But who's counting...
Summary:
Team members take care of each other. Always. After a while, the good teams might stop counting the times. But they never stop caring.
Author's Note:
Hey folks. Do you know that feeling when your muse hits you over the head with a heavy object, completely out of the blue? Well, mine just did that. LOL And since I bruise easily, I decided to placate my muse by taking a short break from my current writings for 'What at a Tangled Web" (Chapters 4 and 5 are already in the pipes), and just squeeze in this little one-shot. No copyright infringements intended - this is just for fun.
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The first time it happened, it had been Ethan.
Or, to be more exact, a decidedly bloody cut across Ethan's eyebrow. Simple, for his standards. So much in fact, that none of them even looked twice when Jane simply took Ethan by the elbow and put him into the nearest chair to take care of the injury. Ethan, for his part, never so much as flinched while she closed the cut. It was all part of their jobs. Seven stitches later, the mission file was successfully closed.
The second time it happened, it was Brandt.
And Really. Bad. Luck.
Jane didn't even bother to glare at him for managing to sprain his ankle twice in one day. Together with Ethan, she simply helped Brandt hobble into the back of the van. In the end, the shoe was a loss, but thanks to Jane's gentle first aid, Brandt was soon comfortably resting on the backseat, while Ethan drove them home from yet another 'mission accomplished'.
The third time, Brandt and Ethan weren't sporting any injuries at all.
They did, however, wisely stay out of Jane's way, as she handed Benji two sleeping pills before she walked him to his room to make sure he immediately went to bed. It had been Benji's round-the-clock surveillance that had gotten Brandt and Ethan out of their latest mission alive. But it was Jane who eventually made everyone promise to never let Benji almost overdose on '36-hours-of-nothing-but-coffee, ever again.
More missions came and went by.
Their latest one, in particular, even without a hitch.
Only one thing made it a bit peculiar.
After the mission debrief, Jane … vanished.
Sure, there was a good chance she had simply gone home – after all, they had been wished a good weekend by the Secretary and been told to enjoy some time off – but Brandt didn't think that had happened yet.
Exhibit one was the fact that Jane's jacket was still hung over her chair in the briefing room. Exhibit two… well, call it 'guy's intuition', but Brandt just felt that something had been a bit different about Jane all day, and he simply couldn't figure out what it was.
He wasn't worried, not really. His 'danger sense' wasn't sending him any alerts, either. But on a scale from one to ten, Brandt decided that the mystery was at least 'Tell Ethan' – worthy.
Ten minutes later, their private little off-the-record search party included three members – Ethan, Brandt and Benji. And their goal was clear: Comb through the entire main building of the IMF headquarters to find out where Jane was hiding.
So the guys went looking.
Ethan handled the upper floors and the IMF building's roof. Benji went back to the team's office on the third floor to go through all internal video feeds and the parking lot surveillance cameras in the hopes of finding a clue. No luck so far. Brandt meanwhile checked the lower floors and, just to be sure, he also checked in with the entrance desk. Yep, Jane was still in the building.
Okay.
That left one question: Where to find her?
In the end, it was pure luck.
Benji had gotten thirsty while checking the surveillance cameras. So, for a minute, he went out to the vending machine across the hall. On the way back, an unexpected comm check from Brandt startled him just enough to make him lose the grip on his coffee cup - and while he did make a successful attempt at catching it again, some of the coffee succeeded as well: in landing right on his shirt.
With a soft curse – and the grumbled promise to make Brandt pay for his favourite yellow dress shirt – Benji quickly turned on his heel to make a beeline for their locker room, so he could grab one of his field t-shirts to change into. He was pretty sure it wouldn't exactly look stylish without the rest of the combat gear, but hey, if Ethan could make a plain white shirt look sexy, Benji was willing to give it a try as well. It would only take a minute for him to dart in there, get changed and get back to his laptop.
That was the plan.
But, as was often the case with best plans, it didn't live long.
In fact, Benji dropped it the moment he took the first step into their locker room – and saw Jane asleep on the couch in the corner.
She was clearly sleeping. But her arms were wrapped around her stomach, as if even in sleep there was something that made her slightly uncomfortable.
'Her stomach?' was Benji's first thought, as he stood motionless in the door.
But then he looked a little closer, squinting into the semi-shadowed room. Particularly taking in the way Jane held herself slightly bend with her back against the back of the couch. And how one of her hands had come to rest around her lower back.
'Wait a minute….'
And the penny dropped.
Benji suddenly remembered how, just last month, he had seen Jane similarly hold her side for the briefest of moments during the Jackson mission. Not in pain, but … a bit annoyed, it had seemed. And then there had been that one time, again roughly a month before that… when she had cursed just a bit louder than everyone else when they had all been dropped into the ice-cold waters of Panama River during that Ortega case. And yet another little moment was just coming back to Benji's mind, that case when…
'Ah cripes…' Benji grimaced as he suddenly realized what was wrong with all those incidents.
And he almost fell over himself in his attempt to quickly, yet silently back out of the room again, so as not to disturb Jane while he called the rest of the team.
When he informed them via comm line that a) he had found Jane and b) there was no need to call the military, the paramedics or the coroner, Brandt was the first to reply:
"Benji, would you mind sharing with us, where exactly she is and, most importantly, how she is?" Brandt's voice was strained quite a bit - partly due to his worry, and partly due to the fact that Benji had somehow managed to conveniently forget nearly all the important information in his little sit-report.
