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The room was dim, lit mostly by screens. 

Satellite feeds, grainy footage, heat signatures drifted through jagged terrain halfway across the world.

Voices overlapped—measured, clinical and detached from the lives flickering in green and white across the monitors. 

“Movement along the eastern ridge.”

“Zoom in—hold there.”

“Thermal spike at grid nine.”

Jack sat with his back to the table of the briefing room, hunched forward and fingers steepled before him, tracking with piercing blues the satellite feed cycling through on the screen in grainy infrared, along with the the timestamp running in the corner and the heat signatures of men moving through the ridgeline corridor southeast of Priština.

He'd been watching the same loop for forty minutes on another monitor. The terrain was the familiar Kosovo highland: broken, heavily wooded on the eastern exposure - the kind of ground that swallowed movement and made clean extraction a complex exercise. He knew it. He'd been studying the Yugoslav theater since '97, when it became clear to anyone paying attention that the KLA's escalation wasn’t going to resolve quietly, and NATO's patience had a ceiling.

He also knew the terrain better than the analysts presenting it to him, which was the kind of thing he didn’t need to reaffirm when it was the reason why he’d been pulled in from the base and put on a plane to Belvoir in the middle of a steak bite.

“They’re too exposed,” he muttered.

Around the round table were two men in suits from the National Security Council whose names he's been given and already set aside, a colonel from the Joint Chiefs with too many files spread before him, one DIA liaison who kept clicking his pen, and a couple of tech analysts to better explain what went on on the screens.

Standard configuration for something that rushed and urgent.

One of the suits closest to his seat caught his grumble. “They’re following the planned route.”

“Then the plan’s bad.”

A few heads turned. 

The colonel piped up solemnly, “It’s decided then. The deployment window is locked. Ground team moves at 0400 and Air support is on standby. We want eyes on the ground before the handoff window closes.”

Jack nodded. He'd already calculated the window. Forty-eight hours, maybe sixty if the weather on the eastern corridor cooperated, which the satellite data suggests it wouldn’t.  “Then I better gear up—”

“Actually, that won’t be necessary, Major,” the same suit next to him interjected without preamble, like interrupting a man of Krauser's particular dimensions was something he did regularly and never reconsidered.

Clearly a lifelong habit of being unimpressed by men who could fold him in half. 

Fucking feds. 

Jack’s eyes cut towards him sharply. “Excuse me?”

“We’re keeping you stateside,” the man continues, his tone carrying the quality of a decision being communicated rather than discussed. “Your current assignment takes priority. That unit in Colorado took considerable time and resources to select. Pulling you from that now compromises long-term readiness.”

Krauser flagged the first lie in that prattle instantly—or else they’d have to explain to him where the pretty boy they dumped onto their so-called top-secret program counted in that statement.

“Long-term readiness? Haven’t we been watching the same loop for over thirty minutes now? What about the long-term readiness of these men.”

“And we have a very capable team ready to be dispatched into the field for the handoff.”

“I know that terrain very well. That’s why you brought me here in the first place, after all, isn’t it?”

A flicker of irritation crossed the suited man’s face. “Major, we brought you in as a valuable advisor. Your role—”

“My role is to make sure soldiers don’t die when they don’t have to,” Krauser cut in, voice low but controlled. “Right now, they’re moving into a dozen threat indicators they won’t see coming.”

Silence tightened across the room.

Jack pushed off the chair, stepping closer to the main display. The convoy crawled forward, right into a narrowing corridor of terrain.

“I’ll get there—with the team you’ve readied,” he stressed out, indulging the man his petty managements, sensing that fastest route through this room was compliance, “pull them out of that mess—” He glanced over his shoulder at the rest room as his tone took a sharper edge, “—and I’ll be back before our precious assets start thinking the worst is behind them.” A beat. “Every last dipshit one of them.” 

The speech earned a few looks, some amused, some less so and that pen finally stilled.

The NSC agent studied him, weighing. “You’re confident in that.”

Jack didn’t hesitate. “Affirmative.”

A beat passed where the table looked around one another in silence. 

