Author's Note: It's another song challenge from XFChemist! This time it was Set the Fire to the Third Bar by Snow Patrol. This one went angsty, too. I'm not sorry.
He crouches down, his older body folded up as close to a z as he can get it. He moves swiftly through the thin shadow that hugs the barracks building. A full moon night is a fucking bad night for a covert mission. Movement at ten o'clock stops him dead in his tracks between two windows. Inside the building there is boisterous conversation he hopes covers up the sound of his boots on dead leaves. Ten O'Clock lights a cigarette and calls out across the courtyard in Armenian Jack recognizes but doesn't understand.
He pats his pocket and feels for the accordion fold of paper. He doesn't need it but it feels right to have it. He swipes his thumb across the smooth metal of the handgun he carries for comfort more than anything else. The safety snicks so quietly he can only hear it in his memory.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Jack wipes his hand across the wooden table until the drops of sweat and water are mostly gone. The old map he spreads across the table has seen him through more than a half a dozen trips to the Middle East and it will see him through one more. There are various routes traced in pencil, Sharpie, and – just one – in blood, because when you're in the deep shit, you work with what you've got and sometimes all you've got is what's inside you.
He smoothes his hand across the blue and green paper and tries not to laugh when he catches the various shades of mustard yellow out of the corner of his eye and through a mostly boarded up window. The scent of Carter competes with the sweat and dust and gets up inside his nose and lodges deep in his gut. She'd carried it at his request for four days. He didn't tell her why but he's pretty sure she knew it was about the visceral reminder of what you come home to because the scent of her is so strong on the paper that she had to have taken it to bed with her in lieu of, he hopes, not being able to take him to bed instead.
Somewhere way off the left edge of the paper is Colorado.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
He has the shitty cinnamon caffeine gum tucked against his lower lip like it's tobacco. He'd rather have the tobacco. He needs both. He always preferred smoking over chewing, but the packet of cut leaf in his pocket reminds him that options aren't always available. Ten O'Clock sniffs then spits. Jack is far enough away to not know quite where that spit lands but close enough to smell the slight hint of pepper on the air and talks himself out of a similar sniff.
Jack hunkers in the shadows so long he feels not only his bad knees but the fist-shaped bruise on his ribs.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
The bar is right where he left it. A little hole in the wall where you only spoke Arabic if you wanted to get dead, there are six mismatched bar stools tucked up under beards and robes. The guys are mostly American – maybe Canadian – and prop up Tennessee whiskey bottles with undercover stories. It's the only place outside of the Green Zone to get a decent drink and reliable intel. The right numbers station broadcasts from an old, illegal shortwave in the corner. The little-girl voice makes him shudder just like it always has.
Four of the six guys let familiar eyes slide over his face impassively. The other two give him dark looks more for the benefit of the drunk guy in the corner who doesn't realize what kind of establishment he's happened in to. He orders a shot of whatever the bartender is pouring and then, in a fit of nostalgia he won't even admit to himself, a shot of the B&B she would drink on the bad nights. It tastes like cough syrup when it hits the back of his tongue but it's fire in his stomach and it burns like her eyes or maybe her smile on the days they remind each other what they can't be.
Funny, but it's one of the guys he knows that finally hits him. It takes him longer than it used to to piss somebody off enough and he figures his heart probably isn't in it like it used to be. He remembers the pain is important but he doesn't really remember why.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
A sharp whistle from just inside one of the buildings and Ten O'Clock is stubbing out his cigarette. As soon as his back is turned, Jack slides through the shadows like an oil slick. The bruise on his ribs tugs at the edge of his consciousness and he remembers why it's important.
At the corner of the barracks he pauses. Light from inside the buildings spills out into the wide courtyard. Twenty yards of well-lit space with no cover stands between him and his target. Laughter careens off broken glass and a fist-fight kicks up dust and pathetic tufts of desert grass.
He steps back deeper into the shadow and shoves a wad of tobacco into his mouth next to the gum. Then he waits.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
The night before he left they talked on the phone for forty minutes about nothing at all. For reasons he can't fathom, they both pretended that he couldn't tell her ragged breathing had anything to do with the way she'd stroked herself to the sound of his voice or that she'd buried her face in something soft when he'd said her name. When it took several long minutes for her to answer his question, he didn't mention it. They were playing with matches in a kerosene factory but if they didn't mention it then it didn't happen.
