A Year Later

~!~

After Paraguay

            Sam was in the midst of demonstrating how to disarm a physically superior opponent, also known as Ferretti, for a survival training class when her pretty amazing day stopped being so amazing.  Before a class of thirty-six, she went from fighting a single imposing opponent to two. One was Ferretti whom she knew and trusted. The other was definitely not one of her guys, and he did not play fair.  She had already removed Ferretti’s dud knife from his custody when the other guy leapt on her back.

            For a second, it was like she’d been slammed with a boulder. Sam gasped, felt her heart rate begin to increase, the adrenalin hit her bloodstream, the glucose breakdown in her muscles.  She didn’t even have time to think Fight or flight before she tossed the jackass on her back onto his back with a follow-up to the solar plexus as a parting gift.

            Glowering at him, a cadet, contemptuously, she asked the class, “Can someone tell me why what he did was a very stupid idea?”

            One girl raised her hand, blowing a lock of curly blonde hair out of her face as she did so.

            “Cadet?” Sam acknowledged her, while refusing to let the offender up.  She had a good hold on his wrist. He wasn’t going anywhere.  If he tries, I really will hurt him.

            “Hailey, ma’am.  It was a stupid idea because you’re a Level Three in hand-to-hand combat, ma’am.”

Sam smiled slightly.  She could hear Ferretti muttering, “Suck up,” from the back of the room. She’d deal with him and his apparent lack of assistive reflexes later.

“Also because, rather than incapacitating you, the manner of his attack gave you sufficient momentum to propel him over your shoulder and onto the ground.” Hailey shrugged as if it was as easy as ABC.  “It was a badly planned offense.”

            Sam nodded in approval.  “Well put, Cadet.”  Twisting her attacker’s wrist with what probably constituted greater than necessary force, Sam decided to address him.  “So, please, tell the class what you were thinking when you decided to come at me from behind.”

            He was scowling at her, but it was belied by his body language.  He was turned on his side—admittedly, her doing—but he seemed to be trying to tuck in like an armadillo under siege.  Oh, big man’s afraid of me. You should be.  She wasn’t going to kick him for that, in spite of the fact that he could have seriously injured her in the middle of a training scenario.  She would have liked to have a go at him, but she was pretty sure the base’s liability insurance didn’t cover outraged Ops captains.

            “Well?”

            He gritted his teeth, eyeing the way she held his wrist.

            Sam guessed his hand looked a little off-color.  You should be glad all I’ve done is cut off your circulation. She’d seen worse done to guerilla fighters and done worse herself.  It was bordering on pathetic now that she thought about it.

            She rolled her eyes and let go, stepping back lest her temper get the best of her or his the best of him.

            “Well?” Her hands went to her hips, then to her pockets.  She wasn’t his wife and she wasn’t in the business of acting like his mother.  It was still all she could do not to tap her foot on the tumbling mat floor and box his ears.  His landing hadn’t been nearly as painful as the body slam she’d received from him.  Is there anything men don’t complain about?

            “Well,” he said, a medley of contrition and conceit, “I just wanted to see if you really knew what you were talking about.  You know how it is, those who can’t do teach.”

            Sam crossed her arms to keep from showing him how well she did.  “I think we can agree that I do and teach just fine.”

            “Yes, ma’am,” he dipped his head.

            Sam sighed. He didn’t look like much more than a kid in spite of his awe-inspiring size.  I’ve met linebackers who’d look up to him.  Dismissing those thoughts, she decided to take pity on a show-off.

            “Cadet?”

            “Yes, ma’am.”

            “Get out of my sight, now, and I’ll forget this happened. If you’re still here in ten seconds, you’re on a bus.”

            “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.”  He leapt up onto his tree trunk legs and hightailed it out of their training center.  And that is truly for the best.

            Sam turned back to the rest of her charges and gave them a fair imitation of her father’s worse glare.  “The first thing you apparently need to learn is the difference between a controlled exercise and a combat situation.”  She paced in front of the group so that she could look every one of them in the eye.  “What you will be engaging here at Peterson are controlled exercises.  This is not to prevent you from learning. It is to prevent you from dying before you have a chance to utilize what you’re learning.  Can someone tell me what Major Ferretti and I were just doing, before we were so needlessly interrupted?”

            Hailey was the first, and really only, to raise her hand.

            “Cadet Hailey.”

            “Ma’am, you and the major were demonstrating a combat situation in a controlled setting.”

            “That’s correct, Cadet.  What that means is we’d previously determined the parameters of this exercise, including but not limited to, its participants and the maneuvers we intended to show you.  When Cadet…” Sam thought hard for a name but none came.  “When that cadet injected himself into the exercise, he did two things.  He disrupted the exercise, thereby preventing me from properly instructing you on how to disarm a physically superior opponent.  However, he also illustrated something very important.”

            She looked around again, pointedly at Hailey, and some attentive others.  “The best laid plans can go to hell.  There’s nothing you can do except prepare for the unexpected and roll with the punches or, in my case, the body blows.” She clapped her hands to signal the end of class.  “Learn from every moment, cadets.  I’ll see you next class.”

            At Ferretti’s shout, they all scrambled to their feet and came to attention.

            Sam lifted her chin and nodded, “Dismissed.”

            They broke ranks and cleared out.

            Once they were gone, Sam dropped onto the nearby bleachers to give her shoulder a rub.  That guy had not been an easy one to throw.  I knew I should have taken up bodybuilding in high school. Any sudden recollections of their last mission gone to hell were roundly ignored.  Not today, not with that.

            Ferretti’s strode over and plopped down next to her. Contrary to his default joviality, he looked wary.

            “You all right, Sam?”

            Sam kept rubbing her arm.  The pain throbbed, but it just felt like a strain.  That seems fitting.  She nodded. “I’m fine.  He was just…really big. Bigger than he looks.”  The story of my life.

            “Tell me about.” After a moment of sitting quietly, he nudged her arm lightly.  “You know I would have stepped in if I thought you needed me, right?”

            She shrugged, winced, and nodded when that was the most she could do without a twinge.  “Yeah, I know.”

            “Just wanted to make sure.”  He looked her up and down and she was keenly aware of the fact that he’d been around the colonel a whole lot longer than she had.  Talk about your learned behaviors.  “Speaking of back-up, why don’t you and I head over to the infirmary so that Doc Frasier can have a look at you?”

            Sam stiffened in her seat.  She loved Janet, but she hadn’t liked the infirmary since the whole battery of testing she’d had to undergo on her first day. Not the least of which was an X-ray to make sure she hadn’t fractured or otherwise maimed her cheekbone.  I swear Janet actually thought someone had done that to me.  Actually, a lot of people thought that.  For some reason, everyone in their enclave took even a hint at abuse seriously, though they’d never said why they worried quite so much.  Just one more secret I might never know.

            “I’m really okay, Lou.  It’s just a strain.  I’ll be fine after a night with my heating pad and some aspirin.”

            He gave her one of his boyish, crooked smiles.  “Don’t go too wild, Captain. We’ve got an early day tomorrow.”

            She groaned in remembrance.  “We’ve got an early day every day.  How’s tomorrow any different?”

            He leaned on her again, but this was more reassurance than play.  “Got a new mission coming up.  Jack’s gonna give us the nitty-gritty.”

            Her nose wrinkled at the terminology. It didn’t bode anything good for them.  “That bad, huh?”