Ethan, on his end, gave a short sigh, before reaching for his comm mike as well. He tried his best to keep the peace – and restore at least some resemblance of comm order - by nicely requesting:
"Benji, a little more details, please?"
"Okay, uh…." Benji conceded, but then not much else followed, except, " … you know, uh….. well…she's in our locker room…and uhm…"
"Benji!" Brandt's voice cut through the comm line so sharply that for a second, Benji actually thought the man was standing right behind him.
"Yes! I can hear you, Brandt!" Benji suddenly found the desperation to actually rip right back in a pressed whisper, before stuttering on, "It's just that…err, welll,…" Benji took one more deep breath, and then decided to just get it all out in one quick go, and hope for the best, "…well, … I-think-it's-just-a-really-bad-time-of-the-month-for-Jane."
There, he'd said it.
Now, did anyone get that?
There was a moment of nothing but silence. And then Benji's earpiece crackled with a distinctly confused voice that he identified as Brandt, who was asking:
"Excuse me?"
Okay, so the guy clearly had no clue.
But just as Benji wanted to roll his eyes – mainly at the unfairness of the world, because now he would have to repeat what he'd just said – he suddenly heard Ethan's voice come on the line.
And just from the sound of Ethan's voice alone it became clear, that at least on Ethan's end, an idea was obviously dawning.
"Okay, Benji, I think I can copy that." Ethan acknowledged Benji's report cautiously.
'Right,' Benji nodded to himself in a soft chuckle, 'Ethan's been married once. He gets it.'
Benji then listened with one ear to Ethan's voice, as their team leader gave out the new plan of attack.
"Alright… Brandt, meet us at the locker room. We're gonna help her."
"Help her?" Brandt was still trying to catch up with what appeared to be a runaway conversation to him, "Help her with what?"
Neither Benji nor Ethan took it on themselves to answer his question.
Brandt would just have to figure it out for himself in a couple of minute from now.
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Indeed, only a few minutes later, Benji saw Brandt storming into the corridor. And about twenty meters behind him, just stepping out of the elevator, there came Ethan.
Almost immediately Benji could see that Ethan had come prepared. There was a rolled-up bundle of a soft, warm blanket under his arm. And judging by the extra load Brandt was carrying as well, Ethan must have obviously told their resident ex-chief-analyst to also grab a couple of pillows on his way down. Going by the still confused expression on Brandt's face, however, Benji didn't think Brandt had any real idea what to do with them yet. Well, he would find out soon enough.
Benji, for his part, had also not been inactive. As he had waited for the rest of the guys to come down, he had quickly dashed back to the vending machine. Not for coffee. No.
What he had brought back with him was a large, hot cup of fresh cocoa - with extra chocolate.
The approving smile on Ethan's face as Ethan noticed the cup in Benji's hand, made him and Benji almost look like co-conspirators on a secret mission. Something that irked Brandt for exactly as long as it took him to reach the locker room. But the moment Brandt saw Jane with his own eyes, it only took a meaningful glare from Benji, and a slow nod from Ethan, until Brandt, too, joined the circle of 'understanding'. Then, without any more words spoken out loud, they all went to work.
Which is why, two hours later, when Jane eventually woke up, she wasn't sure at first what had changed – but something clearly had.
She was still lying on her side. Exactly the same way she had fallen asleep after her retreat from the debriefing. But as she looked at herself on the couch now, there was a blanket covering her from her feet up to about mid-chest, with the edges of the blanket carefully tugged around her middle and back to keep her extra-comfortable there.
And somehow, not one, but actually two pillows had also found their way onto the couch with her. The first one had obviously been cushioning her head. The other one – well, she was practically curled around it, as she realized just now.
And beside her, on the low table next to the couch, there was a steaming cup of
'… cocoa?' she concluded, honestly confused.
She decided to look more closely.
Yes. It was cocoa. And the miniature heating construction around the cup, that was still keeping it hot, spoke of technical genius – because honestly, who thought of putting field-issue heating capsules in a nice little rosette circle right around the entire cup to keep it hot?
She was about to really start thinking about this little mystery, when her glance fell on something that made the question…well, redundant.
There, scattered all around the room, were her three guys - asleep in various states of more or less comfortable positions on whatever available furniture they had been able to find.
Brandt was resting all curled up sideways on the comfy armchair they had put in the locker room after one of their more harrowing missions. Ethan was sitting over at the large map table, his head resting on his arms which were folded flat on the table top like a pillow. He, too, was sleeping. And sprawled on his back on the plank bed beside their lockers – there was Benji. Slightly snoring, and clearly not aware that he was about to slide off the edge of his make shift sleeping arrangement.
As Jane looked around the room and took in all that she had apparently missed while she had been asleep, she couldn't help but smile, really touched by the sight.
Then, with a relaxing sigh, she lowered herself back on her side, embracing once more the soft warmness of the care she had been given.
"Thank you guys," she softly mumbled, knowing they probably never even heard it, but wanting to voice it nevertheless.
And as she slowly fell back asleep, she could almost no longer feel the slight pull on her insides, which had been bothering her for the past few hours like it did every month.
And she counted herself lucky to have team members like Ethan, Brandt and Benji.
With a last glance at the three men around her, she tried to remember all the numerous times they had all helped each other in various ways whenever one of them had needed care. But as she felt herself succumb to sleep once more, she realized it simply didn't matter. They never kept count. Because all that really counted, was that they cared.
The End
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P.S.: I. love. Feedback. :-)