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He spotted the first splash of blood around 2300 hours.
It was dark, obviously. Dark sky, even if the city streets were lit up bright around him, and neon reflecting off liquid when everything else was that dark didn't really show the color. That wasn't what had caught his eye. There was just something about the splatter that looked odd, and he slowed down and looked at it a little longer and realized that it was too viscous to be water, that it wasn't flowing right. He stopped, crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall above it, glanced up and down the street idly like he was thinking about where he wanted to go; and while he was there, he put the heel of one boot in it, smeared a little from the dark pavement to the whitewashed brick of the wall to give himself a better look at it.
Yeah, that was definitely blood.
Flint bit his lip, and thought about it. On the one hand, it could be anybody, anything. Civilian who'd already been carted off to a hospital, none of his business. On the other hand—
On the other hand, now that he was looking for it, he could see the trail it made: long narrow drips, another splatter, the barest smear still tacky and gleaming on the chipped brick corner of a wall across from him. And that trail didn't cut off at the edge of the street like it would if somebody'd been lifted into an ambulance. It went the other way, down the alley.
He was just supposed to be doing recon. The remains of COBRA Commander's systems, the uplink and targeting data for the Project Zeus satellites that had been sitting there in Fort Sumter after it was all over, had pointed the Joes toward half a dozen secondary COBRA locations to track down.
But if somebody else was here—somebody COBRA had already put a couple holes in—well. A, that explained why there'd been so much more activity tonight than there had been last night; he'd almost run smack into badly-disguised COBRA patrol teams twice in the last three hours. And B, kind of two birds, one stone, wasn't it? Maybe whoever it was, they'd already located COBRA's local bolthole, and done Flint's job for him. Hell, maybe they'd been in it. Maybe they'd had to escape from it. Maybe they had intel, an entry or exit point, something.
Maybe they needed his help.
He was working off comms; he was just supposed to be doing recon, getting a good look at the lay of the land and then circling back to report. Block hadn't wanted an open channel, something COBRA might detect or jam or intercept, giving the team away.
Jaye had still outfitted him with a gizmo, though. A dit comm, she'd called it; barely more than a button, but he could tap out a little Morse to the team as necessary, with it.
He stuck a hand in his pocket, let them know he was taking a detour and strode down the street at the same time to help disguise the motion of his finger against the lone key. And then he turned down the alley, and got moving.
The trail went all over. He almost lost it a couple of times. Up one side of a building, jesus, and then down the other. Whoever this was, they were doing their best not to let the leak they'd sprung slow them down.
But it was slowing them down, a bit at a time. The blood got wetter, fresher. They hadn't stopped to clean themselves up, slap a field dressing on or anything. It was adding up on them, Flint understood, even if they were being seriously fucking stubborn about it.
He got half a clue why after forty minutes and two more COBRA patrols—they were definitely out looking for the bleeder, poor unlucky sucker. On the upside, they apparently lacked a sniper's eye and Flint's attention to detail; one of the teams crossed the blood trail twice without noticing it was there.
He made it past them just fine in the end, and the trail took him down a maze of cross streets into a different part of town: fewer lights, a lot less convenience stores and a lot more nightclubs.
And it was there, finally, in the back of an alley so narrow a car wouldn't have fit down it, that he found out who exactly he'd been following.
Not hard to recognize the guy. Still in that white outfit, of all the idiotic things to wear while you were trying to get COBRA off your ass in the middle of the night—he stood out in the dimness like a ghost, leaning against the alley wall with a hand over what was presumably the worst of a hell of a lot of wounds. His head came up when he heard Flint's footsteps, but he was slower about it than Flint had expected; he looked pretty fucked up, vision not quite tracking, blood in his hair and on the side of his throat, trickling down one of those perfect fucking cheekbones.
"Aw, crap," Flint said. "You again?"
Storm Shadow's mouth twisted. "Approach, and I will show no mercy."
"Friendly as always," Flint muttered.
"We are not friends. We are not even allies. I owe you nothing."
Which was fair enough, in a sense. He'd been pretty clear about it last time, and Flint had the sense there wasn't a lot that changed this guy's mind. Like, ever.
But the thing was, the Joes would never have been able to stop COBRA Commander, or Zartan, or Project Zeus, if it hadn't been for him. Never mind clearing their names and restoring the honor of the Joes—the world would have ended, if they hadn't gotten the job done. If Storm Shadow hadn't helped them get the job done.
