Work Text:
Reacher is waiting for her on the steps of her apartment. Sam’s still wearing her graduation dress when she drives up in her clunky old Honda, brakes with a wince-worthy screech, and then flies out the door and at him.
Reacher permits the hug for thirty seconds, and then participates in it for another thirty seconds, and then signals that he’s ready to be done by patting Sam’s back.
Sam ignores him for a second, and then pulls back. “I knew you’d come!” she says, beaming, which he privately finds irritating. The words, not the smile, of course. He’s only seen her a handful of times over the past few years, but he’s somehow found that her smile has ceased to ever irritate him.
I knew you’d come, though. That sounds like something the kid would say to someone predictable. Someone dependable.
“I was already around,” he says. “Had the best burger of my life in Maryland.”
Truth is, he was doing some manual labor down in Georgia for a couple of farmers. The pay had been good and the work had been honest, but it had lasted nearly two weeks and he’d been happy to have an excuse to travel again. Happier to have an excuse to see her, but he doesn’t want to get into that.
Apparently, his lie goes over well. “Why was it the best burger of your life?” Sam says. “Was the ketchup made from the blood of your enemies?”
“I come all the way here to give you a graduation present, and you make fun of me?”
“You got me a present?”
“Kids these days,” he says. “With their apps and their phones. And their rudeness.”
“Is that it?” She’s staring at the plastic grocery bag in his hand one second, and then the next, she’s grabbing for it.
He jerks the bag away and gets her into a headlock, easy, at slightly the wrong angle, to which she enthusiastically elbows him in the balls. He lets go staggers back, still holding the bag, and feeling inordinately pleased with himself and with her. Test passed. Way to go.
“That had better be a good present,” Sam says, as the two of them begin to circle. She reaches into a pocket (and he didn’t know they made dresses with pockets till now), produces some kind of hair thing, and puts her hair up into a ponytail.
“I could yank that thing,” he said. “You’d be better off without it.”
“This isn’t the Army, I’m not getting a buzzcut. Is it a new burner phone?”
“Come and find out.”
Sam stands there a moment, trying to plan her next move. Then she launches herself at him again.