He replays that catch in her voice when he turns into the corner of his little hovel cum base camp and braces one hand high against the wall. Chin tucked against his chest, he watches his dick disappear into his hand and doesn't even try to lie to himself about the map clutched between his teeth. If he tries hard enough he can taste her. He's probably losing his edge because when he comes he isn't imagining silken heat in place of his fist, or his face sticky with the evidence of how much he turns her on, but rather the feel of her tongue sliding across his and what her hair would feel like slipping between his fingers. The old paper eats his groan like it ate all his previous transgressions.
In his creative memory he can hear the cotton of her bed sheets whisper against her skin and the crinkle of heavy, old paper as she comes back to their conversation.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
It takes almost an hour for the target to step onto Jack's side of the courtyard. It's silent when Jack grabs the man from behind, one hand across his mouth and under his chin, the other on the back of his head. A quick, counter clockwise twist is all it takes to dispatch the global threat. Jack sifts through the folds of the man's robes and fights with the feeling of revulsion when he brushes against warm, dead flesh. The alien communication device and personal shield are in pockets just like Jack figured they'd be.
He throws the body over his shoulders and slinks back through the shadows. The fire pit behind his old hovel hasn't seen a cleanup job in a while, but it's still deep enough and the fuel still burns hot enough that it's efficient.
Back at the table he acts like his hands shake because of the tobacco he's no longer accustomed to, but his fingers smell like jet fuel.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
When he climbs the stairs to the plane he catches a glint of silver up on the shoulder of the access road beyond the chain link and he remembers her security clearance is pretty high. When he drops his mirrored sunglasses over his eyes he's sure he sees headlights flash once, but he's probably wrong.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Stateside, things seem a little too Technicolor. At a pawnshop between the Pentagon and his hotel, he finds an Indian logo lighter and he picks it up for probably fifteen dollars more than its worth. At the motel, he sits in a white plastic lawn chair outside his door and smokes cigarettes lit with a little book of matches that indicate his chosen motel also rents by the hour. The night's humid and the smoke swirls around his head. With half a pack left he throws the matchbook into the coffee-can-turned-ashtray on the ground next to him.
He catches transport from his Washington debrief but finds himself waylaid in bumfuck Kansas. He deplanes long enough to piss and grab a cup of coffee and a smoke while the airmen load shipping crates onto the back of the plane. When he steps out of the hangar, he's already drawing a deep lungful off a Marlboro. He slips his sunglasses down over his eyes despite the dusk. On the other side of the tarmac, he sees a glint of silver and headlights flash just once.
His duffle will make it to Colorado eventually. He crushes his cigarette under his heel as he pulls the car door open. She's got the car in first before his door is closed. He drops his cigarettes and the lighter into the console and slides his seat back all the way.
Somewhere along 96 she finds the scenic route and country painted in mustard yellow, and he feels like he can open his eyes all the way. After a while, there's a little bar and she's parked and out of the car before he can object. In the corner, a numbers stations rambles on a shortwave radio. While he fights the urge to smash the thing against the bar, she pushes him towards a dusty booth and orders a round of something brown.
They drink the one each and, after he tells her he knows she came on the phone that night, she smirks and tosses him the keys. She's leaning against the hood when he finally has the balls to join her outside. It's dark and cool and everything's mostly purple when she tells him that the car does one-thirty.
She takes his sunglasses and slips them on as he slides into the driver's seat. He reaches for the radio and she reaches for his hand. An hour later, he's told her about the last three missions in Iraq. When he pulls into his driveway, he gets out and leaves the car idling. She doesn't hesitate when she leans over and pulls the keys out of the ignition.
He hardens as she follows him into his house but it's not time, not yet. And it doesn't matter how bad it gets, it doesn't matter what they allow each other to do for one another. When it's time to turn the lights down, she's curled up in his easy chair under his grandmother's quilt and he's sliding between cool sheets because that's how it is.
The next morning she's gone but his cigarettes are sitting in the middle of his coffee table with a brand new book of matches from his DC motel. The lighter is gone.