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nilchanceTitle: Everybody Knows (the boat is sinking)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nilchance
Rating: Adult
Pairing: the Losers, gen
A/N: I was going to write fix-it fic for the end of the comics, vol 5. This is sort of that fic. Warnings would be spoilers for the comics vol 1-5, so it's under the cut. Also the canon is like some mutant hybrid of comics/movies canon, with the niece and the sister. The title comes from the Leonard Cohen song.
Warnings: canon character death (Clay, Cougar, Roque and Aisha). PTSD.
They ditch Antigua after Stegler finds them. It's not that Stegler wasn't decent enough during the last mission, but fuck, he's CIA and Jensen doesn't trust their kind of loyalty. Apparently without Clay around he starts getting paranoid.
He tells Pooch to go home for a while. Pooch won't. Jensen thinks maybe Pooch is afraid he'll eat his gun if he leaves him alone for five minutes. Things are getting worse, not better: too much tequila and too little sleep, Cougar's nightmares transferred over like spyware. But he's not going to do that, or he doesn't think so, because he can't do that to Pooch. He knows how much it sucks to be the one left.
(Cougar would beat his ass for thinking like that. Well, fuck him; if that bastard wants to complain, he shouldn't have died.)
His sister Shannon is not amused to find out that Jensen wants her to move again, just out of survival-paranoia, but she goes; she's pissed at him right up until he shows up to help her move what little shit she has time to gather. Then she looks at him and says, "oh, Jake," like he's breaking her heart.
He gives her a thin smile and tries to step around her. She stops him with her body, with her arms around his neck. He knows he smells like an ashtray in a dive bar, but she rests her cheek against him. Rocks him like she used to rock Diana when she was little and tired and furious at everything.
"Honey," she murmurs, "it's been--"
"I know. A year. There's not a time limit, okay? Jesus--"
"--I was saying that it's been quiet. That's all."
"Oh." Closing his fists, opening them, Jensen swallows. "Oh. Sorry."
"Mm." Shannon pulls back, holds him at arms length, studies his face. "You could tell me."
He thinks of the blood, the incendiary grenade, and the mushroom cloud. There was no missing Max's Evil Overload plan, what with the televised threats, and Shannon has to know that he was involved somewhere in it. But there's no way for her to understand, even if she listens to every word he says, and it's not worth the CIA after her.
Besides which, how is he supposed to tell her I left Cougs to die?
After a minute, his silence is an answer. She sighs, pushing overgrown hair out of his face, and says, "At least come with us."
"You're supposed to be hiding."
"So are you." Shannon sets her stubborn jaw. "This is not a martyrdom kick."
Why not?, he almost asks, it has been for everybody else. Instead he backs up out of her arms and calls up the steps, "Di? You coming?"
"Hey." Shannon smacks his shoulder, almost hard enough to knock him back into the doorframe. She has a ferocious glare, Jensen realizes as if from a distance, through a scope. "I'm not gonna let you curl up and die, you asshole."
"Oh, sorry," Jensen snaps back, "I didn't know you got a call if I kill myself or not."
Half a second too late, they both realize Diana is already standing on the steps.
****
Jensen goes with them to Vegas. Mostly because Diana refuses to let go of his wrist with her skinny little fingers. He could hurt her, but...
Okay. He couldn't hurt her. That'd probably be the point when he really would eat a gun, when he'd break a 10 year old's hand just so he can bolt.
It's a long frosty drive to the desert; Diana can give the silent treatment like nobody else Jensen knows (anymore). After about an hour of her looking at him every time he tries to jolly her out of it, he finally puts his head back and pretends to be sleeping.
He never knew he could be this tired. He thinks he might really actually keel over if he doesn't manage to get a few hours soon, like now, but every time he does, he remembers... stuff. Stuff he'd rather not think about. He only has so much room in the dark closet-space in his head before monsters start trickling out.
"Mom?" Di whispers. "Do you know what happened?"
"No, baby. I don't."
"Oh." Shifting around in her seat (and when exactly did she start getting so tall?), Di makes noises like she's chewing on her nails. "... do you think he'll tell you?"
"Yes," Shannon says with steel in her voice. "I know he will."
