Chapter Text
After Miami, they move on.
“I’m staying with Jolene and the baby,” Pooch tells Clay, his jaw set stubbornly, “I’ll come if you guys need me, but I got a lot to make up for.”
Clay frowns and opens his mouth to protest. Aisha shoves her elbow into Clay’s ribs. Jensen shoves his elbow into Clay’s ribs. Cougar shoots Clay a dirty look. Pooch politely does not acknowledge any of it.
“Yeah, okay,” Clay manages between short breaths, “Alright.”
They go to one of Beth’s games, and despite Beth being fouled and Jensen nearly fighting the referee, the Petunias emerge victorious; although the greater victory is clearly that Jensen somehow talked Cougar into wearing a Petunias shirt underneath his jacket.
“This is good,” Jensen declares soundly, holding Beth up on his shoulders. Jennifer—with one arm looped through Cougar’s and the other through the strap of the bag she’s making Jensen carry—smiles. It’s not a nice smile.
“I’m glad you think so. And since we haven’t really talked about it, if you ever get falsely labeled KIA and you don’t tell me, we will be having words.”
“Yeah, Uncle Jake,” Beth adds, “Or else momma might blow up all your computers again.”
“Blow up? Wait, what do you mean again?” Jensen squawks, making Beth shriek in delight and firmly grip Jensen’s facial hair, “You told me the basement flooded!”
Jennifer smiles that not-nice smile a little wider and serenely repeats, “All of them. Again.”
Cougar pulls the brim of his hat down to hide the upward curl of his lips.
Clay and Aisha get a loft. Cougar attends the ‘housewarming’ and is there when the team helps them move everything in.
He is also there when the fire department arrives three and a half hours later to put out the inferno, courtesy of what Jensen is calling Clay and Aisha’s “sadomasochistic foreplay”. Clay doesn’t meet any of their eyes for the rest of the day, but Aisha smirks like the cat that got the cream, the canary and the mouse.
(It's all very quaint in a way that makes Cougar rub his chest absently, frowning at something that’s missing.)
Cougar takes stock: Pooch is with Jolene in the boonies of Rhode Island (“That is such an oxymoron,” Jensen keeps saying, “There’s hardly enough Rhode Island to be Rhode Island.”), cooing over their baby. Jensen is with Jennifer and Beth somewhere near Maryland. Clay and Aisha are around Boston. Everyone’s settled.
Or, mostly everyone.
Cougar goes south.
After weeks of recon and skulking, calling in favors from all his local contacts, Cougar finds a bar in San Juan named Cinco Perdedores Muertos. It’s pretty non-descript looking, and the inside is clean. There’s never a full house, but there are always enough people to suggest a steady and loyal clientele. After three more weeks of casual recon, Cougar finally goes in.
“What are you doing here?” The bartender asks in Hindi, garnering a few odd looks from the closest customers.
“I told you that I would bring you back,” Cougar replies in Farsi.
“And I told you that I might not come back,” the bartender drawls in Portuguese.
“I promised,” Cougar says in English, and then, “Roque, lo prometí.”
Roque sighs explosively and tugs off the dirty white apron he’d been wearing. As he stalks towards Cougar, he points at a man leaning against an old jukebox and snaps, “Michel, you’re on deck.”
Michel—a young Taíno man with long hair and some sort of blade strapped to his inner thigh, nearly hidden by the thick denim of his jeans—nods seriously, and a smattering of whispers breaks out amongst the lingering customers. Roque shuts them up with a glare and a grudging round on the house.
Cougar is expecting it when Roque slams him into the side of the building, eyes narrowed and scowl firmly in place.
“I promised you,” Cougar mumbles, before Roque can even open his mouth. “And I keep my promises.”
Roque laughs and then slams his fist into Cougar’s jaw—one, two, three times; three has always been a good number, their number—and laughs again. The movement of his mouth pulls the burn scars taut.
“Okay,” Roque chuckles, white teeth a quick gleam in the dim lighting, “Okay, okay. Let's hear it.”
