Chapter Text
It all started when Cougar went missing.
The silent sniper had gone on ahead of them, taking his place on the roof of the office building across the street from their target, sheltered by the darkness of a New York fall night. The city might never sleep, but where the lights didn’t shine, it was blacker than black.
With Pooch waiting in the car and Clay wiring the explosives in the basement, Jensen had worked his way in, hacked into the mainframe, triggered the building emergency evacuation, then watched in glee as Cougar’s expert shots took out the targets one by one as they fled the building. He’d buzzed Cougar with the radio, to tell him good job, and the other responded with a simple “De nada,” then – as ordered – they cut radio contact.
But when they regrouped, Cougar wasn’t there.
Tugging his lower lid down so that he could take out his contacts, Jensen frowned. “Cougs said he was gonna be late?”
Pooch frowned, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. “No.”
Blinking rapidly, the hacker frowned. “Weird.”
“Mmhmm,” Pooch nodded, watching their commanding officer out through the window. Clay was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, scowling as he spoke rapidly into his cell, glancing skywards occasionally. Presumably, he was speaking to Aisha, who was monitoring the situation from a helicopter overhead. “He never called in to say there was a delay. I don’t like it.”
Sliding his glasses back on, the blond frowned. “Cougs is tough. He can take care of himself.”
“Sure, but you know what the colonel’s like. Ever since LA…”
“Yeah,” Jensen muttered. Clay had always been overprotective of his team. But ever since Roque had betrayed them and nearly caused all of their deaths, he’d gotten almost scarily mother hen. “I know.”
The front passenger door was suddenly ripped open, and Clay threw himself in his seat. “The roof’s clean.”
“So he wasn’t sniped himself,” Jensen said, relieved.
“Doesn’t look like it. Pooch, bring the car round. We’ll sweep the building.”
“Not gonna be possible,” Pooch tapped the front of the police scanner that had been keeping up a slow, static-y buzz in the background. “Been monitoring – they’re already sweeping the building.”
“Shit.” Clay hunkered down in his seat. “Then we’ll wait til they find him. And get him back.”
“Yes, sir,” Pooch smirked.
“Can it.”
Jensen rapid fire clicked his pen, toe tapping as he scoured the security footage of the building he’d broken into in the first place, and the one Cougar had gone AWOL in. The police sweeps had found nothing, which could have just meant that Cougar had evaded them, but it had now been seventeen hours and the Mexican still hadn’t made it back to the safehouse.
Pooch was napping, baseball cap pulled over his eyes, and Clay was wearing a hole through the carpet as he paced, calling every contact he’d ever made to see if they knew anything. Anything.
“C’mon, Cougs…” Jensen leaned closer to the screen, frowning, “Where are yo – gotcha!”
As one, the other men bolted up, even the “sleeping” Pooch. Crowding in on either side of him, Clay demanded, “Where? Where is he?!”
Jensen tapped the screen with his fingernail. It showed the roof of the building where Cougar had been stationed, and there he was, mostly immersed in shadows, lying on his stomach with his gun, intent and focused. “It was the muzzle flash that let me find him, see…” he touched the screen again as his gun flared with another shot. “He hid well.”
“All right, so we found him. Where did he go?”
Jensen frowned, and put the video on double time. They watched the gun flare at least three more times, then Cougar reached up to touch his throat, activating his radio. “That was when we were talking,” he explained.
Clay nodded sharply.
Cougar then pushed himself up onto his knees, to stand.
Then he was gone.
“Woah woah woah!” Pooch threw up his hands. “Back that up! Where did he go?!”
Jensen backed up the video as ordered, then put it on slow motion. Like moving through molasses, Cougar lowered his hand from his throat, flicked the safety on, then rose to one knee. Then even in slo mo, he was there one second, and gone the next.
“What the hell?” Clay demanded. “Did they cut it? Was the video tampered with?!”
“Time stamp says no, but give me a minute…” Jensen frowned, confused, and started searching through the file parameters, fingers flying across the keyboard. “Nothing in the file, hold on…” he frowned, eyes narrowed at the screen. “The light doesn’t change at all. I mean, it has to be edited, right? But whoever did it is a friggin’ genius, cause I can’t find any sign they did it.”
“Play it again,” Clay ordered, face dark, brows furrowed.
Marking the spots, Jensen flicked the thirty one second section of hand to throat safety on climb to knees and gone video on a loop. Over and over, their teammate reappeared, then vanished.
“Burn that for me,” Clay barked. “I’ll get it to Aisha, she’ll get it out. We will find him.”