****
They're in Vegas for maybe a week when Jensen first sees him.
It's daylight and they're outside, which is a tourist mistake in the first place; heat crawls up in sick waves from the asphalt. But apparently Diana requires new clothes if she's starting at a new school. Plus Jensen feels bad for hauling the kid across the country again just because he couldn't cover his tracks well enough. Plus plus, she's getting on Shannon's last nerve. So here he is, Diana clutching his hand like one of them or the other is much younger, even though she's almost in junior high now and holding her crazy uncle's hand must be mortifying.
It's some sharp loud noise that makes him look. He doesn't even know what the sound is before he's turning, one arm blocking Diana, the other halfway to his knife. All that adrenaline funnels down to looking for a target, his instincts terrible and clear and good.
He sees that long narrow body, those dark eyes, that leashed black hair. That fucking hat.
He stops dead. Everything does, down to his reach for the knife and the traffic in the street and the ants baking on the sidewalk.
"Uncle Jake?" Diana's hand is on his forearm, stopping him from clearing his knife in public. Smart girl, good girl. "Hey. Hey, are you okay?"
His face feels numb. He doesn't want to blink, or breathe, because he'll lose him. He'll stop seeing him and then he'll have to curl up on the ground around everything that fucking hurts--
And then somebody weaves in front of the hallucination. Between one second and the next, Cougar's gone.
****
That pretty much ends the day, though Diana is too busy freaking out and calling her mom to seem like she minds. They get a cab home, Jensen's fingers wrapped around the hilt of his knife, ready to pull on the driver if he so much as breathes in Diana's direction. It's uneventful; the driver doesn't try anything and so the adrenaline is still singing in Jensen's veins by the time they pull up in the driveway.
Shannon opens the door, her hair still wet from the shower. Once everybody's inside the house, the door bolted, Jensen leaves her to deal with Diana. He's got shit to deal with now.
He calls Pooch first on the secure cell, checking again to be sure that it's still secure. In the background, he can hear the kids and Jolene. "We've got a problem," he says before he even gets hello.
"You got a lot of problems," Pooch mutters.
"No, just-- shut up and listen for a minute. I think either I'm losing it or we've got it a tail."
Careful silence for a minute, then: "Jensen, why do you think you're losing it?"
Jensen explains. Beginning to end, the car backfiring and Shannon and almost pulling a knife on the street. Cougar.
He can almost hear what Pooch is thinking, but all he says is, "I'll call you from the airport."
"Okay." Jensen pulls his glasses off and squeezes the bridge of his nose. "All right. Thanks, man."
"Yeah, yeah," Pooch says. "Forget it, white and nerdy. You'd do the same for me."
They hang up. Jensen sits with his head down for a minute, gears grinding in circular motion, then sighs and retrieves his laptop from under the desk. He's got an escape plan to lay out, just in case.
****
He should've expected Shannon to ambush him. She is his sister, after all, and sneaky genius is in their blood. But she waits until late enough that Diana's gone to bed and Jensen has gone from drinking-and-thinking to drinking-and-not-thinking.
"Hey," she says from his doorway, and holds up a sealed bottle of top shelf tequila. It sloshes a little when she gives it a shake. "You're gonna go blind, you keep drinking that Jose. Let me fix you up."
"That's not gonna work on me," he says, the words blurring only a little together. He learned to drink hard from Frank Clay himself, after all. "Hasn't worked since I was 18."
"Ah, but you see." Shannon sits on his desk. "You're going to tell me what's going on even if you don't get the tequila. So you might as well take it."
"Heh." Pushing the chair back some, Jensen leans back to stare at her. "You know they teach us how to resist torture, don't you?"
"No torture." Shannon hunches down, elbows on her knees, to give him her best terrifying smile. "You're going to tell me because you want to tell me. You want somebody to know that they died like heroes."
"Pooch knows."
"Does he?" Holding the tequila bottle by its neck, Shannon offers it to him. "I thought he went home to Jolene. Was he there with you when they died?"
After a long moment of quiet, Jensen mutters, "shit," and takes the bottle. Opens it. Drinks, a long smooth swallow with a kick like a mule. "Shit," he says again, when he can breathe. "Okay."
