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sonora_conejaPairing: Hannibal/Morrison
Rating: R
Warnings: none
Summary: A fill for this prompt over at the kink meme
First mission fic!
But with a twist?
Hannibal's first mission. With a side of Russ/Hannibal! JWB did a great one, a while back, but let's have another, yay!
Lieutenant John Smith kills a man on his first live-fire mission. His chalk leader, Captain Morrison, thinks it’s about time they had a chat...
Lieutenant Smith slides around the edge of the rotting adobe wall, palming up the five-inch fighting knife from his thigh, feeling the hilt, firm and cool. It slides right into his palm and he tries to keep his breath down. Gauge the distance between the sound of the door opening and the lighting of the first lamp that’s coming, remember the height of the silhouette that just came in.
Comparing it against the list.
The list had had five names on it.
Three weeks ago.
Today, it has only one.
The last one.
Then they can get out of this fucking country. Stop eating MREs and half-cooked goat meat and whatever else they can find. No fucking pack. Go back to Turkey and get a decent shower and some goddamn deworming meds and then maybe, maybe, Captain Morrison will finally... and the lieutenant smiles to himself.
And launches.
The fight’s over pretty damn fast. Twenty, thirty seconds. But Sherdil Hamadi doesn’t go down easy, and as John slams his blade home, right above his own knee, holding the fucker to the floor as he body convulses, muscles firing for the last time, John realizes there’s a small knife driven at least an inch into his thigh, through his combats. A long, bleeding scrape under his shirt. Two broken fingers, and there's something wrong with his nose.
Still. He can't stay here.
He rolls off, wiping his knife as he goes on the dead man’s robes, holding the bile in until he’s outside, hacking up the pain and the stress and the fact he just killed his first man, a fucking goat watching him from across the yard, lights burning in village windows, dim and distant. So much easier, he thinks, ambushing his guy in his brother-in-law's fucking farmhouse than the one that Sergeant Reyes beat to death in a bathhouse in Herat, or the two that Captain Morrison, Russ, took out through that open window...
Five names, three weeks. A HALO jump into now-Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, right near the Pakistan border, after a list of people that somebody at the CIA or somewhere had decided needed to die. But they’d just helped these people kick out the Russians, hadn’t they? And the Cold War was over, so who gave a shit about Afghanistan any more?
Russ hadn’t had much to say about that. Just flicked a piece of dirt off whatever he’d been eating at the time and hadn’t answered. He’d taken John apart later, though, first chance he got, out of earshot of the two sergeants with them.
“Never question orders in front of them,” he’d growled. “We’re here. We’re going to kill our men. We’re going to leave. That’s it.”
“That’s all we get?”
Russ had patted him on the shoulder, squeezed, let his hand linger a little too long. “Not until we get to make the plans, John, you and me.”
“You and me, captain?” John had echoed, feeling, not for the first time, a warmth flood through him from this man’s touch. Dirty and tired and still, like a bolt, right through him.
“Yeah, el-tee, you and me,” Russ had replied, and slapped him lightly on the cheek. “Come on, let’s go pop your cherry on one of these goat-fuckers, yeah?”
But every wasted moment’s a waste he can’t afford right now, and so he rips out the little blade stuck in his thigh, wraps it as best he can with a long strip off his lungee, hanging useless around his neck anyway now, and jogs out into the night, following the dry streambed out to the meeting point, about two miles away.
Where Russ will be waiting for him.
+++++
Adrenalin spent, leg aching at the puncture wound, nose jarred to the point of numbness, John is exhausted by the time he makes it to the pre-arranged location.
He doesn’t see the team at first, doesn’t know if anybody else has made it, but there somebody comes out of the darkness, dirty local robe, hands out, talking in Farsi or whatever the hell it is they speak here. Jumpy as he is, John has the guy on his stomach in the dirt, knife flashing out again in the moonlight... and his wrist is caught by a strong hand, right as its about to arc down.
“Jesus, kid,” says an achingly familiar voice. “You’re going to kill our corporal there.”
Corporal Nezami tosses him off, rolling himself up in the dirt. Iranian. Sniper and translater for this little mission, and he grins in the darkness, clapping John on the shoulder. “You had us worried, el-tee,” he says lightly, accent heavy, and John realizes that’s what he was hearing. “Almost late.”
“Yeah, but I’m on time, right?”
“You kill that fucker?” he asks, flat and low. There are things going on with Nezami, things having to do with his family back in Iran, that nobody else on the team really understands. Every time there’s shit out in Central Asia, tasked to their unit, Nezami’s the first to volunteer. But he’s the only one who didn’t get a kill in this time. “Caused based on how bloody awful you look right now...”
“Knife through the heart,” he says, trying to find the captain in the night. Focuses his answer there. “Real clean, just like you said, captain.”
Russ is standing a little bit off to the side, that scraggly bread he spent months growing out for these missions of his juts out from his chin, pensive and still, like a Grecian statue from a past age. His body stands out, dark against the star field overhead. So far from civilization, John thinks crazily, his head beginning to swim. The stars here have been the brightest that he’s ever seen them...
“Your nose broken there, Smith?” Russ asks, distant as the moon.
Reyes gives the lieutenant a hand up. He’s the oldest of them, twenty-eight, and there are things in his eyes that will never go away, and those eyes fix on the captain now.
John feels cold inside. Did he fuck up? Russ had agreed to the plan, his plan, the little waiting game in Chishti Sharif, staking out the man’s old haunts, family homes, that sort of thing, after they’d flushed him out of Herat.
He’ll run home, Russ, and we’ll fucking catch him there...
“I’m sure he did you proud, Morrison. Mission accomplished. Can we get out of this fucking shitbox of a country now?” Reyes asks.
Russ nods, and goes for his radio.
“We’ve got a ten mile hike to the extraction point,” he says, thumb playing over the button. He doesn’t look down. “You going to make it, John?”
“Fucking A,” he grits back.
