Chapter Text
Today’s was far from the first ‘run it’ Breanna had run, but somehow it never got less exciting. Something about the team’s easy bickering–and how it had grown to include her–combined with her tech and the joy of sharing it kept her attention deeply enough for her not to notice Eliot’s face at first.
She hadn’t noticed when it started exactly, and couldn’t point to what it meant. Breanna flexed her mental knuckles til they cracked; it was time for some detective work.
The face in question was kind of like his regular grumpy face, maybe leaning towards his brooding grumpy face or his ‘I’ve not punched someone in too long’ grumpy face. It had started at some point during her briefing, so she could probably assume it was related to something she’d said.
So, backtracking.
She’d finished with the bare bones of a plan, as usual, and someone had answered something to do with stealing a whatever. If Eliot had complaints about the plan he’d grumble about them, not just pout (although this face was too intense to really call a pout for anything other than tension-relieving reasons).
Before that was talking about their client, the person they were getting leverage for, the person their evil capitalist of the week had hurt, and how they’d been hurt. Although, thinking about it, the client had come before Breanna’s little villain monologue. About-the-villain monologue. Anti-villain monologue?
She could remember Eliot’s ‘I feel really bad about whatever bad thing you’re talking about’ face when she was talking about their client. Maybe this face, the one that was only getting darker the more she looked at it, the more she looked at Eliot, had started when she was talking about the bad guy.
In fact, the face was sort of scaring her now.
Luckily, she wasn’t the only one staring at the hitter.
“Eliot? What’s wrong?” Sophie somehow made her concern clear without letting her tone get too close to sympathy. Or to concern, really. Or anything that might make his macho-man defences go up.
He didn’t respond.
Parker tried, poking him in the arm, “Eliot?”
And then all of a sudden he did.
“What? What! Nothing! I’m-” He grumbled and pushed Parker away in that way he had that showed he wasn’t really mad while still forcing a bit of personal space- “Fine!”
Parker pouted, while Sophie held her hands up in mock surrender, then turned back to Breanna, gesturing at the screen.
“Sorry, Breanna. I think we’d better go over that last bit again.”
Breanna opened her mouth to continue, clicking back to the start of the plan, when Eliot spoke up again, voice rough and dangerously quiet.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t what?” Harry asked.
He made a face, like he wasn’t quite sure how to say what he wanted to, how to make them listen to him; this was important.
“Don’t-” He half-grumbled, half-sighed, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “Don’t bother. Don’t run it again. We’re not doing it.”
“Eliot!” Sophie admonished, “We can’t just abandon these people. They need our help!”
“Not this time.” Eliot’s tone left no room for argument, but there would be one anyway if she didn’t step in. She hated it when they argued.
“Why?”
Maybe an explanation would calm everyone down enough. Breanna knew he had one to give. It was just a question of whether he would.
“It’s just-” He broke off, again, looking increasingly frustrated. “This team… This guy… He’s not our kind of bad guy.” He winced a little, then course-corrected. “He’s not your kind of bad guy. He’s mine, okay? You guys go anywhere near him, I don’t know I can keep you safe.”
Harry looked confused, though only a little more than normal, but something in Eliot’s non-explanation seemed to cool Parker and Sophie a little.
Emphasis on the ‘little’ part.
“Is this another thing we’re not supposed to ask?” Parker spoke like it meant something. Sophie tensed.
Eliot just laughed, a little sad, a little painful.
“No, Parker. You can ask about this. And you handled him fine.”
“You… know this man?” Sophie said, looking pointedly at the bad guy on Breanna’s screens but turning straight back to face Eliot.
“Yes.”
“You think he’s worse than Moreau? You let us go after Moreau.”
“He’s–stop poking me, Parker–he’s different.”
“Different how?”
“Just- Just different, alright? We worked together, a long time ago. You need me to go into detail or can you just leave it for once?”
The crew all looked at each other, trying to figure out what they wanted to say, and who they wanted to say it. Harry started to say something about it all being fine and whatever Eliot wanted before Sophie cut in.
“I think, Eliot, we’d like to know why we’re leaving these people to get hurt when there’s something we could do to help.”
It wasn’t really a request. Breanna had learned that Sophie didn’t really do requests. She just said something, and you did it. Maybe for no-one more than Eliot.
But he looked hesitant this time. Like he wanted to run.
It wasn’t a look she’d seen before on him, and she didn’t think she ever wanted to see it again.
“Soph, I get it, I do, I just-”
And then Parker said: “Tell us.”
And he did.
“” “” “” “” “” “”
The weather had turned this morning, and it made Spencer uneasy.
Conditions had been rough for weeks, torrential rain turning normally passable routes into unmarked wastelands and wind fucking with their radios until signal was staticy and intermittent at best, but his watch had come to a close with gentle sunlight over the horizon, and birdsong.
With the bad weather, at least, something had already gone wrong. Maybe it was one of those illogical superstitions, but in Spencer’s experience, at least one thing had to go wrong on every op, and if that was the weather, there was at least a chance it wouldn’t be anything else.
But today was a nice day.
They were fucked.
He triple-checked his kit, then checked that his team had triple checked theirs, then jogged to the commander’s tent and checked the route and the backup route and the primary secondary tertiary and emergency backup exfil sites, then jogged back to his team and made them all check everything again.
