests beyond revenge.
Cougar was lying half off a mat, elbow in the sand, waves rolling gently up the beach and him sniggering softly at the conversation when he looked up to see Jensen with some guy.
They weren’t hand in hand or anything quite so cute, but they were walking close enough together that when Cougar lifted his head in an automatic reaction to track movement there was no question what Jensen was planning on doing with that man.
‘What’s wrong?’ Jenny asked, seeing the sudden rigidity to his entire body, down to his bare feet.
‘Nothing,’ he said. Jensen was allowed - it was fine. Jensen was allowed, and just because maybe Cougar had been pretending a little like that conversation was some weird fever-induced fantasy had in the dozing hours right at dawn didn’t mean it was. Jensen liked men, that had been established, and Jensen was allowed to go with men wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted.
‘Shit,’ Jensen said, unthinking.
‘What?’ asked Elijah, who’d not noticed Cougar or the women or anything much beyond the menu and Jensen’s hand, which had been very close to his own but now was very far away. He turned, concerned. ‘What’s the matter?’
Jensen didn’t know if he could do this. Didn’t know if he could do this with Cougar over there, didn’t know if he could do this at all - but Cougar had never…
He turned his hands into fists, trying to get a grip on himself. Elijah gave him a look of proper personal concern, waiting.
‘You ever had a guy tell you he’s into guys but all he does is sleep with women so you don’t know if you believe him, and even if you did,’ Jensen bit off his own voice. Even if he did, he didn’t know. Liking doesn’t mean getting, he’d said, and that was true, but some of the issue was tangled up in a conversation they hadn’t so much as started.
‘Everyone’s a bit messed up,’ Elijah agreed. ‘This you telling me something?’ He looked offended, like they had a real and long-lasting connection Jensen was just now choosing to sever.
Jensen looked up at him, and Christ, he was pretty, like something carved out of stone with no reason to look so fine. The mere proximity was whispering through his body down to his groin in a manner that hadn’t been so physically realised in far too long, and all he could think was Elijah’s mention of a hotel bed waiting for them. ‘Shit, no,’ he blurted. ‘Almost wondering why we’re here.’
Elijah blinked down at him, smiling that beautiful smile. Took his hand, and took him to his hotel.
They hadn’t… talked about it.
If it’d been Cougar there would have been a few sly comments, Pooch giving him an appraising look, Clay rolling his eyes and telling them to keep their brains on the job. Jensen - if it’d been Cougar getting in late after a night on the town - he’d have given him some slang version of congratulations and gone back to his computer.
But when Jensen had come in at the same time the sun had come up, him looking properly tussled and all-over happy, Aisha had given him scarcely more than the most bland look she could manage. By the time everyone else had got up Jensen’d gone so far as to wash Elijah off him, eat a bit of breakfast, and make a pirate hat out of newspaper.
So no one discussed it.
In Jensen’s mind it was an elephant in the room. No one in the Losers had ever admitted to the group entire about being more than absolutely heterosexual, and here he was blithely going about with men. Man. One man - and okay, so Clay knew, and Cougar knew, and Pooch wasn’t an asshole and Aisha most likely genuinely did not give a fuck, but still. A fist-bump. A thumb’s up. A fucking pat on the shoulder, at least.
But nothing was said, and life rolled on in the only way their life knew how to roll. Gunfights. Qatar. Evil shady men in evil shady business suits blithely discussing their demise like the Losers mattered to nothing and no one at all.
And Jensen pining over Cougar and Cougar pining over Jensen, and neither of them saying anything about it.
The status quo was keeping on being kept.
Cougar couldn’t shake it. This. Couldn’t shake this. A feeling that dug deep to the core of him, a sense that the world was horridly wrong.
Jensen was talking smack with Pooch, the two of them getting riled up at each other in a joking kind of way. And Jensen was eating, too, pushing food between his lips without any elegance, and no person looked actual pretty when they ate, except for Jensen. Except for Jensen when Cougar was watching him, probably, and if that wasn’t a problem in and of itself Cougar didn’t know what was.