Finally, the liaison exhaled before turning away, already reaching for his cellphone. “…I’ll make the call. See if we can get authorization.”

Jack didn’t thank him, he just turned back to the screen, eyes narrowing as the feed flickered, already halfway there.

***

“Hey, Kennedy.”

Leon glanced up from his bunk. He'd been lying there with a knife balanced loosely in his  hand for an hour now, not doing anything with it in particular, just turning it over and back in the way it had slowly become a tic when lost in thoughts. 

A couple of soldiers lingered in the doorway, already half out of uniform, boots and trousers staying but their khaki jackets knotted around hips or tucked beneath arms as if they couldn’t be out of them soon enough—Leon was still in his, had gotten used to the weight of it somewhere along the way—and carrying the energy of men who've decided the night belongs to them. 

“Some of us are heading out to Malone’s for drinks and a few rounds of pool,” Kyle Rives said. 

The other one, whom Leon wasn’t familiar with, grinned. “Figured you might need a stiff drink after that nosedive in the mud you took yesterday.”

Leon looked at them for a second, then at the knife in his hand.

He flipped it once—clean—catching it by the handle without thinking.

“Thanks but I’m good,” he said.

the two men exchanged a look.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“Dude, you know Krauser’s not around, right?” the one he didn’t remember the name of said—as if Leon hadn’t seen him being pulled from his mashed potatoes right before his eyes. 

“Wha—where are you going, Major?”

Krauser passed back the phone, already up and moving. “Some business that needs to be taken care of. I’ll be back. Finish your plate.” 

Finish your plate, he’d said.

Leon huffed. 

His appetite had gone the moment Krauser left him hanging in their familiar picnic bench.

These had been his parted words for him and Leon was pissed at how silly they were when the matter concerned the current war in eastern Europe—something he learned later that day, after playing off his charms on the receptionist at the restricted area, where he learned federal agents had waited for the Major to escort him in a black SUV.

Shit’s about the fucking war and that was what he left Leon with.

Tch. Well, Leon didn’t finish his stupid plate and didn’t feel like dinner either. 

How about that.

“We know he rides your ass harder than anyone but he’ll never know about it if it's all of us sneaking out.”

Leon shrugged, slinging a smile across his face even when he’s already half-tuned out. “Not about that.”

It was though. Part of it. But not in the way they thought.

They lingered a minute longer, then Kyle clapped him lightly on the shoulder, laughing. “Suit yourself. Just don’t bleed out here or something.” 

“Yeah, if Krauser gets back and finds his chew toy looking like warmed over garbage, he’s gonna ride our asses to Kingdom Come,” the other added.

Leon huffed a quiet breath that passed for amusement. “Yeah. I’ll try.”

As they walked away, Leon caught the whisper of What’s wrong with him? and Kyle Rives’ Leave him alone, he’s just a kid.

And those were their parting words for him, too. But Leon could only hear the echo of one.

If.

Even if he’d been in the mood for a change of air, he’d lost any motivation for it.

Kyle’s stupid friend wasn’t wrong though. He could use a drink or two. However, he wasn’t sure he could stop at that and Krauser made him promise to never get shitfaced again after that Christmas Eve… And for some reason, he didn’t want to break that promise.

So he was not feeling like eating, he was not feeling like drinking and he was also too restless to fall asleep. 

Eyes fell to his hand and stared at the saw-edged knife the way Krauser taught him to look at any weapon— 

“No fear. The size of it is irrelevant. What matters is that you don't take your eyes away from it.”

Was Krauser joining the war?

War… What a load of bullshit.

Leon swung the knife.

As his arm stayed suspended, position locked, Leon followed the dull light skating along the blade with his eyes up to his wrist for a beat.

Shit.

Bad grip. 

He’d been rebuilding his wrist work from the ground up for two weeks now.

He adjusted his position on his bed. Crosslegged. Back straight.

Simple rotations first. Controlled tosses no higher than eye level—the foundational stuff; the kind of movement that looked like nothing until it set the pace for everything that followed.