            He frowned in the affirmative. “It’s only covert because they don’t want anybody to talk about it.”  He’s always had a gift for stating the obvious, she thought.  Regardless, he managed to insert a couple of layers of meaning to the definition of the sort of ops they did.  The last one had been Black, but dry. She had no such confidence in the one to come.

            “I know exactly how they feel.”  She found herself frowning, too.  Looked like, soon, she’d have to find something new to laugh about.  She was seriously running out of diversions.

            Following a contemplative walk back to the training center, Sam and Ferretti sidled into the colonel’s office while the command team was busy collecting the mission objective.  In usual circumstances, there’d be a higher office briefing the lot of them. However, General McClear was a busy man and often delegated such ceremonial tasks to his subordinates.  The colonel regularly had the unenviable duty of briefing other teams as well. 

Such is the life of the ranking officer in Ops.  She didn’t want it; following already took more than a sufficient number of hours out of her day, she wasn’t committing to that kind of workload yet.  She much preferred to while away her days training upstarts and tinkering with Simmons’ latest attempt to minutely improve military technology.  Since Sam didn’t do ‘minute,’ his work either went big or went boom thanks to her intervention.  The fire-resistant lab space at Nellis definitely had its perks, she recalled guiltily.

Once she heard the colonel and Kawalsky’s tell-tale banter floating through the doorway, she unconsciously straightened in her seat.  After failing to stifle a grimace at the resulting pull, she glared at Ferretti, mutely daring him to sell her out to their CO.  He had to have her back on this.  He hunched his shoulder unclearly and she was left to wonder what he’d do.  Great, Lou unpredictable is me totally screwed.

They came to their feet at their superiors’ entrance. It was more muscle memory than any need to maintain formality.  As ever, the colonel shared an exasperated eye roll with his second-in-command.

“Sit,” he grunted on his way to his chair.  “Y’know, we’d broken Lou of that habit before you came to town, Captain.”

She smothered her grin and her shrug—for different reasons.  “Sorry, sir.”

He raised his eyebrow doubtfully but didn’t argue.  Butt in seat, he opened the ubiquitous brown folder, marked ‘classified’ and began.  By the end, she really wished he hadn’t.

Mentally reviewing the details of their upcoming mission after the meeting, Sam was tense already.  It was the stuff of nightmares. Not in the vein of Rwanda but enough.  They were going full submersion in Brazil.  Walk in as tourists, sneak out as fugitives.  She was less upset by that idea than she was that they were about to enter another Latin American gangland.  They were about to dine with honest to God kingpins and, then, they were going to shoot them in the head and relieve them of their cache of highly-prized and highly-priced imported Venezuelan weaponry.

Go hard or go home, she reminded herself, all the while trying not to remind herself of anything else.  ‘Paraguay’s damned hot and muggy this time of year,’ said her rogue recollections.  ‘The bugs are fuckin’ murder,’ said the Ferretti of her mind with the colonel assenting and Kawalsky’s amen.  They’d been doing okay in the wilderness.  Sam had worked to overcome her new environment and acted from her team’s examples.  It had been better by then, easier; the mission had been complete.  After that, nothing was better and everything was hard.

Sam gave her body a shake.  She didn’t want this one to be hard.  Her shoulder, then her back protested even this small physical response.  She reached for the abused muscles near the small of her back and gave the area a firm rubbing.  Damn, I might need a muscle relaxant for this one.  Pain was an unpredictable factor out in the field and one they couldn’t afford.  The captain needed to be pain-free to be mission ready and she intended to be.

“Looks like Ferretti was right,” said the most recognizable voice in her life today.  She closed her eyes against it and dropped her seeking hands from her back, not that it made a difference now.

“Don’t know what you mean, sir.”  She could be as obstinate as he could be. She could also converse with her CO and plan appropriate revenge for Lou at the same time.

“Sure, ya don’t,” he quipped with false lightness.  He was regarding her with all the weight of a 40-ton Mack truck. She felt like she was carrying the world when he looked at her that way.  After this morning, she felt like she’d dropped the world and was trying to make up for the fumble.

“Is there a problem, sir?”

“This is the part where you tell me, Carter. Is there?”  Seeing no sense in carrying on the masquerade, Sam tilted her head in a facsimile of a nod.

“Just a little sore, sir. One of the trainees got a little enthusiastic in session this morning.”

His left eyebrow rose sharply and he took a step closer.  “Oh?” He managed to infuse half a dozen command requests into the simple sound.

“Yes, sir.  He seemed to think Major Ferretti and my demonstration on disarming tactics could use a little…flare.”

The colonel crossed his arms and began to stare her down. She shifted her weight ever so slightly despite knowing who the intensity was truly meant for.  I don’t envy you, McCarty. Ferretti had known his name though she hadn’t.

“Flare?”

“He came at me from behind, sir.  It was pretty funny, actually. He seemed to think I couldn’t take him.”

His mouth twitched, belying the ferocity simmering in his eyes.  “Sounds like he got a lesson in Carter 101.”

Sam rocked onto her toes.  “Like you wouldn’t believe, sir.”

“So,” he reached out to brush her shoulder, “you’re good then? No pulls, hitches, or, dare I say it, strains?”  He was doing his full-captain visual inspection.  Per habit, she struggled not to respond by shying away.  She went to answer with the only response that would be acceptable to either of them, but he beat her to it with a silencing wave of the hand.  “Before you even think about it, you should know by now that I consider being lied to a personal insult. So, think carefully—do you really want to insult me, Carter?”  He peered at her the way she imagined he did to Charlie and she was buckling as she imagined Charlie would, too.

“No, sir,” she murmured grudgingly.  She moved automatically to shrug and was nearly successful.  Hissing sharply, she reassured him, “Just a couple of strains, colonel. I’ll be right as rain in time for Brazil.”

Rolling his eyes, the colonel turned away to head back into his office.  “It’s not like we’re going without you, Carter. Chill out, rest up, relax,” he advised. “Go fishing. That always helps me when I’m all wound up.”

“I’ll take that under advisement, sir.”  She could see him mouthing her words to himself in the reflection of his office window.  She briefly worried about his eyes getting stuck in the upright and rolled position.  Then, she grinned.  Would serve him right for being so stuffy, which was funny because there was no one in the chain of command less stuffy than Jack O’Neill with two l’s.  He told no end of jokes about the guy with one but Sam had never met him.

“I’m sure you will, Carter,” he responded dryly, bringing her out of her tickled introspection. He wouldn’t have appreciated the humor, she knew.  “In the meantime, I want you to sidle on down to Janet’s and get patched up.”  He silenced her again, this time with a stern glance.  He wasn’t kidding.  “Still need you at 100 percent. Nothing less will do.”

She nodded curtly, straightening at his tone.  There had been an undercurrent of tension in all of her conversations with him since the briefing began.  Something was up and she was the least qualified person to find out what. She was, however, the only one in residence for the time being.

“Sir, is everything all right?”  It was his turn to appear confused.  “You seem tense.”

He laughed a little, a tad humorlessly for her taste, and dragged his fingers through his hair.  She couldn’t decide if that was a touch of silver she was starting to notice at the temples or just the crap lighting in the room. “Someone made a member of my team the target of an unprovoked attack. That bothers me and it should bother you.”