So, fine, Storm Shadow owed Flint nothing. But maybe Flint owed Storm Shadow, a little bit.
He didn't like the guy, and he sure as shit didn't trust him. But that didn't mean he was going to leave him bleeding out in an alleyway with COBRA closing in.
"Sure," he said aloud. "Okay. Thing is, you've got to be doing even worse than you look, if I caught up to you. And don't get me wrong, I'm a hell of a lot better than COBRA, but they've got a hell of a lot of guys out here searching for you, which is going to even the odds some." He paused for a second. "I'm guessing this is some kind of big vengeance thing for you? Swore an oath on your sword or something that you wouldn't rest until you took them down for whatever they did to you—"
"All that I cared for, all that was mine, was taken from me," Storm Shadow gritted out, hoarse.
"Right," Flint agreed. "And it's personal, which means the last thing you want is somebody else helping you with it. I get that. But it was personal for us, when you gave us a hand."
Storm Shadow's mouth pressed itself into a line, like even speaking the words aloud, mentioning that he had in fact once done something for somebody other than himself or his honor, pissed him off.
"Just let me get you out of here, man. You can regroup, come back twice as hard and kick these motherfuckers in the head. You're allowed to do that, right? Take a break and heal up, when you've got enough holes in you?"
Storm Shadow didn't answer. His head had dropped forward just a little, his eyelids heavy. His breathing had gotten kind of strained, and he was—jesus, he was bleeding a lot, still. Hadn't done himself any favors, climbing the way he had to get this far.
Flint took one step forward, and then another. Closed to katana range, and paused, but the sword didn't whip out of nowhere and skewer him, which probably meant it was okay to keep going. He started unzipping his jacket, worked it off his shoulders, and Storm Shadow's brow drew down, lip curling in the beginnings of a snarl.
"What do you think you're—"
"Cover," Flint said evenly, holding it out. "That suit of yours isn't exactly hiding the number of times you've already been stabbed tonight. Jacket's black. The blood won't show."
Storm Shadow didn't take it.
Flint rolled his eyes, and then took his life in his hands, because he did that every fucking day anyway: he shook it out, took it by the seams and swung it out and around Storm Shadow's shoulders.
It didn't quite work. Storm Shadow was leaning pretty heavily against the alley wall. In for a penny, in for a pound, Flint told himself, and got an arm around the guy's waist.
And shit, he really did need the help, judging by the amount of weight he was letting Flint take. Or, no, not letting Flint take, because it wasn't deliberate—the amount of weight he couldn't stop Flint from taking, more like.
Flint wrestled the jacket the rest of the way around him, and then there was a weird taut second where Flint's arm was still underneath it, clasped across the small of Storm Shadow's back. That ridiculous white uniform of his had a real close fit; Flint could feel the shift of muscle under his palm as Storm Shadow tensed. And the guy might play it like he was made out of ice, but that wasn't literal. He was human, at the end of the day. A body, alive, warm and strong and solid against Flint.
It was only a second, though. Flint cleared his throat, got his arm loose and put it around the outside of the jacket instead. "Come on," he said. "This way," and Storm Shadow's jaw went tight, but Flint continued to not die a gory death, so.
He helped Storm Shadow back down the alley to the street—tried to keep it loose, casual, just a guy with a drunk friend leaning on him. The jacket was definitely working; most of Storm Shadow's wounds had been inflicted by somebody aiming for center of mass, so his legs were all right, and Flint's jacket fit him pretty well. Turned it from a murder uniform into something that could almost approach casual clothes.
Which was great, because the best cover they were going to find on this particular street was a nightclub.
Storm Shadow got the idea when they were still a good twenty feet away from the entrance to the closest one. "No," he said sharply, because of course he did.
"I'm sorry, you got a better option?" Flint said.
Storm Shadow scowled at him. "You would run and hide like a—"
"—guy who doesn't particularly want to die tonight if he can help it? Yeah," Flint said, mild. "Listen, I'm not in the habit of backing down either, when I've got the choice. But a tactical retreat isn't the same thing as cowardice. You know that. I've seen you fight, there were tapes from Sumter. You back off when you need to, when it'll give you an advantage. You pull an ambush, if you've got the element of surprise."
It was true, if also bullshit when applied to this situation specifically; a tactical retreat wasn't the same thing as medevac, either. But Flint wasn't just a sniper. He'd specialized in strategy. And no way was he going to make a rookie mistake like giving Storm Shadow a reason to hit him over the head and limp off to die again.