The knife rolled over his scrapped knuckles, flipped between fingers, spun cleanly back into his taped up palm. The rhythm found him fast, the way it always did when he stopped thinking about it and let his hands remember.

“Slow is how you find the mistakes. Fast is just how you hide them.”

Spin, catch, turn.

Spin, catch, turn.

His breathing evened out a little and he leaned back against his pillow, stretching one leg out while the other bounced faintly with the leftover current of adrenaline.

And anxiety.

The knife kept moving. Reverse grip transition. Clean.

Forward spin. Catch.

Palm roll—the blade slipped. Leon caught it before it dropped, jaw tightening.

Sloppy.

Krauser's voice arrived at the front steps of his mind without knocking.

Leon exhaled through his nose and tried again. Faster this time. More deliberate. The correction sat itself and he ran it again from the top, building the sequence back up from where it broke, the way he'd been taught: You didn’t paper over the error, you went back to where the error began.

Again.

Again.

The knife became something close to a blur between his fingers, the motion shedding its individual parts until it was a single continuous thing, instinct being carved into muscle one repetition at a time.

His hands knew things his mind had to explain to them once. That gap had been closing for months without his fully noticing until moments like this one, alone in the low light, when there’s nobody to perform for or impress.

Krauser had caught the wrist earlier into their sessions. He said nothing for most of it, watched him work through it and see if he’d catch onto the mistakes on his own. And if Leon did before the moment of correction, when Leon's form finally matched what it was supposed to look like, he’d be given that single, small nod. 

Not even praise. 

Just acknowledgment. The recognition that something had been done correctly, offered flatly, almost as observation rather than approval, and somehow that made it—... Leon didn’t have a word for what it made it. He just knew that nod had started to mean something he never really cared to stop and think about… 

If the major was here, Leon would already be wallowing in the look those frigid eyes got when he did something right. This was around the time they usually started their one-on-ones after all…

The smile faded like a cheap fragrance and the restlessness was back. It built pressure somewhere under his ribs like there's too much current in too small a space and his wrist work wasn’t drawing enough of it off. 

He sat with it for a moment, slowly recognizing it for what it is.

If.

Leon’s jaw tightened as if the word could be snapped in two between his teeth—and he pushed to his feet in a single shot.

Since they were a small unit of thirty one cherry-picked soldiers—not accounting for him—the base allotted four buildings for their sleeping arrangements, divided into small groups rather than stacking them down in one barracks. A smidgen of privacy, which was the concession, and the size of said arrangements being the trade. 

Thirty-two feet long, twenty-three wide—which sounded generous until you put seven men and their footlockers into it. Three beds ran along one wall, four along the other—an unwelcomed asymmetry courtesy of Leon’s addition—and fifteen feet of open floor running down the middle. Just enough to pass through without grazing either side. 

It wasn’t like the whole base wasn’t designed to remind you at all hours that comfort was a civilian concern they were meant to check at the front door the day they accepted this draft.

Leon’s bunk was against the farthest wall, a last minute addition and closest to the one fluorescent tube left buzzing faintly, throwing long shadows across the bedframes, footlockers and other personal effects regulations allowed for keepsakes.

The only thing Leon had as such was his gun and the RPD badge—a cherished collection of ghosts he begged the feds not to take away.

In retrospect, even without feeling crabby, Leon might have still passed on the night out for a moment of utter and complete privacy like the one right now.

He took the center of the room and started moving between the two pillars standing in the middle. 

Light steps, controlled pivots, shifting his weight from heel to toe while the knife ran its patterns in his hand.

Suddenly, the barracks got the particular quality of a space that felt like it belonged solely to him—as if he was back home, in his childhood bedroom, and that alone couldn’t compare to any drink his mind conjured every minute of every day spent here. And so he moved through it like such—unhurried, finding his ground, learning the geometry of it the way his Major told him to learn any space he moved through. 

And little by little, slow turned to fast.

He weaved through the narrow aisles, ducking around bedframes, pivoting off the support beams, boots whispering across the floor in the half-dark. The fluorescent light at the far caught the blade on each pass, brief cold flashes like moonlight skipping across broken glass. 