And it’s not until nearly four hours later that anything gives. When the stars fade and the sun starts poking up over the barren desert wastes, when they round a hill and see the Blackhawk circling, when Reyes and Nezami run ahead and Russ is bringing up the rear, M-16 cradled in the crook like it fucking belongs there, muzzle down, that anything changes.
Russ, silent in his heavy hiking boots, pulls up next to John and lays an arm around his shoulder, pulling the younger man’s head on to his own. The lieutenant hesitates for a second and then let Russ do it, hold him there.
They’re still walking.
“Good work, el-tee,” he says softly, and kisses the top of his head. “Real good work.”
“Cherry popped, boss,” he replies back.
“Not quite yet,” Russs says, and John feels the beard, lips brushing his cheek.
He looks up, heart starting to pound over the sound of the chopper blades, hoping, hoping, that maybe Russ does actually mean...
“Get you your tag, el-tee, right here,” the captain says, and punches him in the shoulder, both of them separate entities again, and John suddenly feels weak. There’s a huge stain on his pant leg, his own blood dark on the khaki. His vision starts to narrow, and he tries to say something, but the bird’s so close and he can’t override that noise and there’s the strangest sensation of...
And down he goes, into the dirt, everything scattering away from him, back into darkness in the rising dawn.
+++++
When John finally comes to, he’s back in his dorm room at Incirlik Air Base, in bed. Russ is sprawled out on the room’s tiny sofa, legs thrown up over the armrest, thumbing through a thin book, obviously bored.
And the lieutenant smiles to himself. He’s been with in the same unit as Captain Morrison for a year, and he doesn’t know much about the man, except that he’s not a huge fan of reading. Or paperwork. Or anything that’s not fieldwork, really. Anything that takes him away from the fight, wherever the fight is that month.
“Gilgamesh too boring for you, sir?” John says with a grin, and Russ looks up with an expression of pure relief.
“Thank fuck, el-tee,” he says, and lays the book down carefully; John’s gotten on his case more than once about treating his private library with respect. “Don’t know why you don’t read Tom Clancy like everyone else.”
“Fuck Tom Clancy.”
“Yeah, we’re cooler than Jack Ryan,” Russ agrees, and comes over, leaning against the wall, hands shoved in his pockets. The beard’s gone, which means they’ve probably got orders back to the States or something. “Much more badass.”
“Not very badass of me, passing out, was it?”
“Don’t get your panties in a twist over it, Smith. You were bleeding pretty bad. Hike was probably keeping the wound open or something,” and the captain gets kind of quiet. “Docs said a few more hours and you might have had some complications.”
“How’d I get...”
“You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“Yeah, you were pretty out of it for a while, man. And then they doped you up at the clinic.”
The rest of it’s hanging between them, suspended in the droop of Russ’ shoulders, the way those hands are turning in his pockets. Stayed with you until you woke up, I was worried, I’m sorry... It’s the captain’s job to worry about that sort of thing. On him to make sure his men come home, get patched up or boxed out with a flag on top. Well, today it was the former and not the latter, but John knows better than to tell the older man he doesn’t have to shoulder that guilt today.
“Thanks for getting me out of there,” is what he says instead. Close enough.
Russ shrugs. “We’re Rangers, el-tee. That’s what we do.” And he grins. “All the shit that’s not supposed to be possible.”
John pushes himself up, feeling under the issued sheets for his leg. There’s a bandage in the way, and when he touches it, he can tell that it’s been stiched.
“They had to put seven in. Wasn’t anything,” Russ says, and he’s kind of driving his back into the wall.
“Not much of a scar.”
“Your nose is kind of fucked up. That’s kind of the same thing.”
John pokes at it experimentally. It hurts. “Yeah, but it’s not a scar.”
The two officers sit there and stare at each other for a moment more, and then Russ drops his eyes. “Look, John, I didn’t...”
And here it is. Here’s their way out. Here’s Russ’ opportunity to say that he only planted that kiss because he was just caught up, that he was glad he was getting his team out alive. Here’s John’s chance to say it was good to have the support after the stress of the past three weeks, that he totally understands. That there isn't anything going on. They stay friends, Russ the boss, John the second in command, nobody going fag around here... everything just like it’s supposed to be.
But fuck that, John decides. He's spent too much time wondering, hoping, to let it slip away now that it's finally come to the fore.
“Didn’t what, Russ?”
The captain rolls his eyes up to the ceiling, hands digging in those pockets. Like he’s having a conversation with himself. “Naw, that’s some bullshit,” he says finally, locking his gaze on John. There’s concern there. And lust. “I absolutely meant to kiss you.”
John shivers. Oh, he’s been right. They have been dancing around... whatever this is. Whatever this is going to turn into. Whatever they're going to do. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Russ pushes off the wall to sit on the edge of the narrow dorm bed. Puts his hand on John’s good leg. “And I want to do it again.”
“Yeah?”
One of Russ’ hands, still scratched up from the past three weeks, half of his pinkie nail missing, a rough, hard hand, touches the wall, right next to John’s head and their faces are close. Very, very close. “Yeah. I want to do it again. You got a problem with that, lieutenant?”
Before he even realizes he moved, John’s got a hand wrapped up into the older man’s shirt, stopping him from moving away, holding him there, and Russ is smiling at him.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah...”
Soft, slightly chapped lips close down over his, and for a moment, John wonders if he really did die out in that desert, if this man he's looked up to for the better part of a year really is doing this, really does want him like this...
And then a hand runs around the back of his neck, so careful to avoid his damaged nose, and there's no doubt, no doubt at all.
And John opens up, and lets Russ in.
It’s an awkward angle for a kiss, Russ leaning down, trying so hard not to catch that broken nose, and John reaching up, not really sure what he’s supposed to do with a man, but he knows enough to know that he wants...
A hint of rough on those chapped lips, the first glide of the captain’s tongue, pushing against his own, the way their teeth clash, a calloused hand at the nape of his neck, petting the short hairs back there, not too rough
“You ever done this before, John?” Russ asks, attacking the pulse point on John’s neck now, stroking down his thigh. “Anybody claimed this gorgeous ass of yours?”