Storm Shadow was an asshole, but COBRA didn't deserve to have him handed to them on a platter. COBRA didn't deserve the chance to take him out.
"Tactical retreat," Flint said again, and dragged Storm Shadow inside, one reluctant step at a time.
It was a good choice. Flint stood by that. Nobody who knew anything about Storm Shadow was going to come looking for him at the bar in a cheap club like this, sitting next to Flint Faireborn.
Unfortunately, that also made it a bad choice. Storm Shadow stuck out like a sore thumb.
So it was lucky for him he had Flint's strategic genius on his side here.
Flint already had an arm around him—to hold him up so he didn't fall flat on his face, staggering around after leaving half the blood that was supposed to be inside him splashed around the city behind him instead. But nobody in here knew that.
They were pretty much of a height, which was convenient; Flint could lean in close, chin as good as hooked over Storm Shadow's shoulder, without actually touching him that much. And without either looming over him or needing to set himself up to be loomed over, which would have taken somewhat more enthusiastic cooperation than he was going to get.
Storm Shadow went tense all over anyway, predictably enough.
"Chill," Flint said, keeping his tone warm and low, on the edge of flirtatious, just in case anybody else leaned up along the bar could hear him over whatever garbage club mix was throbbing its bass line through the floor. "Half an hour, okay? Let me hang off you a little, try not to look too much like you'd rather be setting me on fire, and you won't have to kill anybody for touching your ass. If COBRA picks up your trail, they'll send somebody in here, and we'll adjust. If they don't, then we're probably fine, and we can go out the back—I'll get you patched up, we'll call it a night, next time you see me you go ahead and chop my head off if you can. Deal?"
Storm Shadow gave him a flat, icy look. "For touching my ass," he repeated, biting out each word with vicious precision.
"Well, yeah," Flint said. "Come on, you know what you look like. If you're taken—" He stopped, and gave Storm Shadow a wry onceover. With the blood mostly covered up, the leftover streak of it in the hollow of one cheek was just a shadow, or plausibly a smudge of lipstick; his hair was swept back all artlessly, and Flint's jacket layered over the sharp upturned collar of his uniform top looked like—well. It looked intentional, even stylish. And his ass in that taut white synthetic fabric? Forget it. "Okay, I'll probably have to break a couple wrists. But that's still less conspicuous than you skewering somebody on your katana, if you follow me."
Storm Shadow's brow furrowed. He was still glaring, unsmiling, sharp and distrustful. But now he looked kind of bewildered, too.
He'd been raised in the same monastery or whatever as Snake Eyes, Flint remembered suddenly. And then he'd been framed and he'd run away, and basically the rest of his life up until Jinx and Snake had gone to kidnap him, Zartan had been messing with his head.
Maybe he didn't know what he looked like. Or at least he didn't have any frame of reference for what it meant to look like that, to people who weren't black ops specialists or kung-fu warriors—to normal, horny people in shitty nightclubs at one in the morning.
Flint leaned in close, hooked an arm around Storm Shadow's shoulders and swayed in until he could turn his face into the side of Storm Shadow's throat. Just to murmur in his ear, but hopefully that wasn't what it was going to look like to the half-dozen guys closest to them. "Half an hour. Let me hang off you a lot," he amended, "and if we need to call a new play, we will."
Storm Shadow didn't give an inch.
But Flint waited ten or fifteen seconds, withdrew and let the corner of his mouth skim the angle of Storm Shadow's jaw when he did it, and he still didn't end up impaled through the guts for it.
He'd always been more comfortable asking forgiveness than permission, anyway.
The next half-hour was very long, and very weird. Even in Flint's personal scoring system, which had a lot of long weird half-hours fighting for a rank.
Storm Shadow held up pretty good for a while. If Flint had to guess, he didn't go for undercover missions so much as "ambush from the shadows before anybody knows what hit them" missions, and no one had encouraged the guy to relax even once in his entire life.
Luckily for him, and luckily for Flint, he'd been stabbed a whole bunch of times, and then he'd run halfway across the city. All the iron-willed determination in the world couldn't stave off the combined effects of exhaustion and blood loss forever.
Flint kept an arm around him, leaned into him; and a fraction of an inch at a time, the line of Storm Shadow's spine began to soften. A fraction of an inch at a time, he started to give himself over into Flint's hands.