Roque’s mother was from Chapada dos Veadeiros and his father was from Chiapas. Roque was born in São Paolo, and lived there until he didn't. No one knows this. No one truly knows the Who or the Where of him. No one knows the when.
The boxed marked ‘nationality’ on his military records says American; his hometown is listed as some small town straddling the imaginary line between West and Midwest; says he was born in the late 70s, some somber morning in the winter.
(When he enlisted, everything was paper and ink, and it was easy to... embellish a few things.)
Roque tells Clay he’s from Chicago; he tells Jensen he was born in the DR, but raised in Brooklyn; tells Pooch he’s from Sierra Leone, adopted by some rich white suburban family and raised in New England; tells Cougar he’s second generation Ghanaian, lived a little bit of everywhere. He has the slightest of accents to back him up on each separate occasion. He had many long years to press his consonants and compact his vowels into a general American accent, the kind that goes unremarked.
And yet, somehow, whenever Cougar says his name, it’s with the slightest trill of the r, the long pull of the o, a sharp ‘kay’ instead of the blunt English ‘kuh’.
Roque never says anything, never corrects him, even though for the first year Pooch and Jensen would always look lost for half a second, before they chalked it up to one of Cougar’s eccentricities (for someone so quiet, he has quite a few of them).
He’s not sure if Clay’s ever noticed.
So Roque never says anything, but his name on Cougar’s tongue sounds a little like his mamãe, a little like papai, and a lot like home.
Cougar can tell that Roque is terrified. He can’t see it; there’s nothing to see on Roque’s face, nothing hesitant or anxious in his posture, his movements. But Cougar can tell.
“Pooch is probably going to break my hand,” Roque murmurs to himself, and Cougar makes a half-silent noise of sympathy.
Roque frowns, “Jensen is going to cry on me and then punch me.”
He’s probably right. Cougar shrugs. Tries to hide a smirk, fails.
“Oi, vá para o inferno, bundão,” Roque snaps, flicking the brim of Cougar’s hat. It only makes Cougar smirk harder.
From the front porch, they can hear the baby—Linneus, Cougar tells him, but most of the team calls him Lin, after his father—burbling happy half-formed words. Beth is trying to get Lin to say her name from the sound of it, and Jensen, Jolene and Pooch are talking, but not so loud as to make out the actual words.
That’s family, Roque tells himself. This is who it was all for, this happiness.
Cougar rings the doorbell.
“Uncle Cougar’s here!” They can hear Beth’s shriek and the sound of small feet running.
“Shit,” Roque says. It sounds like a plea.
Beth flings the door open, and at the sight of Roque, screams.
“Merda,” Roque says emphatically, as Pooch and Jensen come sprinting from within the house, obviously packing.
When they see Roque, it gets quiet. Beth scrambles back into the house after a quick push from Jensen.
Roque is wrong, at least; Jensen doesn’t cry before he punches him.
Jensen gets that one hit off—Roque grabbing his mouth and cursing into his palm—and Pooch has his gun raised and his face is grim and the whole situation is spinning out of control.
“Fucking—” Roque is snarling with bloodied teeth. “Oi, bundão, you just gonna let this fucker beat on me?”
Which means Cougar is on damage control. Easy.
After Cougar holds a blade— has to be one of Roque’s, with a nice, clean edge—to Jensen’s jugular and stops whatever movement Pooch so clearly wants to make with a glance, he takes a step back. Pooch closes the front door behind them.
“Fuck you,” Jensen is shaking, his fists are clenching, but Cougar can see the tears forming in his eyes, “Fuck you both, ohmyfuckinggod, fuck you.”
“What is this?” Pooch hisses furiously at Cougar, “What are you doing?”
“I’m coming back,” Roque’s voice is firm, but he’s hovering more in Cougar’s orbit than standing on his own.
“Are you shitting me—fuck you,” Jensen spits, jabbing a harsh finger at Roque, “You left.”
“No,” Roque snaps back, crowding closer to Cougar but not past him, “I ended it.”