Those lips had been last kissed by that man back in Montserrat, presumably, and that was another problem.
Cougar was not a jealous guy. That wasn’t denial: he simply was not a jealous guy. Never had been, not about anything, not the size of cake his sister might get compared to his, not about the car someone was driving, not about the person kissing someone he wanted. That wasn’t his way. His way was a quiet mysterious surety, which was why this was throwing him for such a loop.
It wasn’t that he was jealous of the guy, just that he wanted to knock that guy out of the way and take the place he viewed as his but hadn’t claimed. There was a whirl of thinking behind his silence, and that wasn’t usual. Cougar meditated near often as breathing; half his life was carefully emptying his mind to keep his whole self steady.
It was that damn movie. A confession to interest in men as a whole was a thing entirely different to a confession to interest in particular, but Cougar had assumed. Now that assumption had been buried by time and distance and the weight of so much in the rest of the world Cougar didn’t know really how to bring it up.
‘You’re my Miguel,’ might be a starter, but where to go from there? Far as Cougar could tell everything in the movie was implied, no on-screen kiss, everything between them read between lines - and wasn’t that what Cougar’d be doing, to presume that Jensen wanted him?
Cougar didn’t know how to come onto someone who wasn’t already leaning on his shoulder, offering him a drink. He didn’t talk. He just waited, let them all drift over to him, but if that game was gonna work on Jensen it woulda been done already.
It’d take a fool blinder than Cougar to think that whatever this could be, that it was going to be a one-night deal; if it was going to happen it was going to be forever. Dead in five days or fifty years, which ever came faster, he’d do it with Jensen at his side. Likely he’d do it anyway.
He just didn’t know -
With so many near-death experiences he should have been better at picking out what he’d be willing to die not knowing. And still. Still, here he was, not quite sure of his next move.
Pooch, for all his silence, for all his easy acceptance, he’d taken note of Elijah. It’d been whirling in his brain, and now, in the sleepy silence of a long drive, he checked that Jensen was asleep before glancing at Cougar riding shotgun.
‘You ever thought of getting with a guy?’
Cougar’d had his fingers twisting the hair on his chin while he hummed to a tune he wasn’t sure he remembered correctly, and nearly jabbed himself in the lip with surprise at the question. ‘Cómo?’
‘Like, with a guy, instead of a lady. Cos I never have.’ But that was a lie, ever since he’d seen Elijah’s fingers slightly too far south on Jensen’s back he’d been thinking about it an awful lot. It was all academic, because where was he ever going to get the chance to try, and any hands on him not Jolene’s weren’t the hands he wanted, but still -
Cougar blinked at him so startled that Pooch took it all the wrong way.
‘I don’t mean we should experiment,’ he said, with a huff of laughter more nerves than humour. ‘Just. You know. Never thought about it.’
‘Now you are?’ Cougar asked.
‘Kinda. Is that weird?’
Cougar gave him a wide-eyed stare and flipped his gaze to lock onto something sliding past them at seventy miles an hour. ‘Should it be?’
‘Well, nah, I mean,’ Pooch glanced again in the rear-view to check that Clay was still dozing with earphones in, Jensen asleep and snoring mouth wide open, and Aisha was paying them no mind. Close to privacy as he was gonna get. ‘I’ve never had a problem with queers.’ But from learned habit alone he said that word like it was a dirty word, and Cougar flinched enough in the corner of his eye that Pooch’s stomach dropped in realisation.
‘Shit, really? You?’
‘I, I,’ Cougar stuttered.
‘Your family,’ Pooch realised. ‘Shit. That’s - Fuck, man. I didn’t mean - forget it,’ Pooch said, and put his hands back into a ten-and-two position on the wheel, eyes locked on the road ahead. ‘Sorry,’ he added in a mutter.
They drove a little further, until the silence was more than Pooch could stand. ‘I’m cool with it, I swear. Not a lot of them - you. Fuck,’ he cut himself off, knowing that everything he was trying to say was coming out all wrong. ‘I’m not used to it,’ he complained.
Cougar, still looking out the window, said, ‘Neither am I.’