It was weird. Intense. Flint hadn't expected that, but it was true. Not just because Storm Shadow was intense as a rule, though he definitely was—and having all that intensity so close, aimed right at Flint while Flint was busy doing his best to give it right back, was something else.
But it was also—it was—he knew Storm Shadow didn't trust him. Storm Shadow didn't trust him, and at the same time had no option except to trust him, and Flint was helplessly conscious of the weight of that, of his own determination not to give Storm Shadow any reason to regret it.
A whole lot of people had already screwed Storm Shadow over. Flint was increasingly sure he didn't want to be one of them, and not because he was worried Storm Shadow would swear vengeance on him for it. Just because, goddammit, somebody had to prove the asshole wrong. Somebody had to prove there was a difference between COBRA and the Joes, a difference that fucking mattered.
So yeah, it was weird, and intense. Having to be all over the guy, all up on him in the dark; holding his gaze, sliding a couple fingers down the back of his collar or the line of his jaw. Feeling that earnest tightening knot, something that was almost urgency, over getting this right, at the same time that he was busy visibly playacting the kind of possessive protectiveness that could keep anybody else from trying their luck.
And the thing was, it was definitely necessary. Because Storm Shadow was hot, to a frankly excessive degree.
Flint wished he hadn't noticed it, on a personal level. It had been fine while it was just a tactical assessment: Storm Shadow's cheekbones looked like that, and his ass looked like that, and Flint had understood he'd have to compensate for those facts strategically.
But being confronted with those facts from eight inches away for twenty-five minutes straight, needing to keep a hand on the guy to keep him from keeling over, needing to keep his body language a warning and his eyes on Storm Shadow like there was nobody else in the club as far as he was concerned—well.
Honestly, he was almost glad when the twenty-six-minute mark brought two men through the club entrance. Two men wearing sunglasses, at night, and they were so wildly unsubtle in sweeping the room, as they tromped in with conspicuously heavy jackets and conspicuously empty hands, that they were definitely COBRA.
Fantastic.
"Two," Flint said. "Your eleven o'clock," and he drew Storm Shadow in against him, guided Storm Shadow's head over his shoulder as he turned his face into Storm Shadow's hair, to make it true.
Storm Shadow went still, all that progress they'd made gone in an instant as he turned abruptly unyielding in Flint's grip. "It didn't work. We must kill them—"
"Whoa, hey, hang on," Flint murmured. "Just hang on. They haven't spotted us yet. I know playing it cool isn't your strong suit, but give it a shot, huh?"
He drew back, laughed low in his throat and then skimmed his hand up Storm Shadow's shoulder to the nape of his neck, thumb finding the soft skin under his ear.
"They looking this way yet?"
"No," Storm Shadow allowed, grudging. "But they will. The glasses contain facial identification and gait recognition scanners."
"Then making a break for it won't help us," Flint pointed out mildly. "So we might as well wait it out. How about now?"
"One of them is checking the bar. Four," Storm Shadow said. "Three. Two—"
Flint caught him under the chin, tipped his face in, and kissed him.
It was tactically sound. Kissing blocked upwards of half of the face—changed the shape, the lines and angles. Very little facial recognition data was collected with an eye toward making a subject identifiable with their mouth half-open, their nose obscured by someone else's, their jaw and cheekbone covered by a greedy hand.
It was also kind of awful.
Storm Shadow didn't move at all, didn't even offer the kind of baseline counter-resistance that gave a guy something to press a kiss against. Flint ended up sort of mashing the dude's lips against the wall of his teeth behind them before he managed to recalibrate and ease up. Adding tongue was clearly not a maneuver that was going to meet with success, but that left him standing there trying to keep a closemouthed kiss going instead. Awkward, clumsy, endlessly middle-school, but he didn't know what the hell to do about it.
Then Storm Shadow drew in an odd, sharp breath. That at least gave Flint a brief gap to press his lower lip into—a way to give the kiss an illusion of depth, of the kind of movement anybody might expect from two dudes making out next to the bar in a place like this.
And no one shouted. The COBRA scouts didn't open fire. The bass kept thumping away, the lights strobing, flickering colors made intermittently solid by the half-assed efforts of the single wheezing smoke machine in the corner of the dance floor.
Good sign, Flint thought. COBRA didn't have a whole lot of restraint or subtlety to spare, in his experience.
He broke the kiss without actually backing off at all—kept his face close enough so their temples brushed, so his stubble dragged a little against Storm Shadow's jaw.
