Title: Texas
Summary: Allison feels homesick, and Sarge isn't helping.
Rating: PG 13 more than likely. Violence, mainly.
Warnings: Tex/Sarge
Notes: Oh, come on, people. You know it's a match made in heaven. I think it might be considered AU, as Tex isn't a robot. And, uh, I give Sarge a name. Yeah, I'm awful. By the way, I can't write Southern accents.
Tex disliked the way her armor kept the a constant, seventy degree temperature. She hated how she found herself waking up at six in the morning without her old, morning routine to fulfill. She hated not having a real winter, or having nothing to hunt when the season came.
Allison missed her horse and her cow. She missed the rodeo and the tourists. She missed her gun cabinet and teaching her little brother how to shoot a shotgun.
Allison missed her family. Allison missed her farm. Allison missed Texas.
Sitting in the cliffs, her armor discarded, Tex was attempting to picture herself laying on a hay bale in the barn, trying to escape the heat and her siblings. Unfortunately, the rocks digging into her back and the quietness in the air made it impossible.
"Hey, Tex!" She heard Church shout from the base, ruining that silence. "Where the fuck are you?"
She didn't answer. Instead, Allison sat up and scratched the back of her boy-cut head. That was another thing...she missed her braided pigtails. Not that she'd admit any of this to her "team." They expected her to be tougher than Chuck fucking Norris. And Chuck Norris did not get homesick, homesick got Chuck Norris.
The girl smiled, thinking of all of her friends back home who would have laughed at the joke. Then she scowled, knowing that she would probably never see any of them.
That's when she heard it. The sweetest, most welcoming sound she'd heard in months. The gentle strum of chords, someone plucking at strings in a fashion that she hadn't heard since she left her small town.
Hypnotized, Allison left her armor and her weapons to follow the path that lead higher up into the cliffs. That's where the music was coming from.
...Country music. How she had denied her taste for it! After Church had found one of her CDs in the base, she'd blamed Tucker and proceeded to bury her entire CD collection when the three had fallen asleep.
Enraptured by the sad lyrics and acoustic guitar that the genre was known for, Tex felt nothing but utter surprise when she felt the cold metal of a shotgun press up against her back.
"Stop where you are, Blue," he said, and her eyes widened. That accent...it was the Red sergeant...She should have figured.
Turning around swiftly, Tex used the extent of her training to snatch the shotgun straight out of his hands and into hers without so much as a struggle.
"I ought to cage starving ferrets to your kidneys and starving hyenas to your head and see which one gets to the other first," she growled, unused to being caught off guard and vulnerable like she was. "Tricking me into coming up here with that music."
Said Keith Urban CD was making it a point to get stuck in Tex's head.
"Look here, missy, unless you're plannin' on shootin' Grif with that, I'll give ya till the count of three to gimme that shotgun back," he said as calmly as he could. It was pretty obvious how pissed off he was.
"Not a chance," Allison snarled, shoving the shotgun into his chest. "And my eyes are up here!"
Sarge gave her a lopsided grin."One..." He drawled. "You said you came up here fer the music?"
Tex denied it so many times after that, but her face had actually flushed at that moment. "J-Just shut your mouth and go back to your base, and I won't shoot you..." she said, covering for her lapse of human emotion. "...Today."
"Two," he said in response, ignoring the threat and taking a step closer, arms raised. "You seem awfully familiar, missy. Haven' I seen you around somewhere?"
It was true. Allison felt it too. The man had his helmet off, too, though he had the rest of his armor on still. With caramel brown hair and yesterday's whiskers, he seemed as familiar to Allison as he seemed handsome.
"Well, you haven't seen my face before around here..." She started without even knowing what she was saying. "Are you from Texas?"
"Thr..." Sarge trailed off, all thoughts of taking his shotgun back from the girl and shoving her to the ground evaporating from his mind. "Born an' raised," he answered. "Why?" Dare he ask these next words? "Are you?"
There were very few things Sarge didn't dare to do.
"My great-granddad started a farm down there, and our family's been living there since," she answered. The man's eyes widened. "I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but it's called-"
"Yodel Ranch," he finished. "'S'at you, Alli?"
Tex blushed and looked up at him, reluctantly taking the shotgun away from his chest. "It is you," she said, offering a bright smile. "I was wondering why they never called you anything but 'Sarge'."
"I didn't recognize you with your hair chopped off like that," Sarge replied, giving her yet another lopsided grin. "I heard you got shipped off to boot camp, but I never thought...Aw, come 'ere, missy."
With that, the older man grabbed Allison by the scruff of her neck in a sort of aggressive hug, one that she welcomed. "John Boy," she said affectionately, laughing when she saw the flush on his face at the use of his real name.
To think, she was beginning to think dirty thoughts about the man who taught her to shoot a gun.