“It does, sir, but I’ve dealt with it and I’m ready to move forward.  I expect that the cadet in question is being issued his walking papers as we speak.  He’ll have to start from scratch.”  Whatever she’d said earlier, assault wasn’t just a matter of forgive and forget.  Consequences and all that…

He looked skeptical and inexplicably worried.  “Yeah, I hope so.”  Picking up a snow globe like the many that littered his home, he turned it over in his hands, making blizzards and clear days of spring over and over again in turn.  “What’d you say the kid’s name was again?”  Everyone was a kid to her CO.

“I didn’t, sir.”  Though Sam didn’t tolerate much with regard to deplorable behavior, she also made it a point not to hold someone’s one stupid decision against them.  The colonel had no such policy.

“So, you didn’t.”  He put down the keepsake a touch wistfully.  “What’s his name, Carter?”

“Sir--”

“Someone who can’t follow orders has no business in the military,” spoke the near-infamous problem child of the U.S. Air Force. Sam was incredulous.

“Someone who isn’t willing to push boundaries has no business in command.”  She stopped short, thinking she’d gone way farther than intended with that one.

“That a jab at me, Captain?”  For a man normally content to keep his eyes on the horizon, he seemed suddenly determined to keep his eyes on hers. She preferred that he didn’t do that.

“No, sir.”  She lowered her gaze to the floor.  “He’s Command Track. I’ve heard impulsiveness is one of the traits to look for.”  She was speaking as much from experience as out of her ass.  For the most part, she just didn’t want to be responsible for depriving someone else of their life’s dream. The Air Force had been hers, too.  Still is. This is a reputation I don’t need.

“Heard that, too,” he conceded.  “But,” he amended, “taking shit from idiots is not.”  She jerked her head up quick enough to crack her stiff neck.  His expression revealed a measure of disappointment and the resulting apprehension made her already tightly-coiled muscles positively twang.  “You’re command material already. Don’t make excuses for people that aren’t.”

Realizing there was nothing else she could say, Sam responded with a bare, “Yes, sir.” Complimented and berated in the same statement. I’m really to making friends and influencing people today. She couldn’t afford to get on his bad side, not after everything else.

He re-opened the mission folder from earlier, a clear sign that he was shifting his attention away from her to more important things.  “Give Doc Frasier my best,” he said in blatant dismissal.

“Yes, sir,” she countered again and hastily made tracks.  The last thing she wanted was for the colonel to go looking and find her anywhere besides the infirmary in the near future.  If she was lucky, the colonel would get held up with his backlog of mission reports and wouldn’t have time to seek her out. If the Fates were smiling and the universe conspiring, Janet might even know what had her CO tied up in knots.

The Fates had apparently left for the Poconos because Janet was as in the dark as Sam was.  Evidently, the grapevine hadn’t yet produced a viable explanation with the colonel’s latest mood.  The universe was apparently bored by her offer since the colonel certainly found the time to call Janet to confirm Sam’s presence.  He’d timed it to coincide with the entrance of her teammates into the infirmary.

Oh, I see what you did there, sir.  She pulled a smile for Kawalsky and Ferretti just the same.  Seeing as the visit was just a matter of a couple of overexerted muscle groups, Janet hadn’t bothered to pull the curtain.  Lou hopped right up on the bed next to Sam and nodded to Janet a brisk hello.

“You here for your shots, Major?” the doctor asked in humor but with a touch of sincere warning.  The team’s third member in line hopped right down and left to occupy the empty place beside Kawalsky.  They were sitting on the opposite bed watching with an unconvincing level of interest. It wasn’t being used and Janet didn’t mind so long as they weren’t bothering anyone.  But the fact that they could be so easily cowed by someone so petite never failed to send Sam into fits of internal giggles. Thankfully, she’d learned to hide it well.

“Can it, Captain,” Kawalsky barked without much bite.

Okay, so she hadn’t hidden it that well after all.  The upside to spending this much time with the same people was that they were used to it.  She hadn’t thought that would ever happen. For once in her relatively short life, she was content enough to be wrong about something.

Watching Lou swing his feet over the side of the bed, Sam was tempted to mimic him. She would have but she didn’t do that. She was the serious young gun and he was the jokester. It didn’t matter that they doled out practical jokes like cigars; that was their secret, shared between them and those that knew them.  Sam hid that, even from Janet, even from Sara O’Neill who she’d come to regard as a good friend.  They had an image as no nonsense ‘capable of killing you blindfolded and hogtied’ Ops officers to protect.  Thanks to the time she’d spent in the cockpit, Sam knew to take that seriously, something all four former pilots had in common.

If your peers don’t respect you, your superiors won’t respect you.  That lack of respect could mean a short lifetime in POW camp if those selfsame generals decided that a team wasn’t worth retrieving when the going got hard.  God forbid they be unable to save themselves.  Jack O’Neill’s team remained a valued asset by perpetuating mission success and priceless skill.  Beyond the colonel’s tendency to survive just about anything, he had a knack for seeing potential and mining it for all it was worth.  Many envied that ability and the notoriety heading up so many crack teams wrought.

Sam liked to think it was that gut-bound talent that had led him to her.  He’d told her it had on the downswing from Paraguay and he’d given her no reason to doubt him.  Naturally, some liked to say he’d had other, less pure motives for bringing her aboard, but she never gave them more than a passing snort. Not until recently anyway, not until she had the king of all clusterfucks under her belt and down on paper. 

Getting walloped by a kid was just the latest and greatest of embarrassments Sam’d had to handle.  That she hadn’t hauled off and broken his nose was a sign that things were improving.  She thought, They’ve gotta be. There’s really no worse this can get.

Upon realizing that she’d all but dared circumstances to swing even farther out of her favor, Sam thought she might as well leap ahead of the curve.

“Janet, I’ve gotta catch up with the colonel at 1400, you think I can head out now?” she asked, the toes of her boots milliseconds from colliding with toes of Ferretti’s as they swung in tandem.  He clipped her sole in passing, she firmly nudged—see: belted—his ankle.  There was much subtle, good-natured posturing to be observed by any social scientists interested in studying the nature of their pride in its natural habitat, the infirmary.   It might as well be, we spend enough time here.  All ego and subtle understanding, a veritable anthropological heaven.

The good captain doctor pointedly put herself in the middle of their foot foray, chastising them both in an obnoxiously maternal and obnoxiously effective way:  “Play nicely, children.  Sam, you can go, just make sure you do what we talked about and take it easy.  The strains aren’t bad, but they’ll get bad if you don’t keep an eye on things.”  Janet understood, better than Sam probably, how much the various teams guarded their medical privacy, and thusly had transformed vagueness into an art form.

Sam slid off the edge of the bed.  “Will do,” she affirmed with a quick salute.  Her first dose of muscle relaxant had already kicked in. She felt about ready to take on the Brazilians on her own.  Or sleep. Sleep is good.  She hadn’t done much of that lately and no amount of her subconscious coaxing her toward it was going to change that fact. Therefore, her only option was to fill the time, until the next sunrise, until the next run with anything except closing her eyes.

Time to see a colonel about an undercurrent. This can’t go wrong at all.  She was strangely comforted by the echoes of her team that resounded in her own cynicism.

This was a goal, if a questionable one, and Sam needed those badly nowadays. Hence, she was off to see the wizard.  She was seriously hoping there were no falling houses nearby.

~!~

            On re-entry, Sam was less than shocked to note that she could hear the colonel shouting from the end of the hallway outside the lounge.  Since her teammates had scattered to the four—well, two—winds at her request, she imagined they’d either left base or were lurking nearby, too.  Good money would be on them hanging silently from the rafters.  She wished she’d thought of it first.

