A/N: written for Trope Bingo Round 11: AU - Fusion.
Luke never told anyone about the real reason why he quit the DSS. It wasn't Elena, or the explosions; it wasn't even being accused of theft and having his career thrown down the toilet.
No, it was the drums. It didn't matter which office building he was in, or where he was, Luke would be found and his somewhat overly realistic dreams would begin.
Every time he fell asleep at his desk, he'd hear them. A quiet beat coming from somewhere behind him. He could never quite pinpoint their origins but sure enough, the moment he fell asleep, Luke would wake up in a Jeep wearing khakis and accompanied by someone named Nigel and his four closest friends.
The first time Luke woke in the jungle, covered in sweat and mosquitoes and with a raging need to run, he was bewildered. It was just a dream, he told himself. Nothing more than that. This would all end the moment he died and reality would replace it.
He was wrong.
Reality didn't replace it the first time he was killed by Van Pelt.
Instead, he fell from the sky and landed on his feet as if nothing had happened. Sure, he was still in the jungle, but he was also one hundred percent alive and intact. This dream, this constant game of survival, could not be exited by simply dying.
The funny thing was, aside from his clothes, the Luke he was in the dreams looked completely the same. His tattoos were intact, the scars on his legs were there, and even the twinge he occasionally got in his left arm when he flexed it was mirrored in this uneasy dreamscape.
Then he met his team. Luke soon discovered they were his real team too; four elite agents of the DSS whose respect he held and who he could always rely on. Fusco, Mac, Wilkes, and Chato, were in his dreams and on the same office floor as himself.
Doctor Bravestone, they called him. Xander Bravestone, or 'Smolder', because of those days when he found himself thinking and staring into the distance, lips pursed and eyebrows pinched together. Chato came up with it first, or Mouse, as he was referred to in Luke's dreams. He was now a short black guy who couldn't eat cake without exploding, and naturally carried all of Luke's weapons in a backpack.
None of them understood why it was happening. Frankly not one of them could give a damn either. They just had to deal with the hand they'd been dealt, and the hand was a life split between reality and a jungle where big cats roamed and a man whose body crawled with bugs tried to kill them on a regular basis.
Finally, after seven months of figuring out what they could and couldn't do, what seemed to be their strengths and weaknesses, the drums stopped and the five of them could rest. Two weeks later, Luke watched his team die in a firefight in Rio.
He thought that looming noise would've ended after he lost his friends, but instead it continued. And for the next three years, he was on his own. Dr Smolder Bravestone, surviving and fighting and seemingly invincible unless he was shoved off a cliff. That, it seemed, was not something he could withstand.
Oddly enough, the drums stopped for a year after they rescued Elena from Cipher's plane. When Deckard was around, he didn't hear them, and the dreams stopped too. Then she showed up. Naturally, everything went to hell in a hand basket the moment he let his guard down.
The drums returned, this time, but louder. The second he allowed his head to hit the pillow, Luke would wake in Jumanji with Ruby — or was it Beth? — next to him as if no time had passed in his dream world.
He didn't have to ask what she thought of it. The grin on her face each morning was enough, and these linked dreams of theirs allowed them even more time together to sort their differences and vent their concerns.
One day, however, the drums did stop. After he found himself pulled into a storage room and shoved against a wall, he never heard them again. Jumanji, it seemed, had chosen to leave him alone. Luckily for Luke, that day couldn't have come soon enough.
She knocked on the door of the garage and poked her head in. "Hey, you ready to go?"
"Yeah, just gimme a sec." Luke slammed the hood down on her Jeep and sighed. "I thought we agreed we were done with camping."
"I figured one last time would be nice." She shrugged as if to say 'why not?'. "And I never did get to see that smouldering intensity of yours, Doctor Bravestone."
Luke looked over his shoulder at her and rested his hands on his hips. He smoldered as he said, "Some things, well they just happen naturally, I guess."