Step. Turn. Flip. Catch.

Too wide.

The voice in his mind carried grit and disapproval but a smile crept to Leon’s lips, anyway.

He tightened the motion before Krauser's voice finished the reproach inside his brain, the feedback loop so internalized that it coursed through his veins unbidden.

In the beginning he’d needed it said out loud. Three months ago he'd needed it said once and it’d be enough. Now it was just there, running in the background like the phantom of his opera—the voice in his mind and behind the curtain, guiding his limbs as his moves like the perfect puppet.

Telegraphing.

He tightened again.

The burn built in his legs without fully registering it and the shallow cut across his palm from yesterday's session reopened—he could feel the faint sting of it, the warmth—but his grip didn't loosen, his eyes didn't check it and his knife didn't slow. 

And Leon moved through the barracks like nobody but him could see who or what he was trying to outrun—or chase down.

An opponent taking form in the pillar he twisted around before tipping his blade against the invisible neck on the second pillar with a solemn flick of wrist.

Sweat dampened the collar of his shirt and he shrugged his jacket off thoughtlessly, sending it flying to some bunk that wasn’t his. 

Heartbeat was jagging out of place but all was lost in a scarlet rush he couldn’t contain. He felt loose and light as a feather—lighter than he ever had before—lighter than the academy’s training or anything had ever come close to making him feel.  

It was like he’d unlocked something he never thought possible— 

The power to fucking fly. 

He vaulted over the end of the last bunk, landed clean on the balls of his feet, pivoted and sent the knife through a single clean arc behind his back—

—and caught it perfectly.

Teeth bit into flushed lips as a grin spread in the silent space, slow and unaccountably wicked like a predator feeling at home in the dark.

The satisfaction shot hot and immediate—bright as a struck match. He stood with it for a suspended beat in the middle of the empty barracks, chest heaving, blade hanging loose at his side, and let it encompass him—let it pull him through its wild fire, let it burn the bitter thoughts beneath the high.

This new feeling… this ache he started to seek, subconsciously chasing it through the barracks in the dim light—this ache with blue eyes that lit his veins with crimson fire, that made blood drip down his palm—this new feeling, Leon started to like it. 

And if it burned him then let it stay.

Maybe it was his destiny to feel this way… 

He finally slowed near the far wall, breathing hard, the adrenaline crackling uselessly through his extremities now that the movement had stopped. 

The barracks felt vast in the sudden stillness—like a black hole, void of thoughts and emotions—too empty like it was missing something it had before, even if that something was never in this specific room to be exact… 

What he was missing was inside his head.

Backwards crash onto his bed. Blue peepers suspended between wide open and openly tired… 

Leon thought about Krauser somewhere over the Atlantic. Or already on the ground, moving through foreign terrain that had no shape in Leon's mind—no coordinates, no map, nothing he could picture or place or follow. Just the fact of him being somewhere that wasn't here, leaving Leon alone in his own foreign world—and the thought seized his chest like a loving cobra.

…

If

That nameless asshole, Leon couldn’t wait to face him in the fight ring.

***

He almost walked past it.

Eighteen hours of pure logistics; DC first, the debrief in Belvoir eating through the afternoon and into the evening, then the drive back through the forest that made the Fort disappear from the world past a certain checkpoint taking the rest of it.

Somewhere along the drive, Jack stopped tracking the hours and let his body relax into the miles, allowing himself to enjoy this narrow window between operation and return where nothing was required of him anymore. 

At least until he reached the real comfort of a pillow that knew his neck and a bed that didn’t have to be rolled up on frozen ground at oh-four-hundred… 

He knew the Fort by feel now. The specific texture of each hour of the day and night as it fell over every nook and corner. That was why as he crossed the courtyard, the yellow rectangle of the window against the dark face of a certain building stopped him in his tracks.

Jack stood in the middle of the field for a moment as he looked at it. 

That was hangar number eight.  And just like that, hand readjusting around the strap of his duffel, he already had a guess. 