Leaning back from the computer, Jensen scrubbed at his eyes, glasses shoved up onto his forehead. He hadn’t slept in three days, and it showed. Scruffy, with an almost beard, he shoved his glasses back into place over his red, bloodshot eyes, and said, “I might have something.”
Clay looked up sharply. “What?”
“Grab me another Red Bull and c’mere.”
The commanding officer did so, slapping the can into the blonde’s hand. Cracking it open, Jensen took a couple deep, relieved swallows, then gestured at the screen. “I’ve been playing with light balance and shit, to see if I could see something else. I threw it into reverse negative, then eliminated the blacks, then switched it back… did a bunch of other stuff I can’t even remember right now, I’m so tired…”
“Get to the point, Jensen.”
Jensen nodded. “It ain’t pretty, but take a look.”
The screen was grainy and jumpy, but Cougar was still visible at the bottom, lying on his stomach with his gun. “Look here,” Jensen tapped the opposite corner. “Does that look like a person to you?”
Clay squinted at the dark shape. “It does look vaguely person shaped.”
“Yeah, well, I put this video through hell. Okay, now watch.” He flicked the video to 1/60th speed. Now Cougar almost looked like he wasn’t even moving at all as he rose to his knees. “Watch the person in the corner… watch.”
Rapidly, as if at a full run and as if the video wasn’t slowed to a second in a minute, the shadow raced forward, then quite obviously wrapped its arms around Cougar’s torso, lifted him up like in a bear hug, then dashed back the way it had come, carrying Cougar with it, until it disappeared off screen.
Jensen flicked the video off.
“What the hell was that?!”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Jensen sighed. “But that’s all I got.”
“What the hell was that?!” Clay said again, making the blonde look up at him, frowning slightly. “Nothing can move that fast!”
“Nothing human,” Jensen quipped, trying to lighten the mood.
“Don’t you start,” he pointed at him sharply, and the Corporal wilted. “This must have been some kind of editing trick to throw us off the trail of what really happened to him. Keep searching, got it?”
“Yes sir.”
Clay just glowered at him, but didn’t tell him to stop doing it like he always did with Pooch.
When Jensen finally fell to sleep after nearly five days of a Red Bull fueled buzz, he was plagued by weird ass dreams that just didn’t make sense.
Cougar was dressed in an immaculate white doctor’s jacket – immaculate, that was, except for an arch of fresh arterial blood that had splashed across his chest. It was so fresh that Jensen swore he could still see it dripping, could still smell it in the air. He looked exactly like he had in Budapest, actually, when he and Jensen had been assigned to that undercover assassination at that dentist’s office. When Jensen had stabbed the guy in the throat with a dental pick (desperate times called for desperate measures) the resulting arc of blood had done exactly this.
This time Cougar was wearing his hat, though.
“I need to hear your heartbeat,” he was saying, lifting the stethoscope off the counter. “To make sure it’s strong enough.”
“Sure,” Jensen tugged up his shirt.
Instead of using the stethoscope, his friend pressed his ear to Jensen’s chest, frowning. “Oh good, it’s already stopped. Yes, that is a very good sign.”
“You’re talking an awful lot,” Jensen frowned, cold now.
“Of course, I am your doctor. Now a blood sample.” He took a scalpel, and slashed Jensen’s wrist open. Blood bubbled up instantly, and began dripping off his wrist and splashing on Jensen’s jean-clad lap. “Mmm. Iron rich. Bit heavy on the caffeine though.”
“Cougar doesn’t talk this much.”
“Of course, of course…”
Jensen knew now he was dreaming and strained to wake up. “You aren’t really Cougar. Cougar doesn’t talk like this.”
He smirked, and leaned in closer. He smelled like death and rot, and the blond recoiled. “Maybe Cougar wants to talk to you like this.”
Nose curling at the smell, he snapped, “If Cougar talked this much to me, it’d all be in Spanish.”
Dream Cougar-not-Cougar laughed. “All right. I approve.”
“Of what?” Jensen blinked.
He tugged off the cowboy hat then, and he was suddenly another man – taller, broader. Balder, actually, and Jensen was overcome with the desire to snicker and call him the Scorpion King, but before he could think of such a thing, Cougar – the real Cougar, he was sure of it, was behind him, and twisted Jensen’s neck, snapping it.
He bolted awake with a yelp, the laptop screen still glowing as it worked despite the button mashing he’d been doing with his face.
“Holy shit,” he gasped, hands trembling.