John closes his eyes and lets his head hit the wall. Shit. But he couldn’t lie... “No, n-no, sir. Girls, but ...”
The captain growls, low and almost frantic, the vibrations heading straight for John’s cock, already stirring, approving of the proceedings thus far. “They ever give you what you need?”
“S-sir?”
He knows his voice is shaking and John can’t help it. It’s already so different from the few times John has done this with a girl, none of that sweetness, the hair falling around his face, the surrender, all those soft things he always knew he was supposed to like. All those things he’s never been able to enjoy. All those things that turn sex into an exercise, unsatisfying and hollow.
“Did they give you what you need, the girls?” A thumb strokes his face, their mouths touch again, and the kiss is different now. Softer, but more demanding. Less desperate. Far more certain. An offer. One both parties aren’t going to refuse. “They can’t, can they?”
He stares up as it ends, feeling like he’s falling, Russ holding him still with his gaze alone. “What... what do I need, sir?”
“What they can’t give you.”
The captain pulls his own PT shirt off, those shorts he’s wearing, his briefs, and tosses it all aside. He’s all lean muscle and tanned skin, chest hair bleached blonde from the sun. He’s had ink done on three continents and John’s been in awe of that since the first time he saw the man naked in the showers.
He can’t help looking now.
The Ranger tag on his arm flexes in full view as that arm wraps around his head, fingers tangling into his hair. A Mayan glyph stretches over a hipbone, the legacy of some op that Russ can’t talk about. There’s an Hellenic officer’s helmet tattooed right over his heart, transverse crest blood red. And a short column of black surnames falls underneath that, and those, John knows, are from the men he’s lost under his command. Six. Four on that one mission that he refuses to discuss. He doesn’t realize he’s touching this until Russ catches his hand, holding it tight, and crashes their lips together again.
“You want me, John?” comes the breathy little pant against his mouth as he pulls off the younger officer’s lower lip. John can taste the words, feel them rumble through him, and he’s harder right now than he’s ever been in his life. “I’ve wanted you since the first goddamn day I set eyes on you, knew I had to have you, wanted to take you, wanted you to know...”
“Yes, christ, Russ, please...” the lieutenant groans.
“Anything, John...”
And this, the lieutenant thinks as Russ kneels up on the bed, tearing off the sheets, and John realizes he’s naked underneath. He briefly wonders how the fuck that happened, and then thought flees as his captain pushes him flat on the foam pad, moving over him, holding him down with those strong, strong legs of his, that hand in his dark hair tightening, this is good.
This is it.
This is what he’s been missing. What’s always been missing. That domination, that giving over, the surrender... and he doesn’t even realize his head’s fallen back until Russ breaks the kiss, licking up his neck in one, hot stroke, nipping right below his ear. An invitation, he realizes.
One he’s desperate to make.
One he’s frantic to have accepted.
“Fucking beautiful,” Russ growls, right in John’s ear, warmth shooting through the younger man. His captain nips at the lobe, palms John’s cock through his boxers and the junior officer can’t help the moan that it draws from him, or the way he tightens down on those strong shoulders above him, needing more, needing something to hold on to while the captain works him, hard and fast and exactly, exactly so, taking him in hand, stroking the shaft, rolling his balls. “You’re gorgeous...”
John’s legs are falling apart of their own accord, the uninjured one drawing unconsciously up the older man’s side, rubbing against all that sun-baked skin, the hard muscle. Straining now. Russ hooks an elbow under and presses himself full-length against John’s shuddering form, their cocks sliding together for the first time, and the lieutenant has to bite down on his own hand to keep himself from screaming out.
It alternates, the smoothness of Russ’ cock, hard as steel against him, the rough grasp of his hand, pliant and flexing, and John can’t breath, can’t breath at all, feeling himself racing towards the edge, faster, better, better than it’s ever been, just this, trapped under his captain’s body, at his mercy, the thrill of that realization sending his arousal spiralling. “Russ...” he pleads.
It gets him a chuckle, some mirth the lieutenant can’t catch over the roar of his own building orgasm, the way it spills over, spurts of hot semen splattering both their chests as he comes harder than he’s ever come before in his life, as Russ follows a moment behind. It’s strange, John thinks, the surge of another man’s release over his own skin, strange and wonderful, and as Russ collapses to the bed next to him, John strokes a weak hand against sweaty, sticky skin, breathing in deep, the scent of this man something familiar, something utterly new, something he just knows he’ll never forget.
They lay together now, tangled up on the small dorm bed, breathing together as sense returns to things.
“We’ll have to get your tag, John,” Russ says finally, rising ans going for his shorts. He squats down, ass fully on display, fishing out a packet of cigarettes, the lighter his dad gave him when he was commissioned. He taps a white stick out of the pack, lights, tosses both to John. “First op deserves it. Need to get the Ranger on you.”
“You take me?” he asks, pushing up and grabbing a cigarette for himself. His leg’s bleeding again, just a little, and his orgasm is still thrummng through him and he can’t remember ever feeling this good in his life. “You seem up on this shit.”
Russ grins, wry. “You scared of needles, John?”
“A little,” he shrugs, flicking open the lighter and puffing the cigarette awake.
“Pussy,” Russ jokes, and John starts laughing - it’s all bullshit and it feels good to laugh and he can’t stop staring at his captain.
A year, a year with this man, his casual stance and his calm words and the aggression, tempered into something deadly by seven years of near-endless combat that still haven’t turned him into a monster. A year, and he finally has him. I love him, John thinks, the same thing he’s been thinking since he first saw the man fight, dust rising in the Georgia morning. I love him, but it means something different than what he’d thought then.
Means something so much more.
But John doesn’t say it, not right now. He can’t say it yet. Someday, maybe.
Not yet.
“When?”