When he pushed the door open, his eyes instantly adjusted from the dark outside to the lit interior, taking in the familiar space, instinctively scanning it for what had changed, what hadn’t and what was where it shouldn't be past curfew… 

Leon’s back was hunched over a small table, shoulders curved forward and forearms flat on the surface. The cone of the single overhead light fell directly over him and his hair swallowed it all. 

That ridiculous quantity of blond fluff that he himself allowed from day one—the First Sergeant snarling about shaving it himself. Jack had let him finish, then he spoke three words.

The hair stays.

And the hair stayed ever since.

At first he liked the reminder that this one was an oddity he needed to keep track of. Something that must not disappear into the ranks so easily given the redacted file and the Secret Service that personally delivered it. He first thought of some kind of mole but that idea soon died in the bud on that Christmas Eve night…  

Then little by little he started to like that excess of blond sitting on Kennedy's head like the latter never got the memo about what this place was and what was asked of the men inside it. 

He also liked that it made it easy to locate him from a distance, if only to better watch him squirm through the hell Jack knew he was going through.

And yet, Leon never made a move towards chopping it off despite all the dissent it added onto his plate.

Obstinate and bright and entirely out of place.

Jack wouldn’t have had it any other way to be honest.

Right now, it was throwing a soft halo that reminded him of the painted angels on the ceiling of this small church outside Vicenza during a European posting… How the light still found them despite the dimness and narrow windows had fascinated him.

The door’s metal creak broke the stillness of the allotted space and Leon jerked up, instantly turning before Jack had finished putting a foot inside.

The shift that went through the kid was not small nor subtle at all. Jack watched it happen almost in slow motion. The way Leon's body froze like a mouse that had made it three quarters of the way across the kitchen floor before the light came on, the way his eyes went wide and very blue in the floodlight—round with something between surprise and relief—a terrain more foreign than where Jack came from. 

Then Leon's mouth fell open and Jack was once again struck by the sheer foolery of such a face being niched deep inside this merciless place.

He looked like he just caught Santa climbing out the chimney.

Fucking hell.

"You're back," Leon breathed out.

Jack stared for a moment. “I am,” he said, and let the door fall close behind him. 

“You just got here?”

Jack advanced further into the light. “I have.”

When he finally stopped by the rookie's side, he saw what was so important to make him brave the metaphorical whip of the First Sergeant and the not so metaphorical extra hill climb that would follow. 

A suture kit and a row of stitched up pads lined up the edge of the table. He counted them without meaning to, hoping the number told him approximately how long Leon had been sitting here in this room under this one light.

Those baby blues bore into him like sunken treasure and there were mixed signals written all over them - the deep violet shadows of exhaustion pooled beneath while something else entirely sparkled in the gaze above. Two different stories running in the same pair of eyes. 

Jack waited for him to explain himself the way he always waited for Kennedy now—for him to find his own mistakes before being told, testing to see if a few grunts or furrows would suffice. It had become their particular rhythm and Leon often got there now. Sometimes it just took a few moments. 

What he got instead was more mixed signals. 

“You jumped,” Leon stated.

“Jumped?”

“You were deployed to Europe, right? Everyone heard about it. So you jumped on a parachute. From an aircraft.”

“... That’s usually how it goes.”

Leon’s smile was simple and scrupulous. “How was it?”

A brow ticked up. The only move he seemed to have left lately when the kid caught him off guard with that particular brand of puppy-ish nonsense.

“Is that why you’re not in bed yet? Waiting for a bedtime story?” Jack asked archly.

Leon dropped his gaze into his suture pad and his smile folded into the only pout he encountered in the course of a given day - the only people that pouted around here were Marla at the front desk and the nurse around a busy day.

He also knew that pout. It wasn’t the kind that crumpled his little mug in pain or fury. No, this one was the kind that preceded a snarky little—

“Not my dad.”

Honestly, he couldn’t remember when he started allowing all this cheek. Somewhere between the brat’s first broken nose and third breakdown, maybe.