And well, Jensen doesn’t have anything to say to that.
“What does that even mean,” Pooch starts to argue, but Roque cuts him off with a sharp hand gesture.
“I know y’all ain’t fuckin’ stupid, so think. Clay woulda had us runnin’ after Max for the rest of our miserable, short lives. Woulda had us workin’ off the word of some myserious psycho chick who wanted us all dead from the start, woulda had us dead ten times over! Woulda had us following Aisha’s lead like she wasn’t some backstabbing—”
“Oh that’s rich, coming from you,” Jensen's voice is rough.
“I left,” Roque grits out, and suddenly he’s got Jensen by the collar. “To do what we shoulda done from the beginning. Gone the fuck home. Not chased after some spook with a Machiavellian complex like we were the goddamn A-team!”
And then it’s quiet again and Roque’s words—shouts, really—are hanging there, their anger still in the air.
“I promised to bring him back,” Cougar speaks up, finally, and Jensen looks at him like he’s the biggest fucking traitor on the face of the planet.
“You were in on this?” Pooch is indignant, angry.
Cougar wants to argue: there’s no this to be in on, just him and Roque making sure that shit got done, the way it should’ve been (and although Roque will never say it and Cougar will only think it, the way Clay was supposed to lead them, instead of letting himself be led). But Pooch is pissed and Jensen and Roque are spitting curses back and forth across the porch and–
Of course, that’s when Clay and Aisha pull up.
Roque only manages not to get shot because Cougar steps in front of him, and raises his revolver, its sights trained easily between Clay and Aisha through the windshield.
From the porch, they can all hear Aisha’s low whistle and the follow-up of, “You Losers don’t do things by halves, huh?”
There’s a look of what might be shock in her eyes, but she’s otherwise composed. Clay, on the other hand, looks like he’s about to combust. They exit the car carefully, Cougar’s gun trained on their every move.
“In,” Clay growls, gesturing harshly to the front door, pulling rank with voice alone.
Roque wants to remind Clay that they’re not that anymore, not soldiers, let alone his team, but Cougar is not-so-subtly herding him, so Roque goes.
They—Clay and Pooch and Jensen, since Cougar is ‘compromised’ and Roque doesn’t give a single, solitary fuck about Aisha’s opinion—make Roque sit in the front room with Jolene and the kids while they talk on the back porch.
Jolene is as nice as ever, not even bringing up the whole, “They told me you were a traitor and also dead” thing, and Beth takes Jolene’s lead easily. She even apologizes for screaming at him, and offers to draw him a picture with all the severity of her eight years. Roque graciously accepts.
Linneus, at least, is openly fascinated by Roque. He crawls his way over, and when Roque picks him up, under Jolene’s watchful eye, he grabs at every bit of Roque that he can. He’s especially fascinated by Roque’s burns.
“Ei, Lino,” Roque says at one point, from underneath the boy’s small fingers, the quick slur of his Portuguese garnering a giggle, “Easy with the pulling, filho.”
Jolene is smiling in earnest now, and Roque’s sure he looks stupid as hell.
“Lino?” Cougar questions, and Roque’s not even surprised that the sniper had snuck his way back in.
“He’s too tiny for such a big name,” Roque grunts as Linneus digs sharp infant nails into Roque’s stubble and pulls, “Let him be a baby.”
Cougar hums, amused, but then Clay and Jensen and Pooch are back, grim-faced and eyes on Roque’s every move.
Roque hands Linneus back over to Jolene before Pooch can even own up to feeling uncomfortable, and immediately wishes he hadn’t, because there’s hardly anything that would give them pause now. Except—
Except then Cougar comes to stand next to him, silent but chin raised.
Well, Roque thinks. Maybe they’ll yell, maybe they’ll hit him. But when all is said and done, with Cougar thrumming tension at his side, ready to fight for him—to die with him, instead of for him—Roque can take on the whole goddamn world.
It’s all fucked, is the thing.