Russ leans up against the wall, bare foot up on the cracking plaster. He blows a mouthful of smoke up towards the ceiling. Pensive. Distant. Beautiful. “How about tonight?”
"Yeah?"
"Yeah..." and the captain flicks his cigarette into the battered little kitchenette sink with perfect aim.
+++++
As it turns out, there’s a guy, a contractor, here at Incirlik that does tattoo work.
At the hospital, of all places.
“Yeah, well, that’s how it goes around here,” the guy says when John asks about this. He’s free-handing the tattoo off Russ’ left shoulder - Rangers aren’t common around here, and neither he nor the captain have an actual print of the correct design. So, they’re resorting to this, but it seems to be working out okay. The artist has steady hands, like a sniper or a pilot, and he’s getting the design perfect. “Guys want to keep goin’ on their ink while they’re out here, you feel me? And where they supposed to go? Downtown?” He shudders. “No fucking thank you. This country?”
“Infection,” Morrison says, and nods. He’s got his t-shirt off for this, and John’s having a hard time not looking at him. The lean lines of his body. That helmet on his chest. The scruff along his jaw, the facial hair growing back in, their return to the States evidently a far-distant reality. “Got that in Panama.” He’s talking about the Mayan design on his hip, and John flashes him a smile. “You sure as shit don’t want that, el-tee.”
“Right, boss,” he says, and he really, really wants a cigarette, but the artist has already told him now. “It’s not like I got stabbed recently or anything.”
But the captain shoots him that look, and he shuts up. Right. No talking about that sort of thing, their missions, and the artist must have been around here a while, because he doesn’t even ask about it.
“Yeah, it’s brutal. Worse than prison tats, and you guys deserve better than that bullshit,” the artist says, and holds up the sketch. “That work for you?”
He hands it over to John, who looks at it, unable to help the little smile. It’s not going to be just his tattoo, but Russ’. He’ll have Russ’ own mark on his arm. Have something from this man that means so goddamn much. And he doesn’t care about the implications, the future, anything. The way he feels, right now, about this man, his captain, his lover...
“You going retard on me, el-tee?” Russ sighs, and snatches the paper away, examining it carefully, and passes it back to the artist. “Fucking perfect.”
“Great,” the guy beams and stands up from behind the little drafting table he’s got set up in the exam room. “Let me go get my stuff ready and I’ll be back in in a jiffy, okay? And man, Smith, shirt off.”
Russ snorts a little laugh once the door closes. “Did that guy just say jiffy?”
“Fucking-A,” John agrees, and goes for the hem of his own t-shirt.
His hands are batted away and Russ shoves him back into a handy wall, those hard, biting kisses and desert-rough hands reducing him to a panting mass in mere seconds.
John gasps.
Russ sighs.
It’s so out of character that John pulls back, sliding along the wall until there’s some space to look across, but the captain’s hands don’t leave where they’ve settled along the rise of his hips. “What is it, boss?”
The older man doesn’t answer right away, thumb stroking his hip, something flitting behind those keen eyes of his, mesmerizing and yet so open, so warm, like John could just fall right into that and find himself at home again.
But he can’t go home, not with his mother still pissed at his decision to go into the military, his father long gone, sisters married. No home to go to there.
And he can’t ask this of Russ, what he wants to ask. What he wants.
Not at all.
They both belong here, in the Army, the Rangers, the suck, the fight, the blood, the ache of tired muscles, that edge of reality he found on the op, in that mud hut in Afghanistan, when he could have died, when the target died instead. They both need the clarity it all brings, John realizes. And if feelings get involved in this, everything’s going to get muddled and confused and murky. Because they aren’t allowed to have this. Because men don’t fall in love with other men...
“Stop thinking, John,” Russ orders, his best captain’s voice on. “You’re thinking about this too much.”
He swallows. “Russ, I...”
“You need to let go. It’s what you want, John, to be taken away, to lose yourself in something good, surrender that control you’ve got, all that brain of yours turned off, to feel instead of think...” Russ murmurs, hand rubbing on the younger man’s belly, surprisingly gentle after yesterday’s rough display. Their lips touch, brush, away again. “To give over...”
“Russ, I...” and the younger officer closes his eyes, letting the truth in that wash over him. So true. To be held down, to be laid bare, to be held after, to know... “It’s harder than you make it sound.”
“Easiest goddamn thing in the world. You jump, I’ll catch. Just like that.” And he snaps his fingers.
“Russ, I don’t know about...”
“You can trust me, John.” His shirt’s pulled slowly off, a kiss planted on his breastbone, lips trailing up in between words. “You and me, we’re right. We’re safe. This right here is safe, I swear, I’ll keep it safe, keep you safe. I want to keep you, need you with me. You can trust us, together...”
The door clicks, the little sound preceding its opening, and the captain pulls off and away, grabbing his own shirt from where he tossed it on a chair earlier, replacing it with John’s. Casual, easy, like it’s simple to separate these things out, oil and water coming clean of each other. Nothing of one carried into the other. So maybe Russ is right. Maybe this can work. Maybe they can keep both sides of this thing pure...
The artist grabs a pair of gloves and starts setting up. “You still doing this, lieutenant?” he jokes, completely oblivious, by his own design or theirs, to the tension in the room.
John wants to have this. Wants it right fucking now. Wants it more than anything else in his life. Wants it to be in his life, for as long as it can be. And when it’s all gone - because everybody in their line of work is intimately acquainted with how fast things get gone in this world - he wants to have it still.
Wants to remember.
Wants to know.
So he nods. “Fuck yes. No question. Left arm,” he says, and a genuinely surprised smile spreads over Russ’ face as the older man pulls his shirt back on.
“You staying for this, captain?” the artist asks, a little puzzled, like he's expecting Morrison to head for the open door.
But he just shuts it instead.
“Unit tradition,” Russ replies gruffly, and as the little machine starts up, John would swear that he can see tears in those eyes.
Rating: R
Warnings: none
Summary: A fill for this prompt over at the kink meme
First mission fic!
But with a twist?