            Easing into the lounge, she found the place as immaculate as it never was.  Not a foundling coke can in sight, not a half-eaten Hershey’s bar to be seen.  Somebody had gone on a cleaning jag in her absence and there was nothing good that could possibly mean.

            “No, sir, that’s not acceptable,” he went on, at volume. “She’s a member of my team. If anybody should have a problem with the way she does her job, it should be me and, trust me, I’ve got no problem with her, sir.”

            Sam froze in place, because her heartbeat was loud enough to drown him out without competing with her footsteps for dominance.

            “With all due respect, sir, you’re playing politics with the makeup of my team and the career of one of my subordinates. Not to mention her physical safety.  That’s damned unacceptable, sir.” He stopped for a tense moment. Sam could practically hear his grinding teeth.  “She’s a fine officer, General.  She follows order. She’s got guts. She’s got instincts most ground troops would kill for.  Officers like Carter are the reason we changed the rules, sir.”

            Sam was suddenly sure that she was supposed to exit stage left about now.  She wasn’t supposed to hear this. She didn’t want to hear this.  I need to leave.  And she turned to do so, but stopped short.  He’s going to bat for me. The least I can do is stand and listen.

            She tried standing, but her knees failed her at his, “Yes, sir, I’d stake my eagles on it.  She’s good people, General. I don’t have anybody on my team who isn’t.”  She curled up carefully in Kawalsky’s old leather office chair.  It was so ancient it should have squealed and turned to dust at her weight. It did neither because Simmons kept their domain running like clockwork with an occasional assist from the consummate Sgt. Siler.  Our well-oiled machine works.  What the hell did I do to convince them otherwise?

            “General, I’ll testify to any panel, board, or tribunal you ask me to.  Carter’s not only the farthest thing from a liability, she’s an asset to both the Air Force and my team.”  He hadn’t surrendered but he had stopped yelling.  She could hear the impatient staccato rap of his knuckles on the desktop.  For the colonel, fidgeting was usually a sign that things were going badly or in circles.  He had little patience for politically correct doublespeak. “Sir, if that’s all, I have duties that I need to attend to.”  The rap ceased.  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Goodbye.”  He hung up the phone a little harder than necessary.  Sam flinched.  She wished she’d left after all.

            Her CO was an easy man to read for someone that knew him.  Other people would have found his silence meaningless in this moment, but she knew better.  He was quiet and he was still when he was uneasy.  When there was something amiss, he was the first to know and the rest knew by his sudden shift in persona.  The man in the office twenty feet away was the man Sam knew in the field.  He could be merciful or deadly depending on what was on the opposite side of a trembling shrub.  She had a feeling he wasn’t thinking mercy today.

            “Might as well come in here, Carter.”  She didn’t ask how he knew she was out here.  That wasn’t a question anyone ever asked anymore. It was just presumed that he would know and questioned when he didn’t.

            “Yes, sir,” she answered instantly, wrenching herself out of the chair and to attention in his office before either could say, ‘Hoorah.’ He took the time to check her out, no doubt searching for signs of permanent damage. He’d find none on the outside; he had no window to see in. Thank God.

            “I take it you got the gist of that little talk I had with the Brass.”

            “Me and half the base, sir.”  How often humor and truth went hand in hand with them.

            “Yeah,” he winced, “thought so.”  He rubbed his forehead to ward off an approaching headache, waving her toward a chair with the other hand.  She’d seen that expression after many a mission gone FUBAR.  Out of the ones they’d gone on, there’d been too many of those in recent months.  Don’t think about Paraguay, don’t think about Paraguay, don’t think about Paraguay. The mantra would have been more effective if she didn’t spend every free second of her day thinking on it anyway.

            “Sir,” she hazarded as she took a seat, “was that about this morning’s training session?”  Of course, not about Paraguay, not anymore. ParguayParaguayParaguay. Like a record stuck on a high-pitched note, those balmy nights whined in her head.

            “That’s a pretty fair guess, yeah.”  He pressed his thumbs up against the pressure points on either side of the bridge of his nose.  It was supposed to help, Sam remembered telling him.  It was beginning to look like as big a bust as that training session.  “For some reason the folks upstairs have got it in their heads that you’re a liability in the field.” He lifted a hand to preemptively delay her protests.  “Consequently, they decided to send a ringer in to test you out.”

            All of the sudden, this morning’s disaster made a sick kind of sense. Back at the halfway point, the colonel had warned her.  She’d heard it implied that there were questions about her fitness to be on the team, because she was a woman and Paraguay—ParagauayParaguayParaguay—had been a strike against her. It had been a strike against the entire team. One captured first and another captured trying to rescue the first. They’d violated all kinds of Rules of Engagement to satisfy their creed. No one had been lost or left behind. 

She’d known there would be hell to pay in the aftermath; what she hadn’t expected was for the Brass to send someone out specifically to trip her up. To hear it said explicitly that she was doubted by the very generals who’d lauded her work at Groom Lake was unthinkable… Sam was at a loss.

“I don’t know what to say, sir,” she said anyway.

            “You are not alone in that, Captain.” He scrubbed a hand across his face.  “Naturally, I told them that was crap. You’re obviously not a liability. You’re our damned spring chicken.”

            If she wasn’t so worried, she might have smiled since that was what he’d obviously intended.  “So, what happens now?”  She didn’t know if she could do her job if the higher-ups were going to be thwarting her every step of way, but she’d be damned if she’d give them the satisfaction of seeing her run.

            “So, now, we go on.  You keep doing a damned fine job and eventually the people on your case will have to shove their antiquated ideals where the sun don’t shine.”

            Sam did smile this time.  “‘Antiquated ideals,’ sir?”

            He gave her a deadpan stare. “You have met my wife, haven’t you?”

            She chuckled and leaned back in her chair more comfortably.   “Well put, sir.”

            “I had a feeling you’d think so.”  He mirrored her position in his infinitely more comfortable chair and smiled.  It wasn’t up to its usual standard, yet it still managed to soothe her.  Then again, maybe that was just him.

            Sara really is a lucky woman.  And, in some small way, Sam knew she was, too. Because she’d met him and all the friends he’d brought along and they hadn’t left her yet.  That they someday might wasn’t something she could think about.

~!~

            When Brazil ended in bloodshed, Sam seriously began to wonder if she was the problem instead of life, the universe, everything and everyone else.  Was she really so horrid at her work, so unfailing at failing that she could not effectively end the lives and the reign of people who were fucking asking for it?  She couldn’t even answer her own question since her mind was a little occupied with keeping her body going as it supported Kawalsky’s wounded weight on their hasty stumble through the Parada de Lucas favela on the nasty side of midnight.

Had she hesitated to pull the trigger at the wrong time?  Had she shown mercy when swift mercenary justice should have prevailed?  Had she wondered if the arms dealers in question might be willing to come peacefully? Damn straight, she had. That was her strong suit: wondering, evaluating, and extrapolating before she acted.  She did it in the quarter-seconds it took most individuals to blink and this night had been the same.

They’d had the upper hand with the coke and arms connoisseurs well in hand at one point. The next thing she knew, the colonel had crossed into her blind spot and Charlie—big Charlie, the strong one, the one who could survive this, she had to remember that—had ended up crumpled bleeding over a crate stuffed with hay and metal and spite.