The drive went without a hitch. He barely felt a bump in the road. That part of the story didn’t matter. Neither did what happened next.
At least, that’s what Spencer kept telling himself.
Marcus was the guy’s name. The traitorous bastard. He didn’t find that part out until later. They got to their location, pulled off the opp without a hitch, and on route to exfil the world blew up in Spencer’s face.
He woke, ears ringing, mouth full of mud and Marcus’ boot an indeterminate amount of time later. The sky was darkening just past blood red, and the day’s pleasant warmth long gone. From somewhere, his numb hand swatted at the boot, and he wriggled out from underneath the pile of soldiers. It was maybe half of his group, maybe half of his men.
They were all dead.
He checked, just in case. Found one pulse in the whole pile other than his own, on Marcus’ neck, and dragged him away from his dead guys until he was interrupted by the man’s groaning.
“Hey, chill out, Marcus,” he growled. “You look like shit. It’s just us left here, but looks like we got split from the other couple vehicles, so there’s a good chance they’re out here looking for us. We just gotta hold out ‘til we’re found, alright?”
“Spence?”
“Yeah, Marcus, you’re stuck with me.” He patted the man’s thigh wearily, then held out a hand to help him to his feet.
“No one I’d rather slowly die of exposure with.”
They both grinned, and set off skirting the road a couple yards into the treeline.
“Hey, Marcus?”
“Yeah?”
“D’you see what hit us?”
He shook his head in lieu of a proper response.
“Cause I saw muzzle flashes. I saw movement in the woods. Whatever this was, I don’t think it was just mines left on the road. I think we’ve got a team coming after us. Tracking us, maybe. They find us missing from the crash site, we’re hunted men.” He kept his voice low, urgent without being panicked.
Marcus clearly didn’t have the same concerns. “So what, man? We gotta get found by our guys, so we can’t stay completely hidden. May as well just get found as fast as possible, right? Fuck these guys, they can’t be so good we have to worry about them.”
“What?” Maybe his voice came out a bit harsh, but he was alone with an operator who was average at best in an environment that was only becoming harsher by the minute, trying to get found by one group of guys while not being found by another.
“We just need to keep following the route.”
“Marcus, are you insane?”
“What?”
“They’ll find us in seconds!”
“Exactly!”
“The fucking bad guys you useful fucking bastard!” He shook his head. “Fuck this. Follow me. These fuckers know our route. We’ve got a fucking leak. So we’re not gonna follow the route.”
He took off up the hillside as fast as he thought his legs could carry him for at least an hour before giving in.
Marcus hesitated on the roadside, looking up and down the road, before sighing and following after him.
They ran for an hour and a half, uphill the whole time. Spencer’s lungs and legs burned. His hands shook, half numb from the cold, half burning with grazes where he’d slipped on the rough ground.
Mostly, the night was silent. Occasionally an animal would stir, woken or disturbed by their movement. Occasionally, the wind would shift, and Spencer would catch unfamiliar voices on the breeze.
Once, gunshots, close enough to silhouette the trees behind them onto their faces.
They ran faster, after that. Spencer’s lungs quit complaining, or his brain quit relaying their complaints to him. Marcus’ must not have done the same–average at best, always comes to bite you in the ass working with average guys–and he dropped to all fours on the crest of a hill.
Not too far away, the trees thinned suddenly, and the ground sloped away out of sight.
Maybe they’d find a hollow there, somewhere to shelter in place, let these guys pass.
Spencer dragged Marcus behind him, hand under his armpit so he had to run almost backwards. His protests distracted them both long enough that Marcus’ eyes widening was the only warning Spencer had before his feet–and stomach–fell out from underneath him.
He scrambled for purchase on something. Anything. A branch, or stone, or root, or-
There.
Something in his shoulder clicked loudly. Painfully. He swallowed down a cry of pain. His vision flared white, then black, then back to something resembling normal, if a little grey around the edges.
He glanced up, then, content Marcus could hold himself up, Spencer let go of him with his good arm, and brought it up to take his weight.
The other arm dropped to his side. It didn’t lift back up when he tried.
The voice’s hadn’t been far. They’d catch up soon. They’d catch up, then Spencer and Marcus would be fucked.
He kicked his feet out blindly, hoping there’d be something to hold on to. They found nothing. His body swung with the momentum.
And Spencer’s hand, still half numb from the cold and whatever jolt he’d taken in the crash and the fall, slipped. His downward movement was halted with a jerk.
A hand, holding his wrist.
The hostile search party’s comms, back and forth up above them, echoed into the emptiness of the night. They wouldn’t be found in time. Their only hope was to keep quiet and hold on until the hostiles moved on.
They locked eyes. Spencer was sure his were full of panic, full of instruction to keep quiet and hold on, full of trust.
Marcus’ eyes glinted.
Spencer squinted up at him in confusion. Marcus grinned, gripped Spencer’s wrist even tighter, so he couldn’t twist around to hold on even if he tried.
He kept increasing the pressure. Made no move to pull him up so he could hold his own weight. Spencer winced.
Marcus whistled, and the voices above suddenly became much louder, started getting closer.
“You were a decent CO, Spencer. We were a decent team,” Marcus said, arrogant and condescending and loud. “If only we could hold on.”
“” “” “” “” “” “”
“And then?”
“And then what?”
“What happens next?”
“He tried to kill me, Parker. It didn’t stick.”