He played with the spark in a room full of gas but Jack had never been one to back down from a little kiss of death… 

However, before he could shut down the insolence, something caught his eye—light and hair colliding at the right angle, putting something on display that hadn’t been visible a moment ago, and his earful died on the tip of his tongue.

His large hand dove into pale blond strands and tugged. 

Leon’s neck bent obliquely instantly, eyes going wide but his silence betrayed another unspoken ritual.  

That hand raking through his hair to literally grab his attention had joined the long, quiet list of things that had accumulated between them without negotiation; their afterhours one-on-ones, the little picnic bench behind the refectory, the chair always present beside his infirmary bed…  

For Jack, it split the apple cleanly: a small tax on the insolence and a reminder that the golden crown stayed under certain concessions... Fair by any measure in his opinion.

For Leon though, the complaints had stopped somewhere around the fifth or tenth tug-of-war. Jack couldn't pinpoint the reason behind the surrender, still. Spite, maybe. Habit, possibly. Yet Jack found that neck bending to the will of his hand and the rebellious spark that stayed lit in the eye regardless—refusing to be extinguished by the compliance of the body beneath it—unreasonably satisfying.

The neck yielded, the eyes held, the routine masked as choice continued and through it all, he could see it— 

The blotches of a bruise hidden under all that cornsilk. 

“What happened.”

“Nothing.”

“Mhm, try again.”

“It’s fine.” Leon twisted himself out of the grip and went back to fiddle with his needle as if he suddenly remembered that he was actually very busy. “I handled it…”

“Well I sure as hell hope so with the amount of work I beat into your skull,” A couple of knuckles found said skull in punctuation. “But I’ll still need a name. I don’t have the time—or the interest—to babysit every ego in this goddamn place, but there’re rules here and as long as you little shitheads are under my roof, nobody gets to swing their dick around like they own it.”

“... McCain.”

His fist tightened around his duffel bag.

Dammit. One of the good ones. 

The problem was that this wasn't a typical training program. Not the kind where green recruits arrived soft and frightened to be broken down and rebuilt from the ground up according to the familiar template.

The men here were different. Exceptional assets, hand-selected, already disciplined and hardened by the time they walked through the gate. Already dangerous. 

They hadn't been sent here to learn shooting and chains of command. They'd been sent here to be built into something a little more complex. More precise than the usual parameters of warfare.

So Jack filed it under the growing list of problems this particular program kept generating by virtue of putting exceptional people in close quarters, under extreme pressure and expecting them not to occasionally try to destroy each other. 

However, he was still the chief commanding officer of this operation, and that meant David McCain was his problem to handle—efficiently, though. In a way that didn't make it look like Kennedy had gone crying to his mama. 

Not like it’ll be the kid’s first rodeo; although he thought the bullying had stopped a while ago.

“For what it’s worth,” Leon added after a beat, tone shifting just a shade lighter beneath the sullenness, “you might notice him limping tomorrow.”  

The brow ticked up again.

Jack watched that pout struggling to contain the proud, shit-eating smirk he got served more often nowadays—had he always had that attitude underneath all the waterworks?  Or had Jack beaten that into him, too?

He was doing a lot of beating when he thought about it. But the kid was supposed to be a survivor. He was just testing that theory… 

“The kind of fuckin’ bullshit I come home, to…” He sighed.

Leon peeked up at him finally again. “Welcome home, Major,” he quipped, but it was not that quicksilver tongue that gave him pause. Not completely.

It was actually the shape of the mouth that spouted them. 

Where Jack had expected the edge and the cheek curling at the corners, what he got was an impish little smile, almost coy—but most all, devastatingly genuine.

Those words might have been spoken as the usual dose of lip but that genuine smile—growing full and true as the seconds passed, was what flipped a switch behind Jack’s eyes all of a sudden.

Every thought arrested in that moment; on the precipice of a revelation.

Was it possible the kid… missed him? 

“Well I have been thinkin’ about getting a maid around the place. You sound the part so far.”

He’d balk for now. Too exhausted to willingly pull on that thread and his little blue bird of sulkiness would still be a pain in his ass tomorrow. It also made that smile crumple instantly into another pout for the collection—and this one Leon meant if the deep dent carved between his brows was any indication. 