Hannibal's first mission. With a side of Russ/Hannibal! JWB did a great one, a while back, but let's have another, yay!
Lieutenant John Smith kills a man on his first live-fire mission. His chalk leader, Captain Morrison, thinks it’s about time they had a chat...
Lieutenant Smith slides around the edge of the rotting adobe wall, palming up the five-inch fighting knife from his thigh, feeling the hilt, firm and cool. It slides right into his palm and he tries to keep his breath down. Gauge the distance between the sound of the door opening and the lighting of the first lamp that’s coming, remember the height of the silhouette that just came in.
Comparing it against the list.
The list had had five names on it.
Three weeks ago.
Today, it has only one.
The last one.
Then they can get out of this fucking country. Stop eating MREs and half-cooked goat meat and whatever else they can find. No fucking pack. Go back to Turkey and get a decent shower and some goddamn deworming meds and then maybe, maybe, Captain Morrison will finally... and the lieutenant smiles to himself.
And launches.
The fight’s over pretty damn fast. Twenty, thirty seconds. But Sherdil Hamadi doesn’t go down easy, and as John slams his blade home, right above his own knee, holding the fucker to the floor as he body convulses, muscles firing for the last time, John realizes there’s a small knife driven at least an inch into his thigh, through his combats. A long, bleeding scrape under his shirt. Two broken fingers, and there's something wrong with his nose.
Still. He can't stay here.
He rolls off, wiping his knife as he goes on the dead man’s robes, holding the bile in until he’s outside, hacking up the pain and the stress and the fact he just killed his first man, a fucking goat watching him from across the yard, lights burning in village windows, dim and distant. So much easier, he thinks, ambushing his guy in his brother-in-law's fucking farmhouse than the one that Sergeant Reyes beat to death in a bathhouse in Herat, or the two that Captain Morrison, Russ, took out through that open window...
Five names, three weeks. A HALO jump into now-Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, right near the Pakistan border, after a list of people that somebody at the CIA or somewhere had decided needed to die. But they’d just helped these people kick out the Russians, hadn’t they? And the Cold War was over, so who gave a shit about Afghanistan any more?
Russ hadn’t had much to say about that. Just flicked a piece of dirt off whatever he’d been eating at the time and hadn’t answered. He’d taken John apart later, though, first chance he got, out of earshot of the two sergeants with them.
“Never question orders in front of them,” he’d growled. “We’re here. We’re going to kill our men. We’re going to leave. That’s it.”
“That’s all we get?”
Russ had patted him on the shoulder, squeezed, let his hand linger a little too long. “Not until we get to make the plans, John, you and me.”
“You and me, captain?” John had echoed, feeling, not for the first time, a warmth flood through him from this man’s touch. Dirty and tired and still, like a bolt, right through him.
“Yeah, el-tee, you and me,” Russ had replied, and slapped him lightly on the cheek. “Come on, let’s go pop your cherry on one of these goat-fuckers, yeah?”
But every wasted moment’s a waste he can’t afford right now, and so he rips out the little blade stuck in his thigh, wraps it as best he can with a long strip off his lungee, hanging useless around his neck anyway now, and jogs out into the night, following the dry streambed out to the meeting point, about two miles away.
Where Russ will be waiting for him.
+++++
Adrenalin spent, leg aching at the puncture wound, nose jarred to the point of numbness, John is exhausted by the time he makes it to the pre-arranged location.
He doesn’t see the team at first, doesn’t know if anybody else has made it, but there somebody comes out of the darkness, dirty local robe, hands out, talking in Farsi or whatever the hell it is they speak here. Jumpy as he is, John has the guy on his stomach in the dirt, knife flashing out again in the moonlight... and his wrist is caught by a strong hand, right as its about to arc down.
“Jesus, kid,” says an achingly familiar voice. “You’re going to kill our corporal there.”
Corporal Nezami tosses him off, rolling himself up in the dirt. Iranian. Sniper and translater for this little mission, and he grins in the darkness, clapping John on the shoulder. “You had us worried, el-tee,” he says lightly, accent heavy, and John realizes that’s what he was hearing. “Almost late.”
“Yeah, but I’m on time, right?”
“You kill that fucker?” he asks, flat and low. There are things going on with Nezami, things having to do with his family back in Iran, that nobody else on the team really understands. Every time there’s shit out in Central Asia, tasked to their unit, Nezami’s the first to volunteer. But he’s the only one who didn’t get a kill in this time. “Caused based on how bloody awful you look right now...”
“Knife through the heart,” he says, trying to find the captain in the night. Focuses his answer there. “Real clean, just like you said, captain.”
Russ is standing a little bit off to the side, that scraggly bread he spent months growing out for these missions of his juts out from his chin, pensive and still, like a Grecian statue from a past age. His body stands out, dark against the star field overhead. So far from civilization, John thinks crazily, his head beginning to swim. The stars here have been the brightest that he’s ever seen them...
“Your nose broken there, Smith?” Russ asks, distant as the moon.
Reyes gives the lieutenant a hand up. He’s the oldest of them, twenty-eight, and there are things in his eyes that will never go away, and those eyes fix on the captain now.
John feels cold inside. Did he fuck up? Russ had agreed to the plan, his plan, the little waiting game in Chishti Sharif, staking out the man’s old haunts, family homes, that sort of thing, after they’d flushed him out of Herat.
He’ll run home, Russ, and we’ll fucking catch him there...
“I’m sure he did you proud, Morrison. Mission accomplished. Can we get out of this fucking shitbox of a country now?” Reyes asks.
Russ nods, and goes for his radio.
“We’ve got a ten mile hike to the extraction point,” he says, thumb playing over the button. He doesn’t look down. “You going to make it, John?”
“Fucking A,” he grits back.
And it’s not until nearly four hours later that anything gives. When the stars fade and the sun starts poking up over the barren desert wastes, when they round a hill and see the Blackhawk circling, when Reyes and Nezami run ahead and Russ is bringing up the rear, M-16 cradled in the crook like it fucking belongs there, muzzle down, that anything changes.