He tells her everything.
Author:
nilchanceRating: Adult
Pairing: the Losers, gen
A/N: I was going to write fix-it fic for the end of the comics, vol 5. This is sort of that fic. Warnings would be spoilers for the comics vol 1-5, so it's under the cut. Also the canon is like some mutant hybrid of comics/movies canon, with the niece and the sister. The title comes from the Leonard Cohen song.
Warnings: canon character death (Clay, Cougar, Roque and Aisha). PTSD.
They ditch Antigua after Stegler finds them. It's not that Stegler wasn't decent enough during the last mission, but fuck, he's CIA and Jensen doesn't trust their kind of loyalty. Apparently without Clay around he starts getting paranoid.
He tells Pooch to go home for a while. Pooch won't. Jensen thinks maybe Pooch is afraid he'll eat his gun if he leaves him alone for five minutes. Things are getting worse, not better: too much tequila and too little sleep, Cougar's nightmares transferred over like spyware. But he's not going to do that, or he doesn't think so, because he can't do that to Pooch. He knows how much it sucks to be the one left.
(Cougar would beat his ass for thinking like that. Well, fuck him; if that bastard wants to complain, he shouldn't have died.)
His sister Shannon is not amused to find out that Jensen wants her to move again, just out of survival-paranoia, but she goes; she's pissed at him right up until he shows up to help her move what little shit she has time to gather. Then she looks at him and says, "oh, Jake," like he's breaking her heart.
He gives her a thin smile and tries to step around her. She stops him with her body, with her arms around his neck. He knows he smells like an ashtray in a dive bar, but she rests her cheek against him. Rocks him like she used to rock Diana when she was little and tired and furious at everything.
"Honey," she murmurs, "it's been--"
"I know. A year. There's not a time limit, okay? Jesus--"
"--I was saying that it's been quiet. That's all."
"Oh." Closing his fists, opening them, Jensen swallows. "Oh. Sorry."
"Mm." Shannon pulls back, holds him at arms length, studies his face. "You could tell me."
He thinks of the blood, the incendiary grenade, and the mushroom cloud. There was no missing Max's Evil Overload plan, what with the televised threats, and Shannon has to know that he was involved somewhere in it. But there's no way for her to understand, even if she listens to every word he says, and it's not worth the CIA after her.
Besides which, how is he supposed to tell her I left Cougs to die?
After a minute, his silence is an answer. She sighs, pushing overgrown hair out of his face, and says, "At least come with us."
"You're supposed to be hiding."
"So are you." Shannon sets her stubborn jaw. "This is not a martyrdom kick."
Why not?, he almost asks, it has been for everybody else. Instead he backs up out of her arms and calls up the steps, "Di? You coming?"
"Hey." Shannon smacks his shoulder, almost hard enough to knock him back into the doorframe. She has a ferocious glare, Jensen realizes as if from a distance, through a scope. "I'm not gonna let you curl up and die, you asshole."
"Oh, sorry," Jensen snaps back, "I didn't know you got a call if I kill myself or not."
Half a second too late, they both realize Diana is already standing on the steps.
****
Jensen goes with them to Vegas. Mostly because Diana refuses to let go of his wrist with her skinny little fingers. He could hurt her, but...
Okay. He couldn't hurt her. That'd probably be the point when he really would eat a gun, when he'd break a 10 year old's hand just so he can bolt.
It's a long frosty drive to the desert; Diana can give the silent treatment like nobody else Jensen knows (anymore). After about an hour of her looking at him every time he tries to jolly her out of it, he finally puts his head back and pretends to be sleeping.
He never knew he could be this tired. He thinks he might really actually keel over if he doesn't manage to get a few hours soon, like now, but every time he does, he remembers... stuff. Stuff he'd rather not think about. He only has so much room in the dark closet-space in his head before monsters start trickling out.
"Mom?" Di whispers. "Do you know what happened?"
"No, baby. I don't."
"Oh." Shifting around in her seat (and when exactly did she start getting so tall?), Di makes noises like she's chewing on her nails. "... do you think he'll tell you?"
"Yes," Shannon says with steel in her voice. "I know he will."