“C’mon, get your ass up and let’s go.” He curled his fingers unceremoniously around Leon’s forearm and dragged him up from the chair without waiting for a reply. 

“Wait—let me clean up—”

“Leave it, you can do all the cleanin' ya want tomorrow.” He was the only one with the keys to hangar eight. The only reason Leon could be found here past curfew at all was because Jack hadn’t gotten around to locking it a week ago after being nabbed in the middle of his lunch.

However, the moment he opened the door, Jack felt a sudden tight clutch at the stem of his jacket that made him pause.

“Are you going to be deployed often like this, Major?” Leon asked lowly, eyes downcast and hidden beneath his fringe.

The tone caught him more off guard than the question itself. 

“If there’s an emergency, sure. I’m still on duty, Rookie,” he said even as he remembered that he was never meant to jump at all. 

‘Strategic advisor’ they called him. Close by in case the mission went south before their very eyes.

It still burned his ass that they dared treat him like that comfortable pencil-pusher Colonel who chose the briefing room when he was barely a decade older, still perfectly capable of leading a few hundred in a field.

He let out a sigh. “But they made it clear that my primary objective right now is to complete this unit’s training. So unless some catastrophic shitshow happens, I expect they’ll keep me stateside and reachable from here on out.” 

It chafed him to say that and the grip on his duffle bag turned white once more—and yet, it felt like the right thing to say for at least one of them because a smile lifted those round cheeks again without warning, sudden and full as a fucking flare going up in the dark. 

If the kid dared say some stupid shit like ‘I'm glad’ now, he was finally going to deck him. He did seem to be in a weird mood.

“I see.”

Good enough. 

The fist around his clothes loosened.

“I… I heard…” Leon quietly piped up again, “that you also have your own squad?”

“... Yeah.”

“And that by the end of this training, you’re allowed to choose two men to join it?” 

Jack’s eyes narrowed as he seized him up with the particular attention he reserved for foreign objects. “That’s right. Why? You wanna join my team now, rookie?” He smirked.

Leon seized his gaze suddenly—blue on blue, that cutting edge so precisely mirrored in that suspended second that the original and the reflection became indistinguishable. Nevertheless, the coy curl of that mouth slowly but audaciously getting comfortable in places that had made stronger men look away first.

“No. It’s you who’s gonna want me.”

The way he turned and walked out first into the open night with no hesitation and no backward glance—no waiting around to see how those words landed—was like the move of a man who'd thrown a grenade and had the good sense to already be walking away.

A solid minute of open incredulity was allowed as the whole well-oiled machinery of Jack’s mind pulled up short.

Now out of all the things he came to expect from this walking, talking little hazard dumped onto his lap, he hadn't seen that one coming. Which was in itself remarkable, because Jack Krauser saw things coming. It was arguably his most marketable skill.

He hadn’t seen that snotty liplock in the torture room coming, though, a voice in a distant corner of his mind that was still trucking snarked back.

But just as Leon got as far as the edge of the light, something made the latter stop—clearly some belated, poorly-timed instinct for self-preservation that arrived about ten seconds too late—and Jack watched as the line of that soft jaw peeked from a reluctant angle. 

"...To join your team."

Jack didn’t know what microexpression was telling the truth in that instant; the nervous eyes flickering between him and the ground or the teeth biting onto that lip.

Now—extremely loaded declaration held purposefully or not in the air between them aside—the little brat had bled on his knuckles. Had cursed him blind and blue. Had literally thrashed in his grip to get away. By any reasonable measure, Leon should be looking for an out—should be counting the fucking days or at the very least building distance.

Not sit alone in the penumbra of a hangar past midnight practicing stitches and thinking about what? Joining his goddamn squad out of thin air? 

Somehow, for the first time in recent memory, Jack felt like a current somewhere inside of him had reversed direction.

Being drawn instead of drawing… That was new. 

He’d either hit that head a few too many times or the brat managed to get a concussion in the few days he was away. Regardless, he was sending him for a check up first thing tomorrow just in case.