Russ, silent in his heavy hiking boots, pulls up next to John and lays an arm around his shoulder, pulling the younger man’s head on to his own. The lieutenant hesitates for a second and then let Russ do it, hold him there.
They’re still walking.
“Good work, el-tee,” he says softly, and kisses the top of his head. “Real good work.”
“Cherry popped, boss,” he replies back.
“Not quite yet,” Russs says, and John feels the beard, lips brushing his cheek.
He looks up, heart starting to pound over the sound of the chopper blades, hoping, hoping, that maybe Russ does actually mean...
“Get you your tag, el-tee, right here,” the captain says, and punches him in the shoulder, both of them separate entities again, and John suddenly feels weak. There’s a huge stain on his pant leg, his own blood dark on the khaki. His vision starts to narrow, and he tries to say something, but the bird’s so close and he can’t override that noise and there’s the strangest sensation of...
And down he goes, into the dirt, everything scattering away from him, back into darkness in the rising dawn.
+++++
When John finally comes to, he’s back in his dorm room at Incirlik Air Base, in bed. Russ is sprawled out on the room’s tiny sofa, legs thrown up over the armrest, thumbing through a thin book, obviously bored.
And the lieutenant smiles to himself. He’s been with in the same unit as Captain Morrison for a year, and he doesn’t know much about the man, except that he’s not a huge fan of reading. Or paperwork. Or anything that’s not fieldwork, really. Anything that takes him away from the fight, wherever the fight is that month.
“Gilgamesh too boring for you, sir?” John says with a grin, and Russ looks up with an expression of pure relief.
“Thank fuck, el-tee,” he says, and lays the book down carefully; John’s gotten on his case more than once about treating his private library with respect. “Don’t know why you don’t read Tom Clancy like everyone else.”
“Fuck Tom Clancy.”
“Yeah, we’re cooler than Jack Ryan,” Russ agrees, and comes over, leaning against the wall, hands shoved in his pockets. The beard’s gone, which means they’ve probably got orders back to the States or something. “Much more badass.”
“Not very badass of me, passing out, was it?”
“Don’t get your panties in a twist over it, Smith. You were bleeding pretty bad. Hike was probably keeping the wound open or something,” and the captain gets kind of quiet. “Docs said a few more hours and you might have had some complications.”
“How’d I get...”
“You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“Yeah, you were pretty out of it for a while, man. And then they doped you up at the clinic.”
The rest of it’s hanging between them, suspended in the droop of Russ’ shoulders, the way those hands are turning in his pockets. Stayed with you until you woke up, I was worried, I’m sorry... It’s the captain’s job to worry about that sort of thing. On him to make sure his men come home, get patched up or boxed out with a flag on top. Well, today it was the former and not the latter, but John knows better than to tell the older man he doesn’t have to shoulder that guilt today.
“Thanks for getting me out of there,” is what he says instead. Close enough.
Russ shrugs. “We’re Rangers, el-tee. That’s what we do.” And he grins. “All the shit that’s not supposed to be possible.”
John pushes himself up, feeling under the issued sheets for his leg. There’s a bandage in the way, and when he touches it, he can tell that it’s been stiched.
“They had to put seven in. Wasn’t anything,” Russ says, and he’s kind of driving his back into the wall.
“Not much of a scar.”
“Your nose is kind of fucked up. That’s kind of the same thing.”
John pokes at it experimentally. It hurts. “Yeah, but it’s not a scar.”
The two officers sit there and stare at each other for a moment more, and then Russ drops his eyes. “Look, John, I didn’t...”
And here it is. Here’s their way out. Here’s Russ’ opportunity to say that he only planted that kiss because he was just caught up, that he was glad he was getting his team out alive. Here’s John’s chance to say it was good to have the support after the stress of the past three weeks, that he totally understands. That there isn't anything going on. They stay friends, Russ the boss, John the second in command, nobody going fag around here... everything just like it’s supposed to be.
But fuck that, John decides. He's spent too much time wondering, hoping, to let it slip away now that it's finally come to the fore.
“Didn’t what, Russ?”
The captain rolls his eyes up to the ceiling, hands digging in those pockets. Like he’s having a conversation with himself. “Naw, that’s some bullshit,” he says finally, locking his gaze on John. There’s concern there. And lust. “I absolutely meant to kiss you.”
John shivers. Oh, he’s been right. They have been dancing around... whatever this is. Whatever this is going to turn into. Whatever they're going to do. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Russ pushes off the wall to sit on the edge of the narrow dorm bed. Puts his hand on John’s good leg. “And I want to do it again.”
“Yeah?”
One of Russ’ hands, still scratched up from the past three weeks, half of his pinkie nail missing, a rough, hard hand, touches the wall, right next to John’s head and their faces are close. Very, very close. “Yeah. I want to do it again. You got a problem with that, lieutenant?”
Before he even realizes he moved, John’s got a hand wrapped up into the older man’s shirt, stopping him from moving away, holding him there, and Russ is smiling at him.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah...”
Soft, slightly chapped lips close down over his, and for a moment, John wonders if he really did die out in that desert, if this man he's looked up to for the better part of a year really is doing this, really does want him like this...
And then a hand runs around the back of his neck, so careful to avoid his damaged nose, and there's no doubt, no doubt at all.
And John opens up, and lets Russ in.
It’s an awkward angle for a kiss, Russ leaning down, trying so hard not to catch that broken nose, and John reaching up, not really sure what he’s supposed to do with a man, but he knows enough to know that he wants...
A hint of rough on those chapped lips, the first glide of the captain’s tongue, pushing against his own, the way their teeth clash, a calloused hand at the nape of his neck, petting the short hairs back there, not too rough
“You ever done this before, John?” Russ asks, attacking the pulse point on John’s neck now, stroking down his thigh. “Anybody claimed this gorgeous ass of yours?”
