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When Jaz makes it through the full deployment--when they both do--Adam goes to the souk in Adana and buys a ring. It’s nothing extravagant, small and silver with a delicate pattern. He doesn’t linger on the decision; he’s in and out of the stall before he can second guess himself, and he tucks the trinket away, keeps it zipped into his tac vest. It’s a promise to himself--a promise of a future.
Going home feels strange, because Pennsylvania doesn’t fit anymore. He misses her tiny apartment with the uncomfortable couch and the impossibly soft blanket. He misses late night infomercials and cold pizza. That’s as good a sign as any that he’s making the right decision.
Unlike the ring, though, Adam sits with this decision a while. He goes hiking, works on the pile of firewood, fixes the loose railing on the porch. Calls Jaz.
“Don’t tell me you miss me already,” she teases.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I must’ve dialed the wrong number. Meant to call Preach.”
“Yeah, right,” Jaz scoffs. “It’s okay. I miss you too.”
“Maybe I’ll come to visit,” Adam says, but he won’t and they both know it.
“How’s the mutt?” The subject change lets him off his own hook and Adam breathes. He’s making the right choice.
Telling Patricia is harder than he expects. He wants to do it in person, so he waits until Jaz is safely a world away in Montana with McG before he heads down to DC.
“I was honestly expecting this discussion sooner,” she says over high-end Chinese food that he thinks tastes the same as cheap take out. But it’s her favorite and Adam’s glad for the ease of it.
“Then you have more faith in me than I do,” he says, sort of self-deprecating, and Patricia levels him with a stare, one he’d seen her give to her son once upon a time.
“Change isn’t easy,” she murmurs.
“That,” he agrees. “Is an understatement.”
The end of life as he knows it looms closer now. Adam feels like he should be more afraid.
**
Before he leaves to drive back to the cabin, Patricia hugs him. There are things he wants to say to her, promises he wants to make, but there are too many superstitions, and after Preach, he’s not willing to risk any of them. There’ll be plenty of time for all the things he wants to tell her, after.
“I’m proud of you,” she says. “Do me one more favor?”
“Anything, always.” She’s saved his life more times than he can count in more ways than he could ever fathom.
“Tell her. Before the others. She deserves to know.”
Adam knows she’s right, but hearing it reassures him, settling his nerves.
“Yeah.” He rubs the back of his neck, nodding. “Alright.”
The entire drive home is spent playing out the conversation he has to have, until Jaz calls and Adam knows whatever words he ends up using, they’ll be the right ones.
**
It’s another thing he has to do in person, so Adam breaks his own rules and asks Jaz to dinner the night before they’re all due back in DC. It’s late, because her plane doesn’t get in until almost 7, but she’s there and the sight of her sparks a now-familiar flutter in his chest. Five and a half weeks without her, and it’s stronger than ever.
“I like this version of you,” she says, none of her usual teasing, just genuine her. His version. But he doesn't tell her that.
“I'm the same as always,” he says instead, just to watch her snort and shake her head.
“Leave’s been good to you,” she murmurs, and he watches her fingers flutter at her side. She wants to touch him, and that draws him back to the memory of her mouth on his, of how it had physically hurt him to pull away. It's why they're here.
They're led to a table on the patio, the summer evening perfectly warm and breezy with none of the usual oppressive humidity he's come to expect of DC.
Once they've settled, Jaz just watches him and Adam sets his menu down. He can't keep her waiting--that's not fair.
“This will be my last deployment,” he starts, because anything else feels like dancing around the issue.
“What?!” Jaz’s voice comes out uncharacteristically shrill, and the tension she's been containing shifts and bubbles over. Before Adam can really even think about it, he reaches across the table and takes her hand. It startles her into stillness.
“Jaz, I...last year changed things for me. In a good way. It made me realize a lot of things. I don't want to be my father. I don't want to spend my whole life working. I love my job, you know that and understand it probably better than just about anyone. But I want a life, a family. A legacy that isn't about war.”
Putting it into words for her does scare him a little. What if he can't. What if he doesn't know how. What if she doesn't want that, or him, or that with him?
“Why...why are you telling me this?” She’s staring at his hand where it's still covering hers, and he desperately wants to touch more of her, to let himself hold her again. But not tonight. Not yet.
“Because I meant what I said last year. I need you, Jaz. I want those things because of you, I want them with you. I want to take you to dinner and call it a date. I want to go home and fall asleep next to you and not have to rationalize it being okay. I want you to call me Adam, all the time.”
She looks up and she's smiling and God, she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
The waiter comes with their drinks and Adam waves him away again as Jaz lifts her beer.
“To one last hurrah,” she says.
“Hell yeah,” Adam murmurs.
The kind of settled he feels after that is something he remembers for a long, long time. It's the night he lets himself fall in love over burgers and beer and there's not an ounce of guilt in it.
At the end of the night, he digs the ring out of his wallet.
“I want you to have this,” he explains and Jaz’s eyes go instantly wide. “No...I...it’s just a trinket. Something I got for myself to remind me that this was something I wanted to do, this was what I was working for.”
She relaxes and grins, taking the ring and slipping it onto her pinky where it settles perfectly.
“Think it’s a little small for you,” she teases and he chuckles.
“Looks better on you anyway.”
“Yeah,” she agrees. “It does.”
And then they stand there on the street in the dark and Adam aches to kiss her. She’s fidgeting again and it’s enough to know she wants that, too.
