AN: I really suck at this whole "updating regularly" thing, don't I? So yeah, I'm just going to swear off that little commitment. The updates will come when they will come. Anyway, the next chapter. Things are happening, and the Ghosts are finally doing something! (yay!) Enjoy the chapter!

Summer 2014

We three grew even closer after mom left (if that was possible). Hesh and I, while close before, became literally inseparable. Seriously, we were joined at the hip. I even studied hard and took extra classes so that we would graduate at the same time (okay, maybe I'm overly attached to him).

Dad "retired", which is to say, he got a stable station close to home. I don't think he'll actually ever retire. He's too stubborn. Instead of being active duty, on some foreign base doing who-knows-what, though, he took a station in Santa Monica.

"Welcome back to the States, Captain Walker! Let's give you a job, oh wait there's nothing available, looks like you're a Quartermaster Officer now!"

Yep, that's basically how it happened. He went from active Army Ranger service to being a desk-jobbie in twenty four hours. He would occasionally consult and coordinate tactics and missions for other operators, but only rarely. Hesh and I both knew that it would have been impossible for him to get out entirely, and we didn't want him to. But it was good having him around more. It made our house feel like home rather than just the place where we lived, especially after everything that happened with mom. Whenever we asked him about how he got the posting, he just says he "pulled strings" in the ranks. That always made us wonder just how high up he had friends.

He worked on base in Santa Monica, basically having a 9-5 job. When he got home he would take off the uniform and relax with us, enjoying civilian life. We teased him endlessly saying he was going soft.

"Dad, you count cans of food all day!"
He only ever replied with a wry smile or a chuckle, saying,
"There's a bit more to it than that, I promise."

The higher-ups at base knew of his tactical expertise, though, occasionally having him stay there for a weekend to work on an op. He had the nous to at least act sorry whenever he told us he had to stay longer, but he couldn't hide the layer of excitement that hid beneath his skin, coming out of his eyes, and in every wired action before he left.

It sometimes felt like before, when he left us to return to duty. We knew he loved us, but he missed serving. He couldn't stand being out of the fight, any fight, especially if his company was engaged. The rare times he was home, he monitored the news like a hawk, trying to pick out details of what was happening overseas and wondering who was engaged where.

But he realized that we needed him more this time. At least nowadays we don't have to worry about him not coming back. He's only an hour down the road when he's gone.

Despite the new responsibility he had, we all grated on each others' nerves, especially Hesh and dad. The two were hotheads; they fought constantly; over the most trivial, petty things. I used to wonder where Hesh got his temper from, but ever since dad moved home, I don't have to. I found myself having to keep the peace between them far more often than I would like. I felt lost, and Hesh wouldn't even talk to me like used to. We usually shared everything, but since dad had been home, we hardly spoke at all. It felt wrong, unnatural. The "arguments" were usually pretty one-sided, and went something like this:

"This is all your fault! If you had just been here, none of this would have happened! Mom was sick of it! She was sick of your stupid job; she was sick of you. If you weren't off fighting your stupid war, we would still have mom, and not you."

He practically spat that last bit, like it left a bad taste in his mouth, and then he would rant on for a few more minutes:

"I hate you! What do you know? You don't know us. I wish you had just stayed in Israel! You're not our dad; dads are there for their kids!"

Those fights were the hardest things for me to listen to. I earned myself a few black eyes trying to get between them and calm him down. Hesh only stopped when he realized that he was hurting me, too, not just dad.

I don't really know why we became so distant from each other. We just didn't know him. He was never here. For as long as I could remember, dad only ever visited once in a blue moon. Mom raised us, but then she betrayed us? And we live with a dad we barely know? It was one of the most confusing times of my life. I didn't know what to do, and honestly, I was more than a little scared. They were some of the worst months I've ever lived.

Until dad started… teaching us things. Now that I think about it, for those last years of high school, there wasn't a time when he wasn't training us for something. It was like he was preparing us, or grooming us for an inevitable task that only he knew. I don't know. I was just grateful for the edge it gave me when I joined the Army.

We already worked out in the mornings before school, so he didn't worry much about our physical ability, but when school let out, he started training us. It started with hand-to-hand combat. We beat on each other for hours at a time. Teaching us the moves and forms may or may not have been the best idea, though. Every day we learned something new, one of us would ambush the other, or sometimes tag team on dad. It always ended up in a broken something (insert: chair, table, lamp, microwave, etc.) in the house.

Next he drilled us with firearms. The Army gave him quite the taste for guns, and we got to use two of his old M4s. He taught us all sorts of things. We practiced with them, quickly becoming proficient, and he made us do all our own maintenance, teaching us the ins and outs of the bolt carrier, how to change barrels, and the art of field stripping the rifle without getting dirt in every crevice while putting it back together. He drilled us with iron sights at any distance between fifty and four-hundred yards until our eyes watered from the focus. Then we were cross-eyed and blind until we slept.