John closes his eyes and lets his head hit the wall. Shit. But he couldn’t lie... “No, n-no, sir. Girls, but ...”
The captain growls, low and almost frantic, the vibrations heading straight for John’s cock, already stirring, approving of the proceedings thus far. “They ever give you what you need?”
“S-sir?”
He knows his voice is shaking and John can’t help it. It’s already so different from the few times John has done this with a girl, none of that sweetness, the hair falling around his face, the surrender, all those soft things he always knew he was supposed to like. All those things he’s never been able to enjoy. All those things that turn sex into an exercise, unsatisfying and hollow.
“Did they give you what you need, the girls?” A thumb strokes his face, their mouths touch again, and the kiss is different now. Softer, but more demanding. Less desperate. Far more certain. An offer. One both parties aren’t going to refuse. “They can’t, can they?”
He stares up as it ends, feeling like he’s falling, Russ holding him still with his gaze alone. “What... what do I need, sir?”
“What they can’t give you.”
The captain pulls his own PT shirt off, those shorts he’s wearing, his briefs, and tosses it all aside. He’s all lean muscle and tanned skin, chest hair bleached blonde from the sun. He’s had ink done on three continents and John’s been in awe of that since the first time he saw the man naked in the showers.
He can’t help looking now.
The Ranger tag on his arm flexes in full view as that arm wraps around his head, fingers tangling into his hair. A Mayan glyph stretches over a hipbone, the legacy of some op that Russ can’t talk about. There’s an Hellenic officer’s helmet tattooed right over his heart, transverse crest blood red. And a short column of black surnames falls underneath that, and those, John knows, are from the men he’s lost under his command. Six. Four on that one mission that he refuses to discuss. He doesn’t realize he’s touching this until Russ catches his hand, holding it tight, and crashes their lips together again.
“You want me, John?” comes the breathy little pant against his mouth as he pulls off the younger officer’s lower lip. John can taste the words, feel them rumble through him, and he’s harder right now than he’s ever been in his life. “I’ve wanted you since the first goddamn day I set eyes on you, knew I had to have you, wanted to take you, wanted you to know...”
“Yes, christ, Russ, please...” the lieutenant groans.
“Anything, John...”
And this, the lieutenant thinks as Russ kneels up on the bed, tearing off the sheets, and John realizes he’s naked underneath. He briefly wonders how the fuck that happened, and then thought flees as his captain pushes him flat on the foam pad, moving over him, holding him down with those strong, strong legs of his, that hand in his dark hair tightening, this is good.
This is it.
This is what he’s been missing. What’s always been missing. That domination, that giving over, the surrender... and he doesn’t even realize his head’s fallen back until Russ breaks the kiss, licking up his neck in one, hot stroke, nipping right below his ear. An invitation, he realizes.
One he’s desperate to make.
One he’s frantic to have accepted.
“Fucking beautiful,” Russ growls, right in John’s ear, warmth shooting through the younger man. His captain nips at the lobe, palms John’s cock through his boxers and the junior officer can’t help the moan that it draws from him, or the way he tightens down on those strong shoulders above him, needing more, needing something to hold on to while the captain works him, hard and fast and exactly, exactly so, taking him in hand, stroking the shaft, rolling his balls. “You’re gorgeous...”
John’s legs are falling apart of their own accord, the uninjured one drawing unconsciously up the older man’s side, rubbing against all that sun-baked skin, the hard muscle. Straining now. Russ hooks an elbow under and presses himself full-length against John’s shuddering form, their cocks sliding together for the first time, and the lieutenant has to bite down on his own hand to keep himself from screaming out.
It alternates, the smoothness of Russ’ cock, hard as steel against him, the rough grasp of his hand, pliant and flexing, and John can’t breath, can’t breath at all, feeling himself racing towards the edge, faster, better, better than it’s ever been, just this, trapped under his captain’s body, at his mercy, the thrill of that realization sending his arousal spiralling. “Russ...” he pleads.
It gets him a chuckle, some mirth the lieutenant can’t catch over the roar of his own building orgasm, the way it spills over, spurts of hot semen splattering both their chests as he comes harder than he’s ever come before in his life, as Russ follows a moment behind. It’s strange, John thinks, the surge of another man’s release over his own skin, strange and wonderful, and as Russ collapses to the bed next to him, John strokes a weak hand against sweaty, sticky skin, breathing in deep, the scent of this man something familiar, something utterly new, something he just knows he’ll never forget.
They lay together now, tangled up on the small dorm bed, breathing together as sense returns to things.
“We’ll have to get your tag, John,” Russ says finally, rising ans going for his shorts. He squats down, ass fully on display, fishing out a packet of cigarettes, the lighter his dad gave him when he was commissioned. He taps a white stick out of the pack, lights, tosses both to John. “First op deserves it. Need to get the Ranger on you.”
“You take me?” he asks, pushing up and grabbing a cigarette for himself. His leg’s bleeding again, just a little, and his orgasm is still thrummng through him and he can’t remember ever feeling this good in his life. “You seem up on this shit.”
Russ grins, wry. “You scared of needles, John?”
“A little,” he shrugs, flicking open the lighter and puffing the cigarette awake.
“Pussy,” Russ jokes, and John starts laughing - it’s all bullshit and it feels good to laugh and he can’t stop staring at his captain.
A year, a year with this man, his casual stance and his calm words and the aggression, tempered into something deadly by seven years of near-endless combat that still haven’t turned him into a monster. A year, and he finally has him. I love him, John thinks, the same thing he’s been thinking since he first saw the man fight, dust rising in the Georgia morning. I love him, but it means something different than what he’d thought then.
Means something so much more.
But John doesn’t say it, not right now. He can’t say it yet. Someday, maybe.
Not yet.
“When?”
Russ leans up against the wall, bare foot up on the cracking plaster. He blows a mouthful of smoke up towards the ceiling. Pensive. Distant. Beautiful. “How about tonight?”
"Yeah?"
"Yeah..." and the captain flicks his cigarette into the battered little kitchenette sink with perfect aim.