“I want us to do this the right way, Jazzy.” His hand finds hers anyway, his thumb sliding over the ring on her finger.
“Of course you do.” She huffs out a laugh and won’t look him in the eye. It’s too tempting. “So we’ll wait.”
“One more deployment. Nine more months. Okay?”
“We’ve been waiting a hell of a lot longer than that. What’s a little more time, huh?” Jaz does look at him then and Adam can’t help but think of before, of her waking up in the hospital, of the nightmares and the meds and her fighting tooth and nail to claw her way back to him.
God, he loves her.
“Adam.” Her free hand cups his cheek, just briefly and he looks at her and he knows. Jaz loves him too, and, maybe more importantly, she knows he loves her.
“Yeah, okay.” He leans into her just a bit and then takes a full step back. He holds onto that moment, every single time they’re under fire for the next nine months. It’s a strange and terrifying thing to have something to live for.
Telling the rest of the team is hard in its own way. They’re his family, and, like Patricia says, change isn’t easy. But these people and the relationships they’ve built, the camaraderie they share, isn’t something that will ever go away. So Adam finds himself relaxing, and when Jaz catches his eye from across the room where she’s absolutely decimating McG at darts, her smile reassures him that she’s okay, too.
Strangely, of everyone, he’d been most worried about her. Silly, Adam thinks, given she’s stronger than the rest of them put together. But he’s always done his best to make her life easier, and, leaving her professionally, even when it’s so he doesn’t have to leave her personally, still leaves him feeling guilty.
“The world goes on,” Preach says, appearing beside him. “Ours, yours. Hers.”
Adam has stopped being surprised by Preach, and his feelings for Jaz haven’t exactly been kept a secret. He chuckles and finally turns away from her, taking a long pull on his beer.
“I know.”
“The system is designed to work like a well-oiled machine. How many teams have we both been on? And all these years later, all of them are still going. Without us,” Preach points out.
“Honestly, I’m not sure if that makes things better or worse.”
“I’m not saying you didn’t make a difference here, Adam. But that difference? It’s all personal. You’re great at what you do. Best I’ve ever worked with. But we are who we are because of who you are. Not because of what you do. You’re a good man. It’s about time you figure that out for yourself. Without the uniform.”
“I think you’re giving Xander a run for his money,” Adam says, but he’s processing what Preach is saying, another piece of the puzzle reassuring him he’s on the right track.
“Man’s got enough on his plate. Adam Dalton is not a one-man job. One woman, though…” With a slight grin, Preach shrugs.
“Guess we’ll see.”
“Guess we will.”
But first, they get back to work.
**
Deployment isn’t easy, but it’s familiar. Make sure there are no life-altering injuries, and they all come home.Maybe save the world a time or two. It’s all that matters for Adam.
Things with Jaz are easy, too, which is unexpected. He’d figured after his announcement, there might be tension, but there’s none. She’s as much of a workhorse as he is and this is the dynamic that built them.
So he gives orders and she follows most of the time. They banter and he challenges her and she pushes back twice as hard. He puts her in harm's way when it suits the mission, when she’s the most capable one for the challenge.
And then it’s time to go home again, and they’re sitting around the fire, reminiscing like it won’t be the last time.
“It won’t be the same without you, Top,” McG says.
“Don’t think you’re getting rid of me that easy. I know where you sleep,” Adam says and McG laughs.
“Listen, if a dozen tours of countless terrorists couldn’t get rid of you, I have no doubt I’ll be seeing you around,” McGuire says.
“And there’s always the wedding,” Preach adds.
“What wedding?” Jaz asks, wondering how the hell she missed that announcement.
Preach shrugs and sips his beer. “You’ll see,” he says cryptically.
Amir and McG share a look.
Adam’s eyes fall to the ring on Jaz’s finger. The one she’s absently fiddling with. A promise they’re damn close to fulfilling. He hasn’t thought beyond going home, the basic things he’d told her about. Dates and kissing and falling asleep with her safe in his arms. Marriage hadn’t even entered the equation.
But now…
“Alright, fortune teller. I’m calling it a night. You boys have fun,” Jaz declares. Adam catches her gaze, only momentarily, but it’s enough. Enough to know she’d been thinking the same thing. He smiles into his beer and watches the fire. Tomorrow, he’ll go after her. Tonight, he has one more night of being her boss.
By the book. Patience. Almost there.
**
At one point, he’d had grand plans of kissing her as soon as they got off the plane. The technical physical end of his contract, despite the debriefs and the paperwork. But they’re exhausted and the airport is swarming and as much as he’s never cared what other people thought of him (strangers, anyway), neither of them are much for PDAs. So he squeezes her hand instead and the way she smiles at him is worth a million bucks.
When he does kiss her, it’s in her apartment. They’ve come full circle, really. He pulls her close and cups her cheek and thinks fleetingly of all the ways this ending could’ve been ruined. But no matter what happens now, after today, they’ll have this. He kisses her, not for the first time, but it feels like it is. Because now it’s just them–no titles, no red tape, no trauma. She hums and smooths her hands over his chest. He lifts her and carries her to bed.
“Not wasting any time, huh?” Jaz teases.
“Eh, you know, I think we’ve wasted enough already.”
“Amen to that.”
Adam’s never been one for looking forward. But he’s never had much of a future, either. From where he’s standing now, though, tomorrow’s looking pretty damn bright.