Weekends were special. He'd make us pack up, carrying minimal gear, and we would rough out the weekend in the middle of nowhere. Often, he taught us a new technique on the Saturday then turned us loose, telling us to go have fun with it and be back by dark. He taught us survival, stealth, the stalking of prey; we did a lot of hunting (Deer are delicious, by the way. We had venison steak, venison burgers, venison roast… you get the idea). At the end of the day, he told his war stories by firelight, all with a lesson to be learned. But later he'd let us crack jokes and we even laughed at his bad ones.

In the fall, when the chill crept back into the air, we grew mellow again, remembering what had happened not even a year ago, he took it up a notch. Everything got a lot harder. He started sending us out alone, and we never knew what to expect. Rest assured, you could live in fear all week with the thought, "What is dad planning this time?"

It usually began with a short truck-drive to the woods, geared up and ready. He dropped us off and gave us one or two objectives. Sometimes we had to track him to a campsite, several other times we stalked deer, forced to get as close as ten yards before firing.

We enjoyed every second of it. We relished the challenge, and it felt good. Not to mention it was a distraction from… everything. The black hole left in mom's wake. Our complete lack of social lives. Having to learn to take care of ourselves and grow up just a little too fast.

It was hard. Damn, was it hard.

One mission is seared into my memory as a particular hell (on a scale of one to seven, I would say this was a five); the worst thing that ever happened to us during training. Dad dropped us in the middle of an unfamiliar area, and said he'd meet us back at the house. As simple as that. It was the middle of summer, the sweltering heat poured over us. With no water, and only our sidearms, a map, and a compass between us, we had to make our way back to the house. It started out fine: we found a creek and hydrated, filling our water bottles to hopefully last the day. It took a minute to get a bearing, but soon we were trekking north. We thought we were only six or seven miles out, so we set a nice, leisurely pace. As we hiked on, hour after hour without seeing any familiar turf, we decided to pick up the pace. We crossed a few more streams, refilled and rested for a few minutes. Jogging lightly through the woods (they call it the Ranger Shuffle), I think we crossed one or two small mountains.

The worst thing that happened was when we were running along a ridge and Hesh got his feet tangled in some tree roots. He face-planted, sliding halfway down the crest before stopping. When I caught up to him, his foot looked twisted at an odd angle, and he couldn't put weight on it without hissing or grimacing in pain. So we hobbled, me helping him hop along. Hesh took it like a champ, but there was no way he could weasel out of the new nickname he earned: "hop-a-long".

After a while, I began to recognize the woods around us… as the four mile point where we often hunted. Long since out of water, and a semi-conscious Hesh over my shoulders, I trudged the last few miles to the house. It was well after nightfall when we made it to our backyard, and I barely even made it inside before collapsing in a heap.

Everything after that is a muddled blur in my memory. Dad snatched Hesh from my shoulders and guided me to the couch with his free hand. After that I blacked out. I woke the next morning, sprawled over the cushions and comfy under a blanket. As much as I didn't want to, I knew I had to get up, to give dad a piece of my mind. As I slowly rose from the couch, muscle after knotted muscle protested all over my legs and back, and I decided that movement could wait five more minutes. Then I noticed all my gear in a pile on the floor next to me, a note on top of the stack saying that dad had taken Hesh to see a doctor.

When they got back I was so pissed. It didn't help that he later told me that the drop point had been twenty-eight miles from the house. I was ready to rip him a new one, my own dad, but fortunately the logical side of my brain won out. He couldn't have known all that would happen. That we'd come back exhausted, injured, and dehydrated. Behind his eyes I saw that he was sorry, even if he would never say it out loud.

I didn't speak to him for a week afterwards. And it didn't keep him from pushing us harder and harder.

But it was how we bonded. As crazy as it sounds, we wanted this. The challenges cemented us together. Hesh and I became tough, lean, and strong. No one would ever call me chubby again. We coordinated as a team, working as one, speaking without saying anything. Yeah, it was hard, and the training and challenges hurt like hell, but we embraced the pain. Our social lives suffered, but we didn't care.

Hesh and I would joke, "We don't have friends!" and when dad commented that we had each other, we would protest, "We're not friends. We're brothers."

Brothers. Far closer than two friends could ever be.

Every time we came out of the woods and trudged up to the house, Dad asked us what we learned. The answer was always the same:

Guard each other. Cover your brother's back.

It's the most important lesson I've ever learned, and one I'll never forget.

Hesh should have known better than to read on his first day back in the field. He shouldn't have brought it with him, but it journal just fit so neatly into his cargo pocket. All it did was distract him from the task at hand. He had finally managed to pull himself halfway out of the emotional grave he was digging, only to find that the Ghosts' new AO wasn't going to be as welcoming as it usually was. Hesh could always rely on a mission to distract him from whatever was on his mind, but as he lay silently under the canopy of trees, scanning the compound through his sniper scope, his thoughts wandered of their own free will. Quiet missions made everything go wrong in his head.