She hated this job. Had she mentioned that before?  She hated it yet she kept coming back. She came back because they came back and mission one had bound her to them.  If she was good as her name, there was no one better. If there was no one better, who’d cover them in a crisis?  There’d be exactly no one for them to count on.  That wasn’t something she could stomach; so, she stuffed her night terrors into cut-glass boxes and put on her fatigues.  The colonel gave her the signal, Kawalsky copied, Ferretti winked, and they moved out.  This was her life, she couldn’t leave.

And that’s what she told Kawalsky in spite of the sticky creek of blood slicking her fingers around him, in spite of the heavy stink of iron beating at her nose.  He’d live and live again.  This wasn’t his day and she balked at the idea that it should have been.  The saying lies: there is no ‘good day to die’ for a soldier.  She nudged his temple with hers whenever he faltered to remind them both of that.

She couldn’t hear him but she knew that Lou had their six.  The colonel was a mere suggestion of a silhouette in front of them but she trusted him not to get too far ahead.  As if he’d sensed her doubts, a familiar hand reached back from the pervasive shade to guide her way.  Kawalsky snorted faintly, then coughed noisily.  So intent was she on keeping him upright—and quiet—that she didn’t see the predictably rocky street buckling upwards directly ahead of them.

He went down hard and landed even harder with a well-placed elbow to her gut.  She sputtered and gasped at the unforgettable sensation of rib bone starting to give. And her knee, she couldn’t begin to think about that yet. Mindful of the fact they were on the run from the scene of a crime gone awry, Sam sucked down the song of agony she would have loved to sing right about now.  Kawalsky wasn’t a small man and hadn’t had the chance to square himself away at all on the journey down. Meaning that as much as this hurt her—and she was wheezing harder by the moment—he was far worse and probably out of his mind.

The colonel swore and she thought she heard him ask someone, something, somewhere, “Can this actually get worse?”  She also heard him regret it.  He’d swerved and missed the mishap, they’d walked right into it.  For just a lingering second, she closed her eyes, thinking, Figures.

Quicker than any of them could pick a lock, Kawalsky and she were scooped right up off the ground and propelled back on their way.  She wished it hadn’t been too dangerous to take a vehicle because these streets were not a place to be at 0200 or whatever time of night it was by now.  She felt like they’d been running since daybreak in spite of it being just after dessert when the shit hit the fan.  Unfamiliar territory, a distinct lack of ammo, and casualties. This is art.  As far as she was concerned, screwing up to this degree was a work of surrealist performance art.  McClear was going to pin the blue ribbon right on them for it.

If Kawalsky dies… If he did, things would be a bust for a hell of a lot more reasons than one.  He was one of theirs, their guy, numero dos, XO, 2IC, and just all-around great friend.  Compared to the things he’d survived—they’d  survived—this seemed a grotesquely ordinary fashion to be taken out.  Just a lucky bullet, not even a guerilla fighter in the wilds of Central Africa or Bolivia.  It wasn’t torture or poison, it was a moment in time and Sam was prepared to add it to the collection of those she wouldn’t ever forget if she set foot on American soil again and could curl up in her bed.

Ferretti had her tucked securely at his side, still looking behind while she looked ahead, more carefully this time.  She guided him around the cracked pavement and the pot holes.  He tripped on loose gravel and she kept his footing.  She thought it better to pay attention to the ground than to the colonel and his running, ever so soft, commentary of their progress.

“This was not in the plans, Charlie,” he groused to the barely-conscious, hardly standing man.  They stumbled together and would have fallen if O’Neill’s steadier legs hadn’t held.  “Hey, hey, keep it together.  We’ve only got two whole men left, so don’t get any ideas about bringing me down to your level. We’re gonna need every advantage we can get if we’re gonna leave this hell hole any time soon.”

To her relief, Charlie grumbled and her CO chuckled in that low, unobtrusive style he had that managed to draw her ear every time.  He might have been a master of discretion but he was far too out of the ordinary for his own good and maybe hers.  Everything since Paraguay had been a mess with them. He’d tried to keep things on the level and her level had been all fouled up.  Good and bad, she’d been attempting to live that mission down for three months.  Brazil had just turned into another indication that she wasn’t living down anything at all.

She started when all of a sudden Lou sharply poked her aching side.  She might have growled at him—she was that ticked at herself and everyone involved—if she hadn’t immediately seen what he’d seen. Disregarding completely the surely torn ligament in her knee, she lunged with him into the cover provided by a shady store overhang to watch the show.  If there’d been time, she would have yelled to warn them. Who was she kidding? Ferretti would have beaten her there as he did whenever it counted.

Kawalsky and the colonel didn’t need their all-call.  Kawalsky had staggered unto his own power and was backing up to give their CO ground without moving too far out of his radius.  O’Neill was the stronger of them just then and those five very young-looking guys with two deadly-looking submachine guns and three baseball bats were evidently in search of somebody strong to fight.  Normally, she knew he would have been happy to show a bunch of young busybodies not underestimate a man alone, but, tonight, he wasn’t a man alone.  He was a man with his team, his extended family on the ropes.  Fighting to blood and broken bones was nobody’s cup of tea tonight, least of all the colonel’s.

Sam both wished he would and wished he wouldn’t shoot a glance behind him.  Knowing his third and fourth were not in residence would worry him, distract him from staying alive; yet, not knowing and engaging would risk his life and their safe return stateside.  Her intuition was telling her to intervene, fucked leg or none. Her rational mind advised her to stay put and wait to see what else might yet develop.  The latter also calculated the probability that either of these was the correct course of action. 

The odds are shit either way.

She’d already begun to move when a solid block of hand latched on her hip.  She knew the touch, she still froze in place. Protective instincts talking.

Ferretti was crouched close over her shoulder and breathing hard.  He may have only had eyes for the oncoming danger in the street but his grip didn’t so much as waver. He was pissed and she could have felt it in the pressure of his fingertips if his panting hadn’t given him away. That unique tang of adrenaline was positively oozing from his pores and his eyes dilated—she imagined because she couldn’t see.  She expected that she was the same.  Perhaps anyone would be when it was someone they loved.

And there was absolutely no doubt that she loved him—them, both the colonel and Kawalsky.  They’d insinuated themselves into her life as she’d insinuated herself into their team.  It wasn’t clear anymore where one life ended and another started; they worked well that way, they were unstoppable that strong on any day.  She just needed that bond to keep them unstoppable tonight.

Bracing herself tellingly on Lou’s knee, she rose with aching slowness so as not to alert the colonel’s watch dogs.  Kawalsky might have been hunched over behind him but he wasn’t about to sit this one out for even a weeping wound.  Neither was Sam for a swelling knee or a busted rib or two.  She’d fought through worse wounds, some physical, most not.  She’d injured her body, not her trigger finger.

With a snap of her fingers, more motion than sound, she signaled for Ferretti to fall back to another secure position.  In the colonel’s book, this was the universal sign that she was about to do something monumentally stupid.  Thinking on that, she almost smiled.  How could he have known that ‘stupid’ was her version of inspired?  She’d never told him. A girl’s got to have some secrets.

Like clockwork, Lou heeded her warning and melted into the gloom till she couldn’t see him at all. It was enough to know he was there and she carried out her plan.  Her half-empty Beretta was warm tucked into the waist of her skirt. They’d been avoiding any more shooting but had all been sure to leave with the weapons they’d brought; some were empty, others nearly full.  She probably had more bullets than anyone save Kawalsky right now and he was not exactly in a condition to go full speed ahead with a frontal assault.  She scowled as the gang of jumped up schoolyard bullies circled her teammates, her friends.  Charlie—big Charlie, tough Charlie, the one that could survive this, she was sure—and Colonel O’Neill were back to back and she could sense that they knew they were dead to rights.  To Sam, that was unacceptable.