"Okay?" he murmured.
Storm Shadow was silent, for a strange stretching moment. Flint discovered distantly that the noise in his ears wasn't all music, that his heart was pounding for no good reason.
"They did not identify us," Storm Shadow said at last.
His voice was low. Low, and kind of—scratched-up. Hoarse.
Flint cleared his throat. "Well, good," he said, and then he did ease away a little, just enough to glance around the club himself.
Storm Shadow was right. The men were gone. Probably not gone gone, if they had any sense; outside checking the perimeter, maybe, or upstairs. But still, that was breathing room, and breathing room he and Storm Shadow could use.
He was already thinking through how to do it: that if COBRA was busy checking the roof and the back exits, then they might as well take the opening and swan right back out the front. He looked at Storm Shadow again, ready to say so, and then all the words got knocked out of his head at once.
Because Storm Shadow was staring at him with those sharp dark eyes, as steady and shuttered as ever except that—except that his mouth was so fucking red, and it was probably just because Flint had miscalculated so clumsily at first, but somehow that knowledge didn't make it less hot to see him like that.
Flint got about two seconds to feel the blow of it, to try to absorb the sudden rush of heat through every single nerve.
And then Storm Shadow's lip curled, and he said, "We have wasted enough time here."
"Yeah. Right. Yes," Flint managed.
They were still inside the club. He reached out and smoothed a hand up the nape of Storm Shadow's neck, fingers in his hair, and drew him away from the bar and back toward the door, and tried like hell not to think about any of it.
It only sort of worked.
They didn't get caught on the way out.
They didn't get caught at all. Flint stayed as careful as he could, led Storm Shadow along a winding path all the way back to the pickup truck Flint had been using as a mobile recon base, but if there was anybody on their tail, he didn't spot them.
Storm Shadow put up with a pressure bandage on the deepest wound in his side, field dressings on the second- and third-deepest, and then his patience apparently ran out; he knocked Flint's hand away and said, "Enough."
"Okay, all right," Flint said, and then didn't know what the hell to do next.
Storm Shadow's expression had basically never changed. He wasn't any more pliable, any more comfortable with Flint's hands on him, than he had been at any other point all night.
But the pressure-bloomed color of his mouth in the club had almost completely faded, and he was stripping off Flint's jacket with quick economical movements, and looking at him standing there in white again, the worst of his vulnerabilities papered cleanly over, Flint couldn't shake an indefinable sensation that something was slipping through his fingers.
Storm Shadow held the jacket out, and raised an eyebrow—exactly the same way he'd cocked it after pointedly guiding Flint's semiautomatic out of his face with the flat of his sword, all those months ago.
"You're welcome," Flint said, and took it.
"I am not on your side. You cannot change that with a jacket."
"Yeah, yeah," Flint agreed, but his mouth was trying to tug itself into a smile, and he let it. "You know, you keep trying to warn me about that. Might give a guy the idea you're worried he's going to get his feelings hurt."
That earned him a sneer. "You're a fool," Storm Shadow said.
And maybe he was. But Flint wasn't a GI Joe because he liked backing down from a challenge; and he had a feeling this one might turn out to be worth it, somewhere down the road.
Far down the road, probably.
"So kill me already," he said, and pulled on the jacket.
Storm Shadow hadn't let go of it yet—and didn't, even as Flint drew him in with it. Flint reached out with his free hand, and Storm Shadow didn't do anything about that either, didn't cut it off before it could touch his face.
He still didn't kiss back. But that was all right. Flint hadn't really expected him to. It was just—
It was just that he hadn't wanted to let Storm Shadow go without doing it again. Without trying, as hard as he could, to leave some kind of mark before Storm Shadow vanished out from under him.
"You're not with us," he said, half against Storm Shadow's mouth. "But you weren't against us, once. Maybe that'll happen again sometime."
And at that, at last, Storm Shadow's hand came up against Flint's chest—braced, shoved him away and into the side of the truck.
"Don't count on it," Storm Shadow bit out.
The white suit was still fucking godawful camouflage. Flint could follow the ghostly half-shadow of it almost twenty yards further than he should have been able to.
And then Storm Shadow was gone.
At least for now, Flint thought wryly. Maybe next time, he'd see Flint and pull the sword all over again, come right at Flint without hesitating for a second. But—maybe not.
And whichever it was going to be, Flint was almost looking forward to finding out.