‘I mean, I know Jensen,’ Pooch rambled. ‘Known him for years. I never thought - I guess he acts like it, but I don’t like stereotypes.’ Anyway, retrospect was a whole thing Pooch didn’t like getting into. Woulda, shoulda, coulda, having facts now that you didn’t have back then meant that all you did was think down on the past-you, and that was thinking-time wasted.
‘You’re telling me,’ Cougar muttered.
Pooch glanced at him side-long with a frown. ‘You know about Jensen?’
‘Yes.’
Pooch licked his lips and carefully considered, so the next question wasn’t blurted out like everything else he’d said in the past ten minutes. ‘He know about you?’
That was enough to pull Cougar’s eyes off the empty roadside and onto Pooch. ‘Si.’
‘You two…’ Pooch had sometimes wondered, but that had been academic, idle wondering about what kinds of things two soldiers without wives might get up to sharing a room. He’d never thought it could be actual fact.
Cougar’s lips pressed together and he looked away, tip of his hair and fluttering ends of his hair out the window enough that Pooch could catch sight of them in his side mirror. ‘No,’ he said.
Anything Pooch might have wanted to say to that clearly wouldn’t be well received, so kept his hands on the wheel and just drove.
There could be questions about what it would change, which was nothing, and everything, and again, nothing. Max. This, their whole being dead thing. This mess that had followed them around the world a few times, chasing fast as Pooch could fly a plane. That wouldn’t change no matter what he said to Cougar.
But Jensen felt sick of it, sick like an ache in his teeth, like muscles sore after a workout hurting with every step he took. He saw Cougar every day and he knew that they worked. Friends to the end.
Miguel and Tulio.
They’d survived Bolivia.
Not… Fuck.
Not that he was comparing what he felt for Cougar to anything like Bolivia. If it was he might as well go find a nice train track to lie down on.
Jensen sagged back down into his fold-up steel chair he’d been forced to use, bed acting like a desk. Hunching over a computer hurt slightly less at this angle, things spread out all over the mattress. Cougar was off doing recon with Pooch, so he was here alone, less messing about with wires and more messing about with his head.
It wasn’t time, it didn’t feel right, but if not in London, then when? They’d been chased across the world to here and there didn’t seem to be anything close to light at the end of the tunnel.
He didn’t think he cared if he never even got to touch Cougar. He just wanted to know. Or, selfishly, he just wanted to know that Cougar knew. Wanted to have the words out of him and put where they mattered.
There was a sound in the corridor and he glanced up, but the door didn’t open and the unseen person carried on down the hotel.
When the door did open there was no sound of warning behind the whine-click of the keycard getting accepted. Cougar was there, tired, hat drawn down over his eyes and whole body scarcely standing. He closed the door behind him and looked blearily at the beds.
‘Oh, shit, man, sorry,’ Jensen said, leaping up to sweep his gear off the other bed. Cougar sat, yawned widely, and fell backwards with comic drama. His hat rolled onto the floor.
‘Time?’ Cougar asked, leaving the hat where it fell.
‘Like, midday or something. I am beat,’ he said, with some feeling. ‘One of these days we’re gonna hang out in the same timezone for more than a week.’
‘Were in Montserrat for two,’ Cougar pointed out.
‘A good island,’ Jensen agreed, beginning to arrange all his computer pieces in a more orderly kind of fashion. It was more something to do. More something to distract him from Cougar, and shit, he’d been doing that a lot. Useless crap just to look somewhere else, just to think about something else.
Cougar awkwardly tried to undo his boots without getting up. The cowboy boots had been lost somewhere, or exchanged. They’d done a lot of miles, seen a lot of shit, but falling off roofs hurt a lot less with a bit of padding in the sole. Jensen wouldn’t have been surprised if Cougar had kept the boots somewhere - almost would have asked, but he knew that Cougar owned less in the way of things than Jensen did. Jensen had his computer. Cougar, he just had his gun.