Employing an ease for which she partly had to thank a rigorous course of team paintball shooting, Sam wielded, cocked, and aimed her sidearm.  If Lou had cottoned to her scheme, he’d be raising his own at the same time.  They needed to give the impression of being omnipresent. They needed to be the unseen danger and if there was anything Sam was damned good at, it was being dangerous while remaining unseen.

She aimed at the thug directly to Kawalsky left, at 9 o’clock. Compensating for the somewhat windy night, she adjusted four degrees, took a steady breath, and pulled.  Four inches down from the point of aim was where it struck.  He and his handy-dandy semi staggered to his right, body slamming into one of his comrades with a baseball bat before he finally fell.

Three seconds hence, another shot cracked the chill air. Sam didn’t wince—she didn’t anymore—she just laid in a new course at Ferretti’s amen. Thug to the right of the couple, busy swinging his stainless steel bat at gun-wielding phantoms, lost a lung and consciousness. Or he might have been dead. Accuracy was never a sure thing with a handgun at a distance and she’d decided months ago that when it came to caring, her teammates were her first priority.

Lou took Guy #4 out of commission, permanently, with a handy bullet from somewhere completely new.  He’d managed to come parallel to the command team’s position by now.  There was only one kid left and he looked terrified.  If he’d been terrified enough to run for his life, he would have lived.

He’d decided to do some collateral damage instead…against guns—with a bat, no less.  Sam’s shot clipped his carotid on its way to lodging itself in the bark of a gnarled palm tree. It looked older than this kid. Then again, the car it had passed through on the way to the tree looked older than him, too.  Once more, Sam Carter had ended some kid’s life, because he was too stupid to know better.  If any of these preschoolers had had the sense to use their guns, they might still be alive. Sam had enough experience to know that their own semiautomatic pistols would have been no match for that onslaught.

Expectedly, that didn’t improve her feelings on the matter, and nothing would. After these last months, she did not need this shit again, but here it was.  Ignoring that fresh knowledge, she limped in closer to check the scene.  Ferretti was already there, strong arm wrapped around a swaying Kawalsky.  He’d stayed on his feet so far because he’d had O’Neill to hold him up.  If the youngsters’ taunting had come to more than that, he’d have been a greater liability than a help.  He carried that understanding like a head cold, but the colonel was already moving on, gathering the semis from the hands of the dead and kicking misused bats into the gutters, what there were of them.

Sam clapped a comforting hand on Charlie’s shoulder. While that wasn’t usually her move, it was the only thing that could have soothed her; she hoped it would do the same for him.  He gave her a sluggish nod of acknowledgement and a ghost of his best devil-may-care grin.  It wasn’t normal, yet it was enough.  She smiled a ghostly smile in return.  She’d never be the same either.

It was time to make tracks, so they did.

Somebody lost a car with a bullet hole through the windshield, which was fitting since they were the ones to put it there.  The colonel drove out of a need to keep busy.  He hated busted operations and this one was busted beyond all repair.  Sam sat shotgun and watched their six via the rearview and side mirrors.  Lou played body pillow and nursemaid to Kawalsky in the back.  Had they been in an upscale rental car, they’d have probably looked like a group of misplaced tourists.

Sam in her soft skirt and flats and the boys in their polos and slacks, anyone who looked would have seen dilettantes with money to burn. Oh, look at the shanty houses. How quaint. Sam could have barked at the absurdity of it all.  It wasn’t adorable and it wasn’t quaint.  It was disturbing that places like this still existed.  She couldn’t imagine being surrounded by this kind of economic depression all the time, even if parts of the Springs could give this place a run for its money—so to speak.  So often she complained about her base quarters, she complained about her car, about her apartment; but she had so much for a single person. She had a home and security. She had the affection of good friends who it so happened were also her good teammates.  She was lucky that her existence wasn’t dining and dallying with arms dealers every night.  She was lucky enough.

Taking a soft steadying breath to give her ribs a break from their previous workout, Sam let go of some of the tension that had been running her ragged these many months. She was still uneasy, she was still bruised and hurting, but she was trying to move on.  Seems like I’m doing a lot of that lately.

In spite of her chronic distress diminishing by the moment, she wasn’t letting down her guard.  She continued her smooth perusal of the world outside for any signs that those few marks that they’d left breathing were in sight.  There wasn’t a soul awake in Parada de Lucas tonight other than them.  She still didn’t breathe easy but she was more than content to still breathe.

“Coast clear, Captain?” the colonel asked as they took a conspicuous turn several blocks from where they’d started to stop in front of  run-down shack of a block house.  In all honesty, she’d seen places in the poorest corners of Rwanda built out of sterner stuff.

            “Yes, sir.  No tails, sir. At least none that are conspicuous.”  Her fingers still instinctively clinched around the confiscated semi the colonel had given her to supplement to her spent arsenal.  It was warm from her touch and she was jealous of it.  She’d been freezing from the inside out since they’d stumbled out of downtown Rio de Janeiro.

            “Good,” he answered simply and they drove on a ways.  He stopped again, this time at a more well-appointed house.  It was still nothing that would have passed muster in the States but it was better.  He draped his forearms over the steering wheel and gave her another of his inscrutable looks, which she’d grown used to and tired of in a year or so of friendship. She was looking forward to being indifferent to them.  She supposed she had Paraguay to thank for that fact that she wasn’t yet.

            “Sir,” she inquired unnaturally softly.  Contrary to really all their new, if unspoken, rules of personal engagement, she touched his arm to sway him.  She felt his grimace and she felt him give, his resolve buckling only slightly under her touch.  They both had Paraguay to thank for that, he was just usually the better of the two at hiding it.

            “You need to help Lou get Char—Kawalsky inside.  It’s not much but it’s home until I can devise an alternative exit strategy.”  Ferretti was already taking his cues and rearranging their now unconscious comrade for the best method of discreet removal from the car.  It was a mean feat and Sam couldn’t force herself to do more than watch.

            “And you, sir?”  She tightened her grasp on him, unconsciously sensing that of the gun and the man she held on to, he was the more deadly.  Strangely, she wasn’t shocked to consciously sense it, too.

            “And, I’ll be disposing of this bucket of bolts properly to cover us.”  He had begun to tap the dashboard in impatience.  It was a sign he was ready to move. She wasn’t convinced about to where exactly that was.  This hadn’t been a part of the original mission and yet he’d been pretty much prepared for FUBAR? Exceedingly prepared for FUBAR.  Something stinks, sir. Come on, don’t play me.

            “Okay,” she responded simply upon realizing he’d tell her exactly nothing and, making a thorough visual sweep of the area outside, she opened her door and stepped out.  She carefully rounded the trunk to the side nearest the stone footpath and pulled open the backseat.  Taking hold of Ferretti’s shoulders, she helped him out while he supported the bulk of Kawalsky’s weight.  Once he was steady, she went ‘round to catch their teammate’s feet and lifted him free of the car.  Carrying a guy with cracked ribs.  Great plan, Captain, she berated herself.

            “Straight down the hallway and to the right is a bedroom. Put him there,” the colonel instructed before they could move on. “It’s a defensible position and there’re some first aid supplies in the bathroom.  Two doors, front and back of the structure; no dependable locks.  Windows in every room, so take watches to keep an eye on them. Do not put down your weapons unless you have to. This is not our final position, do you read?”