+++++
As it turns out, there’s a guy, a contractor, here at Incirlik that does tattoo work.
At the hospital, of all places.
“Yeah, well, that’s how it goes around here,” the guy says when John asks about this. He’s free-handing the tattoo off Russ’ left shoulder - Rangers aren’t common around here, and neither he nor the captain have an actual print of the correct design. So, they’re resorting to this, but it seems to be working out okay. The artist has steady hands, like a sniper or a pilot, and he’s getting the design perfect. “Guys want to keep goin’ on their ink while they’re out here, you feel me? And where they supposed to go? Downtown?” He shudders. “No fucking thank you. This country?”
“Infection,” Morrison says, and nods. He’s got his t-shirt off for this, and John’s having a hard time not looking at him. The lean lines of his body. That helmet on his chest. The scruff along his jaw, the facial hair growing back in, their return to the States evidently a far-distant reality. “Got that in Panama.” He’s talking about the Mayan design on his hip, and John flashes him a smile. “You sure as shit don’t want that, el-tee.”
“Right, boss,” he says, and he really, really wants a cigarette, but the artist has already told him now. “It’s not like I got stabbed recently or anything.”
But the captain shoots him that look, and he shuts up. Right. No talking about that sort of thing, their missions, and the artist must have been around here a while, because he doesn’t even ask about it.
“Yeah, it’s brutal. Worse than prison tats, and you guys deserve better than that bullshit,” the artist says, and holds up the sketch. “That work for you?”
He hands it over to John, who looks at it, unable to help the little smile. It’s not going to be just his tattoo, but Russ’. He’ll have Russ’ own mark on his arm. Have something from this man that means so goddamn much. And he doesn’t care about the implications, the future, anything. The way he feels, right now, about this man, his captain, his lover...
“You going retard on me, el-tee?” Russ sighs, and snatches the paper away, examining it carefully, and passes it back to the artist. “Fucking perfect.”
“Great,” the guy beams and stands up from behind the little drafting table he’s got set up in the exam room. “Let me go get my stuff ready and I’ll be back in in a jiffy, okay? And man, Smith, shirt off.”
Russ snorts a little laugh once the door closes. “Did that guy just say jiffy?”
“Fucking-A,” John agrees, and goes for the hem of his own t-shirt.
His hands are batted away and Russ shoves him back into a handy wall, those hard, biting kisses and desert-rough hands reducing him to a panting mass in mere seconds.
John gasps.
Russ sighs.
It’s so out of character that John pulls back, sliding along the wall until there’s some space to look across, but the captain’s hands don’t leave where they’ve settled along the rise of his hips. “What is it, boss?”
The older man doesn’t answer right away, thumb stroking his hip, something flitting behind those keen eyes of his, mesmerizing and yet so open, so warm, like John could just fall right into that and find himself at home again.
But he can’t go home, not with his mother still pissed at his decision to go into the military, his father long gone, sisters married. No home to go to there.
And he can’t ask this of Russ, what he wants to ask. What he wants.
Not at all.
They both belong here, in the Army, the Rangers, the suck, the fight, the blood, the ache of tired muscles, that edge of reality he found on the op, in that mud hut in Afghanistan, when he could have died, when the target died instead. They both need the clarity it all brings, John realizes. And if feelings get involved in this, everything’s going to get muddled and confused and murky. Because they aren’t allowed to have this. Because men don’t fall in love with other men...
“Stop thinking, John,” Russ orders, his best captain’s voice on. “You’re thinking about this too much.”
He swallows. “Russ, I...”
“You need to let go. It’s what you want, John, to be taken away, to lose yourself in something good, surrender that control you’ve got, all that brain of yours turned off, to feel instead of think...” Russ murmurs, hand rubbing on the younger man’s belly, surprisingly gentle after yesterday’s rough display. Their lips touch, brush, away again. “To give over...”
“Russ, I...” and the younger officer closes his eyes, letting the truth in that wash over him. So true. To be held down, to be laid bare, to be held after, to know... “It’s harder than you make it sound.”
“Easiest goddamn thing in the world. You jump, I’ll catch. Just like that.” And he snaps his fingers.
“Russ, I don’t know about...”
“You can trust me, John.” His shirt’s pulled slowly off, a kiss planted on his breastbone, lips trailing up in between words. “You and me, we’re right. We’re safe. This right here is safe, I swear, I’ll keep it safe, keep you safe. I want to keep you, need you with me. You can trust us, together...”
The door clicks, the little sound preceding its opening, and the captain pulls off and away, grabbing his own shirt from where he tossed it on a chair earlier, replacing it with John’s. Casual, easy, like it’s simple to separate these things out, oil and water coming clean of each other. Nothing of one carried into the other. So maybe Russ is right. Maybe this can work. Maybe they can keep both sides of this thing pure...
The artist grabs a pair of gloves and starts setting up. “You still doing this, lieutenant?” he jokes, completely oblivious, by his own design or theirs, to the tension in the room.
John wants to have this. Wants it right fucking now. Wants it more than anything else in his life. Wants it to be in his life, for as long as it can be. And when it’s all gone - because everybody in their line of work is intimately acquainted with how fast things get gone in this world - he wants to have it still.
Wants to remember.
Wants to know.
So he nods. “Fuck yes. No question. Left arm,” he says, and a genuinely surprised smile spreads over Russ’ face as the older man pulls his shirt back on.
“You staying for this, captain?” the artist asks, a little puzzled, like he's expecting Morrison to head for the open door.
But he just shuts it instead.
“Unit tradition,” Russ replies gruffly, and as the little machine starts up, John would swear that he can see tears in those eyes.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-03-20 02:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-20 03:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-21 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-21 04:23 am (UTC)I confess, I really do love this pairing now...
no subject
Date: 2011-03-21 08:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-21 11:21 am (UTC)I shall investigate!
In the meanwhile, have you read stackcats' take on this? It's right here, Past Lives, and it's pretty frikkin' good...