****
They're in Vegas for maybe a week when Jensen first sees him.
It's daylight and they're outside, which is a tourist mistake in the first place; heat crawls up in sick waves from the asphalt. But apparently Diana requires new clothes if she's starting at a new school. Plus Jensen feels bad for hauling the kid across the country again just because he couldn't cover his tracks well enough. Plus plus, she's getting on Shannon's last nerve. So here he is, Diana clutching his hand like one of them or the other is much younger, even though she's almost in junior high now and holding her crazy uncle's hand must be mortifying.
It's some sharp loud noise that makes him look. He doesn't even know what the sound is before he's turning, one arm blocking Diana, the other halfway to his knife. All that adrenaline funnels down to looking for a target, his instincts terrible and clear and good.
He sees that long narrow body, those dark eyes, that leashed black hair. That fucking hat.
He stops dead. Everything does, down to his reach for the knife and the traffic in the street and the ants baking on the sidewalk.
"Uncle Jake?" Diana's hand is on his forearm, stopping him from clearing his knife in public. Smart girl, good girl. "Hey. Hey, are you okay?"
His face feels numb. He doesn't want to blink, or breathe, because he'll lose him. He'll stop seeing him and then he'll have to curl up on the ground around everything that fucking hurts--
And then somebody weaves in front of the hallucination. Between one second and the next, Cougar's gone.
****
That pretty much ends the day, though Diana is too busy freaking out and calling her mom to seem like she minds. They get a cab home, Jensen's fingers wrapped around the hilt of his knife, ready to pull on the driver if he so much as breathes in Diana's direction. It's uneventful; the driver doesn't try anything and so the adrenaline is still singing in Jensen's veins by the time they pull up in the driveway.
Shannon opens the door, her hair still wet from the shower. Once everybody's inside the house, the door bolted, Jensen leaves her to deal with Diana. He's got shit to deal with now.
He calls Pooch first on the secure cell, checking again to be sure that it's still secure. In the background, he can hear the kids and Jolene. "We've got a problem," he says before he even gets hello.
"You got a lot of problems," Pooch mutters.
"No, just-- shut up and listen for a minute. I think either I'm losing it or we've got it a tail."
Careful silence for a minute, then: "Jensen, why do you think you're losing it?"
Jensen explains. Beginning to end, the car backfiring and Shannon and almost pulling a knife on the street. Cougar.
He can almost hear what Pooch is thinking, but all he says is, "I'll call you from the airport."
"Okay." Jensen pulls his glasses off and squeezes the bridge of his nose. "All right. Thanks, man."
"Yeah, yeah," Pooch says. "Forget it, white and nerdy. You'd do the same for me."
They hang up. Jensen sits with his head down for a minute, gears grinding in circular motion, then sighs and retrieves his laptop from under the desk. He's got an escape plan to lay out, just in case.
****
He should've expected Shannon to ambush him. She is his sister, after all, and sneaky genius is in their blood. But she waits until late enough that Diana's gone to bed and Jensen has gone from drinking-and-thinking to drinking-and-not-thinking.
"Hey," she says from his doorway, and holds up a sealed bottle of top shelf tequila. It sloshes a little when she gives it a shake. "You're gonna go blind, you keep drinking that Jose. Let me fix you up."
"That's not gonna work on me," he says, the words blurring only a little together. He learned to drink hard from Frank Clay himself, after all. "Hasn't worked since I was 18."
"Ah, but you see." Shannon sits on his desk. "You're going to tell me what's going on even if you don't get the tequila. So you might as well take it."
"Heh." Pushing the chair back some, Jensen leans back to stare at her. "You know they teach us how to resist torture, don't you?"
"No torture." Shannon hunches down, elbows on her knees, to give him her best terrifying smile. "You're going to tell me because you want to tell me. You want somebody to know that they died like heroes."
"Pooch knows."
"Does he?" Holding the tequila bottle by its neck, Shannon offers it to him. "I thought he went home to Jolene. Was he there with you when they died?"
After a long moment of quiet, Jensen mutters, "shit," and takes the bottle. Opens it. Drinks, a long smooth swallow with a kick like a mule. "Shit," he says again, when he can breathe. "Okay."
He tells her everything.