            “Yes, sir,” they chorused and Sam wondered why Lou seemed more content with this change in plans than she did.

            “All right, carry on.”  If Sam’s eyes were right, he was looking longingly toward the house as they carried Kawalsky inside.  It wasn’t much, he was right, but when they were there it was home.

            She didn’t even hear the gears grind when the car pulled away.  She heard absolutely nothing.  He was equally quiet in the presence of man and machine.  She used to consider that a gift, it worried her tonight.

            The two of them made quick, efficient work of undressing their superior, then employing a bit of field aid to stabilize him.  A handful of the credit cards they’d been issued in conjunction with their mission aliases came in handy for sealing the nastier of his bullet wounds.  A few pressure dressings, some saline washes, and a dose of morphine later, Kawalsky was actually dozing pain- and hopefully infection-free.  One of the better small favors they’d been granted lately.

            Sam was sitting sentry over the end of Kawalsky’s bed while Ferretti did a scheduled security check of the various rooms. It’d be her turn next.  Their 2IC stirred, she touched his ankle. He didn’t stir again.  She was somewhat comforted by the soothing effect they still had on one another.  She wished someone would have it on her.  Sir, what are you up to?

            She hadn’t bothered asking Lou because she knew he wouldn’t answer.  He didn’t just take the colonel at face value, he took him whole, trusting that whatever it was he was safeguarding wasn’t something they needed to know.  She envied that he’d known the man long enough to believe that without reservation. She wished she had.

            Not to be misunderstood, she did trust the colonel. She trusted him with her life and her secrets. She’d trusted him with her vaunted ‘virtue’ once and he hadn’t quite abused it even though circumstances had permitted him.  That had gone a long way to demolishing what walls had remained between them. In truth, it had also erected a few.

            Samantha Carter and Jack O’Neill had become entirely too close entirely too fast.  And the danger was how much she was enjoying that.  Their closeness made it easier for him to play her. It also made it easier for her to play him.  They were a couple of dueling banjos on missions like this. He was keeping something from the team and she intended to discover exactly what that was.

            If he ever deigned to show his face here again.

            Out of a lack of anything else to occupy herself with, she took Charlie’s pulse another time, feeling his forehead for an elevated temperature and finding everything normal.  Everything was normal, just normal.

            She wished that were true.

            Ferretti was back by the time she’d run through a mental recitation of the periodic table of elements a third time.  That was her thing, science.  To be honest, she still missed it.  Other than blowing things up, Sam didn’t often get to indulge in her love of theoretical astrophysics and engineering.  Occasionally, she got the opportunity to use some experimental armaments out of Groom Lake, but that usually required the colonel to pull a couple of strings for her.  This was a whole different world she’d entered here and there were moments, quiet lonely ones, in which she was utterly sorry about it.

            She understood her father now, the cloying darkness that had hovered over him sometimes when she was young. It made sense to her now that she knew the type of things that his country had asked of him.  He’d come back with casts and scars and wounds on top of scars.  He’d be introverted or angry or short. She got it and she got, really got, how hard it was to just leave it where the mission ended.  She couldn’t leave it behind either. There were times when she thought that had to be the reason why she was still alone.

            Sam had enough self-awareness to know that she was fairly easy on the eyes.  She’d felt the looks often enough on her morning runs and on outings with Janet and Sara and other female friends she’d made over her lifetime.  She was pretty but she wasn’t easy to live with.  They didn’t understand the memories that made her avoid sleep or run herself ragged in the hope of being too exhausted to have dreams.  They didn’t know and she couldn’t tell them. The big old ‘classified’ that topped every mission brief was telling enough.  So, she kept her fears to herself and lived with them instead of people.

            Most of the time, it was enough.  When she remembered what she was fighting for, it was.  In a place so physically far from home, it could be hard to recall.  That was when she fought for her team.  They counted on her and she counted on them and it was fine. Just fine, just normal.

            If she couldn’t count on them, though, each and every one of them, she wouldn’t be able to keep doing this job.  If she couldn’t look into their eyes and know that their secrets were her secrets, she couldn’t let them cover her six and she couldn’t trust them to take point.  Without this trust, this team was as good as dead today, tomorrow, or whenever it came to a head.

            Because she hadn’t been able to look at Jack O’Neill tonight and know what he was doing or why, she didn’t trust that she’d be able to do it next time either.  It was a problem that was bigger than just her.

            Sam smiled thinly at Lou as he entered, then stood to begin her entry checks a little early.  It was a quarter of an hour to dawn now.  Maybe the new day would bring some clarity. God knew she was in need of it.

            Her knee protested every step regardless of her attempt at stoicism.  She kept face until exited Ferretti’s line of sight.  It hurt like a bitch and standing with ribs that were starting to feel a bit more broken than cracked was not what she’d had in mind for a mission when she’d put on this nice blouse and these cheap, if cute shoes.  She’d expected to smile, eat, shoot, and move.  The spare clothes they’d hauled to the site for a later costume change had had to be abandoned in their hasty exit. The car, too. Their plane tickets and passports.   Wow, this really did go to shit. Fantastic.

            She chuckled it off, coughing at her ribs’ protestations. They weren’t pleased with her and the feeling was so unbearably mutual.  “Shit,” she hissed, slipping into the front room to lean over the back of the beat-up old sofa they’d neglected to use.  It was as musty-smelling as the whole place and neither she nor Ferretti had been in a mood to kick up a generation of dust by taking it for a bed.  No, but it made a good enough support beam for a breathless captain in crappy shoes.  The only reason she hadn’t discarded them yet because she wanted to be ready to exit stage left fast if the need arose.

            No one had ever said she didn’t prepare well for a crisis; she was usually just better at it when it was actually in her job description to do so.

            She punched the couch with a closed fist.  It had been a square three hours since her CO had driven off.  The streets were clear save for the odd merchant heading out to open up shop.  It wasn’t reasonable or safe for him to venture out for that long to do something so simple. He’d left his team to fend for themselves. Unacceptable.

            On autopilot, she completed her checks, stepping gingerly and hugging herself gently.  They didn’t have an ace bandage to spare and she hadn’t seen any sense in making a big deal out of nothing.  She hurt but she’d live.  They’d all live, unless she went ballistic and smacked her CO for his secrecy.  She had not signed up to be his odd girl out.

            Around 0600 hours, when she was about to tell Lou she was heading out to find their wayward commander, he breezed through the front door without so much as a lingering glance at the measures they’d taken to fortify the entrance.  Still too good at getting over on us.  That didn’t make her smile the way it used to.

            As though sensing her glare at his back, he paused momentarily to look at her.  He simply watched her, eyes drifting with haunting familiarity from her hairline, to her eyes—she shuddered—to her cheek, down her shoulder to her arms around herself, to her leg that only slightly brushed the floor.  He didn’t trust her personal sitrep at this moment; maybe he didn’t even trust his own eyes.

            This wasn’t situation normal at all.

            She was too busy holding on to her anger and indignation and—not, not—relief to give him the intel he’d likely want after so long away.  He disappeared down the short hallway and Sam was left without any of the busy energy that had kept her going through the night.  She hop-stepped to the couch and sat right down.