With a little shake of his head Jensen began sorting out charing cords. Pointless - they were detangled and neatly tied from last time he’d done this. He ordered them up all the same, debated again if he should toss out UC-E6 that he’d bent way back in Brazil. ‘I miss beaches, man.’
Cougar agreed with a firm nod and gave up on the boots.
‘You come from the beach, right?’ He did not look at Cougar, but could see him, starfished out over the mattress, t-shirt sleeves shifted so the softer underside of his upperarms were exposed. ‘Grew up next to sand? Woulda loved that. Coulda learned to surf, maybe,’ he added, frowning at a piece of RAM that had a hole burned through it. He held it out for Cougar’s inspection. ‘Whaddya reckon that’s from? Grenade shard?’
‘Most likely,’ Cougar agreed. He tried again for his boots. Jensen laughed at him a moment before he took pity on the guy and sat down on the edge of his own bed, grabbed Cougar by the toe and pulled him slightly closer so he could untangle the laces himself.
It felt entirely natural. It felt like he’d done this half a hundred times before - and he had. Not actually that many, but he’d helped Cougar in and out of clothes same as he’d helped Pooch and… And Roque.
‘Are you okay?’ Cougar asked, and Jensen realised he’d just been sitting there with his hand on the ankle of Cougar’s boot, not moving.
He blinked. ‘Yeah, fine and dandy. Just remembering.’ He tugged Cougar’s boot off and began on the other. ‘How often have I done this for you? I mean, we’ve been together -’ His voice was abruptly too much emotion, too little sleep, and he swallowed that back and kept pulling uselessly at Cougar’s laces. ‘For ages, man, and now we’re here.’ He meant here in London, here getting hunted by Max, here at the bottom of the pit still getting tossed things to beat up. His hand stilled, and he looked up to find Cougar just watching him, propped up on his elbows, hair fallen back and shirt stretched over his chest.
Jensen almost couldn’t breathe for the weight of it.
‘I’m saying,’ shit, what was he saying? He wasn’t sure if this was it, if this was it, if this was the moment - he didn’t know if he was ready. His hand was still on Cougar’s shoe and Cougar was just watching -
‘You’re my Tulio. You know? Whatever, wherever. This is shit, this is all really, really bad,’ he didn’t know what he was saying. ‘But,’ he looked at his hand, pale against the dark scuffed brown of Cougar’s boot. ‘I’m kinda… happy.’ He squinted up the length of Cougar’s body to meet his eye, scarcely breathing for nerves.
Neither of them moved, and Jensen was scared of saying anything else, scared to break this. ‘I-’ he breathed, and Cougar’s face - it broke. It fell into pieces, and Jensen had seen Cougar in a lot of states but he’d never seen him so vulnerable. He was lifting himself up, rising forward, and then his hand was on Jensen’s face, a touch so familiar but in this context absolutely foreign.
A thumb ran over the stubble at the height of his cheek, a scratchy noise louder than their breathing.
Jensen couldn’t look away. Couldn’t blink.
‘Jake -’ Cougar said, and Jensen tipped forward, an accident, he hadn’t meant to. Cougar’s lips were rough, dry, more moustache than mouth. He didn’t know, couldn’t do anything. This wasn’t the plan, and the kiss was all a daze, something that even immediately after he wasn’t sure had happened.
He could only stare.
‘Did that,’ he blinked. ‘That just happened,’ he realised.
Cougar’s smile was crooked as ever, just a small dimple appearing on his left cheek and wrinkles in the corners of his eyes. Jensen had never seen anything so beautiful.
Cougar’s hand was still on Jensen’s face.
‘Shit,’ Jensen said. He could feel himself smiling. Knew he couldn’t pretend like he wasn’t even if he cared to try. ‘You -’ Anything he could say would be less than this, nothing in the world enough to hold exactly how this felt. He let out a stuttering breath. ‘Shit,’ he said again, grinning.
‘Yeah,’ Cougar said. He was smiling, gentle, and then his fingers pressed with a tender sort of firmness into the hollow beneath Jensen’s jaw, tugging him in for another kiss. Jensen followed, eager, willing.
He’d follow Cougar into fire.