The conversation—if it can be called that—passes in a blur, in a way that makes Roque wonder if he hit his head at some point. Clay is authoritarian and commanding in the way he never was when Roque needed him to be, and that rankles so much that Roque can hardly stand it. Pooch is tight-lipped and Jensen is petulant, but Roque can recognize that some part of them understands exactly why he did it. He doesn’t need their approval to know he’s in the right, but knowing that they don’t despise him—that he still has them—goes a long way.
Aisha is there, giving her opinion—which, granted, isn’t wrong. Cougar and Roque both knew that the whole plan, such as it was, was risky as all hell, and only non-treasonous on a technicality, but “treason” didn’t mean shit in the face of getting the team where it needed to be and Roque hardly wants to hear a single goddamn word out the woman who wanted to dispose of them before she decided to use them instead.
Clay wants to watch him, Jensen wants to punch him, and Pooch and Aisha decline to further involve themselves.
Roque thinks he might explode.
Cougar just looks to Roque, real steady, quirking an eyebrow in the way that means up to you and I got your back all at once.
“You shoulda left me in fuckin’ San Juan,” Roque mumbles, petulant. “Shouldn’t be fuckin’ around like there’s a place for me here.”
The guest bedroom is small and almost stifling in its quaintness. Roque had immediately pulled the mattress from the frame and on to the floor, pulling all the sheets and pillows with it. Cougar had only watched, quietly amused, as Roque crafted a nest positioned out of sight of the room’s only window.
Jolene had only hummed when Roque had said the two of them would share, thoughtful. Cougar is glad now, that they have the room to themselves. If all the others were here, Roque would probably keep his thoughts to himself unless under pain of death. Maybe not even that would’ve helped.
“Te queremos... te quiero aquí,” Cougar mumbles back, shifting until they face each other and placing careful fingers on Roque’s face, trailing them along the mountains and valleys of burn scars. “You got these for our sakes, pa’ familia. Te necesitamos aquí.”
It’s nothing he hasn’t said before; and while Roque is tense, stiff in that new, angrier way that he carries himself these days, he doesn’t shrug Cougar off. That’s a start.
Careful, and without words, Cougar folds the two of them together, fitting limbs alongside one another until their breathing syncs.
“Eu odeio isso,” Roque whispers furiously, over and over, letting himself be vulnerable because only Cougar can understand him, and Cougar doesn’t say anything, even when he feels the pinprick of tears along his collarbone.
Jensen mentions Max in passing, offhand, and Cougar and Pooch nearly don’t react in time. As it is, Cougar only barely manages to snag Roque’s sleeve and they can hardly hod him back between the two of them.
“What do you mean, Max, like–like he’s not dead?!”
“He’s not dead,” is Clay’s input, helpful as ever.
“Fuck off,” Roque spits, yanking one arm out of Pooch’s grip, looking the angriest he ever has at Clay, furious beyond even the way things were in Bolivia. “Are you fucking serious, Clay? Can you not even do that right—?”
“Roque,” Cougar cuts in sharply, voice low.
“No,” Roque snarls, rough. “After all the shit you gave me, after everything—”
After everything I had to give, Cougar translates.
“–and you couldn’t even kill the bastard? Caralho!”
“Roque,” Cougar snaps, before Clay—red in the face, ruddy with anger or embarassment or both–or Jensen or Pooch can respond. And it is a snap, a forcefully rolled r, the click of teeth, the bite of it startling all of them into silence.
“Sea como sea,” Cougar soothes, once he has Roque’s full attention. “This is what we now have to work with.”
For all that it soothes Roque, it results in a lot more yelling. Clay, stung, who growls out “Who the fuck is we?” and Pooch, who tries to explain how it all went down, and Jensen stilll cursing Cougar and Roque to hell and back, but not nearly with the same vitriol as earlier. It’s Roque’s absolutely acidic “fuck you, Clay” that finishes it, and the way he storms away—leaving them behind again—to sit in tense, awkward silence.
It gets worse after that, and the reason is—as always, when it comes to Roque—Clay.