            This was a mostly secure location, she could have slept by now and been rested for the coming day.  The coming day had come, though, and she wasn’t rested and she hadn’t slept. She’d waited for him and compromised herself in who knew how crucial a way.  If they got into a firefight on the way to rendezvous point, and her reflexes were even a millisecond slower than they would have been had she rested…She wouldn’t be able to forgive herself because there’d be nothing forgivable about it.  She wouldn’t forgive him either.

            They couldn’t play each other anymore.

            And, now, suddenly, she was angry that they ever could.

            She dropped her face into her hands, grimacing at the near-audible sound of her bones creaking with the motion.  It was stupid to feel this old when she was in the best shape of her life and younger than any of them.  They pranced like young bucks and she was buckling like the colonel’s resolve.

            Out of nowhere, Sam picked up a scent. Eyes flashing in annoyance, she lowered her hands and saw that the object of her frustration had arrived and made himself at home without so much as a by your leave.  She gritted her teeth to keep from saying even half of what she was thinking.  Most of it was speculation and complaint; what might have been, what might be. It was insane and she’d let it get this bad. He’d let it get this bad.

“If you’ve got a problem, Carter, let’s hear it.”  It was the first time he’d said her real name while they were here. He made it a point to use only ranks while they worked.  No need to give anything extra away, he liked to say.  She wanted to smack the smug-bastard memory of him if not the man before her.

Her temper was about to get the best of her, she could feel it.  Her CO was standing at the uncovered window in his usual way, braced against the frame with an arm over his head.  The streaks of sunrise seemed to shine right past him, not illuminating him in the least.  He was all darkness when there should have been light.

“Did you you botch this intentionally?”  It was a question a subordinate should hesitate to ask, but she didn’t hesitate.  Whatever had become of them on the Paraná Plateau would not survive if he’d fucked them over on this one.

“Nope,” her CO replied so cool and easy his lips popped.  He shifted his stance, not giving her even the decency of a glance.  It is a hell of a sight, she mused, and she was no longer surprised to find that she wasn’t looking at the horizon anyway.

“You left last night without a word.  You came back without one, too.”  She brushed her idle hands along the folds of her skirt.  “Why?”

“ ‘Tis not for us to wonder why, Captain,” he intoned without any of the sincerity that gave that saying so much meaning to others, if little to either of them.

“If it means I can no longer trust my commanding officer, it is for me to wonder, sir.”

He snorted without any ire and shook his head before resting it tiredly on his forearm.  The colonel looked old for the first time since they’d met, or at least one of the first times.  He’d always had a boyish enthusiasm that belied the years that hung suspended between them like a rope bridge across a gorge.  She could always cross that easily enough and him in return; they could reach each other. But today, at this dawn, she didn’t feel like there was enough rope and sturdy wood boards in the world to build a bridge that long.

“If you say you didn’t do this intentionally, I’ll believe you.”  She had crossed her arms to ward off the chill that came with surrendering her sweater to act as an impromptu bandage for Char…Kawalsky.  He was big and tough and had survived much, she just didn’t know if he could survive this.  Don’t be so pessimistic, she told herself, nonplussed to find her inner voice reminded her of him.

“Why is there any question?” Although he hadn’t moved yet, she suspected that he was as certain of her location as a man with a radar screen. He could pick her out an empty stadium or a full one, she bet, with a roughly three-meter margin of error.  It didn’t help that he was a bit of a hero in her head.  He didn’t need or want that and she couldn’t help it.

“Because something doesn’t add up, Colonel.”

He finally turned away from the fully-risen sun to lean against the wall beside the window, casting himself entirely in shadow now.  “Do tell,” he prompted, arms crossed and his expression a mystery.

She didn’t want to tell him anything or have to confront this. If there was some other agenda at work than they’d all been briefed on, she wanted to know if it was worth it that Kawalsky could still die.  “If this wasn’t a coincidence, you may have killed Charlie.”  Sam felt him flinch from across that tiny cramped room.  In his mind, those two people had briefly exchanged places and his best friend was safe while his son was not.  Now, he knows how I feel right now. It was a low blow and she derived no satisfaction from it.  It just needed to happen, it was something he needed to feel.

“He’s fine,” he retorted sharply.  He was drilling holes right through her with those eyes and she was left to wonder if he meant to.

“Now, yes,” she admitted. “But he won’t be if we don’t get him home to Janet.  He won’t be if we all get thrown in jail or summarily executed on the spot.”  She’d been here long enough, she’d followed their paths. She knew that people like them didn’t have neat endings.  If they lived and scraped long enough, they went on to do other things while this stuff festered at the edges of their lives.  Someday, it’d come back to haunt them.  If they didn’t live long enough to collect a pension, they died like dogs.  There were no neat—bloodless—endings in Special Ops.

“Not happening.”  He stuffed his hands in his pockets, seeming so sure.  There was none of the whistling that usually accompanied a job well done.  There was none of the captive glee that made him the man many underestimated.  He was just a guy with a job and a secret or a ton of ‘em.

“You know that how?”  It was her go to cross her arms and watch speculatively.

“Because the colonel leaves nothing undone, Sam,” said a voice from behind her.

             Sam stood quick, forgetting her knee, and had to grab at the rickety piece of furniture to remain on her feet.  Breathing deeply through it, she glared, though it wasn’t meant for its recipient.  She was too glad to see him upright and smiling, if grimly, to be that upset.

            Charlie Kawalsky lifted his chin in acknowledgment to their chief.  “Got ‘em, Jack?”

            Right behind her, closer than he had been, she felt the hairs on her neck stand as the colonel blew out a noisy breath and nodded. “Got ‘em.”

            Kawalsky leaned his groggy weight on the doorway and nodded, satisfaction evident on his face.  “When things go bad, Sam, it falls to the mission commander to clean up the mess.  With this many injuries, he was the only expendable man.  That meant he had to stow us away while he went and…tied up some loose ends.”

            She nodded very slowly.  It was Charlie’s turn to give her a comforting smile.  She knew he’d have even returned the shoulder clap if he could have lifted his arms that high.  This, she was content with, that he breathed and lived and lived again.  It was enough, even if it wasn’t.

            “I’m gonna head back before Lou has a fit.” He rolled his eyes but they danced in the morning light.  “Damn near the youngest out of all of us and he’s a damned mother hen if I’ve ever seen one,” he grumbled as he made slow work of turning back down the dim hall.  “Gotta be taking lessons from the doc.”

            The colonel snorted. It ruffled the short hair at the nape of her neck.  Too close again. This time, she’d been wrong, but she still felt mostly right.

            “We’ve never done this before,” she whispered, not ashamed per se, but utterly outdone.  She revolved grudgingly to find them nearly chest to chest.  He moved too quietly for someone carrying so much of her baggage.

            The colonel shrugged, his expression forgiving and not in unequal measures. She didn’t care to calculate which carried the majority.  “It’s rarely gone this bad before.”

            “Right.”  They’d left a mess of the half-dead and definitely dead in their wake. Couldn’t be categorized as good by any estimation.  And, the half-dead…he’d taken care of them, because that was his job, his burden to bear and she hadn’t made it any easier.

            “Do we have a problem, Captain?”  He caught her at her elbows when her knee tired and tried to fold. It was one of the things she hated, her body surrendering before her.

            She smiled—grimaced—and denied everything.  What else could she do?  “Of course not, sir. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.”

            “That’s funny,” he remarked, dropping her gaze for something farther, maybe impossibly far, away. “I’d always thought we were.”

            She looked down at his hands, the hands that kept holding on after they should have let go.  “Me, too, sir.”

            And maybe, she thought, that was the problem.

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