The pages that he'd read seemed to side-scroll across his vision, blocking out his view of the target area. He scrunched his eyes closed and blinked rapidly, clearing the words away. They still hovered at the corners, swarming and waiting to fill him with grief once more.

Why was Logan's journal so haunting?

A small, dark, and broken part of him just wanted to forget, to let go of all the thoughts and memories that were damaging him. Worse, to push away the little brother who had always followed him. Growing up, everywhere he went, he was never without his shadow. Logan loved him to the point where he would follow him through hell and back; he had, in fact. His presence was so constant that Hesh had begun to take him for granted. But then all at a second's notice, they were torn apart, and Hesh was left to remember all the times when he could have shown Logan the he loved him too, could have shown him how proud he was. Nothing big, just a pat on the back, or a small smile and a, "Good job" or a well-deserved, "Thanks."

Thanks for standing by me. Thanks for having my back. Thanks for saving my life.

He owed Logan so much, but he'd never actually thanked him. He got to count, over and over, the times when he'd let those opportunities slip through his fingers. Now he might never get them back.

That small, dark, and broken part of him reared its head. He hated himself for hating that Logan was a perfect little brother. He didn't grow close to many, but the few whom he let into his inner circle, he loved purely, innocently, almost blindly; and Hesh could say without conceit that Logan saw him above anyone else. It was a fact of their relationship.

The demon in his head wanted to forget Logan entirely, because at least then he wouldn't hurt anymore. He wouldn't feel all this guilt and sorrow. He wouldn't have to worry about what Rorke was doing to his brother. Wouldn't have to wonder if he'd ever see him again. After fifteen days, there had been no intel, not even a whisper of him from the Feds. For all the Ghosts knew he might be dead already.

No. He couldn't think like that. He would not give up; he couldn't do that. The small, dark recess in his mind could never oust one command, one thought that had been with him all of his life:

Take care of your brother.

No power in the world could make him forget, because he was so proud of his little brother. His little brother, who, he'd had to admit, he didn't want to join the Army because it meant he might not always be there to look out for him. Who he waited for, so they could be in the same flight at basic training. Who he'd argued with over MOS's for a week before they agreed on one, just because they didn't want to be split up after BCT. Hesh had very few memories that didn't involve Logan in some way, and the few that didn't have him, were memories of dad, the good and the bad. He could never forget them, and he mentally slapped himself for ever thinking that he might betray either of them.

He hadn't been able to save dad. He hadn't even gotten the chance to say goodbye.

That would not happen with Logan. He wouldn't let it. He could never leave him behind. If their roles were reversed, Logan would never abandon him; there was no way in hell he would leave him out there, alone and scared.

"I've got a visual. FLIR shows three tangos in the target building. One of those is our HVT." At the voice of their drone operator, Hesh snapped his eyes out of their trance and focused on the target in his scope, peering at the drizzle-streaked thermal image.

"Roger that. Breach team is set." Kick spoke over the line and Hesh saw two figures, Kick and one of the new guys, at the edge of the compound, preparing to vault the chain-link fence. Their forms flickered every second or so, deformed by the feedback from their IR strobes. They had their work cut out for them if they were going to sneak in, take down the target, and sneak him out again.

"Check. Kick, Hicks, move to secure the package. Hesh, you're weapons free. Clear them a path." Merrick directed the operatives, and Hesh lined up his sights on a lone guard, patrolling the perimeter near the breaching team. He pulled the trigger, grateful to finally have a real distraction from his own mind. The body dropped like a rock, clearing the sector for Kick and… what was his name, Hicks?

Hesh watched the two Green Berets slip through the compound like specters, only pausing to avoid or take down the guards. He popped off more rounds, keeping the area clear ahead of the team. They moved fast; Kick took point, creeping up to a corner of the central complex building. On the other side, three patrolmen clustered idly around a burn barrel, sharing a smoke.

"Kick, heads up. You got three tangos around that corner." He alerted the two to the group's presence and started to line up his rifle on the furthest away of the three. A softly muttered "Roger" was his only reply for a moment as the guys moved into position to eliminate the other two. Kick positioned himself at the corner and held up three fingers for Hesh to see.

"On three." To the side, he saw Kick point out to Hicks the man he was to kill. After seeing his acknowledgement, Hesh steadied his aim over the farthest guard.

"One."

Inhale.

"Two."

Exhale.

"Three." Near-simultaneously, the three men acted.

Near.

Hesh pulled the trigger, earning a clean headshot. Kick sprang out and plunged his knife in the throat of his man. Hicks acted a moment too late; he didn't take down his target fast enough. He lunged with his knife, but the act was too slow, too late. The Fed was opening his mouth to sound an alarm; another second and it would be out.

Hesh watched it in horror. But he didn't watch helplessly. His hands moved as if under their own power. One slow-motion second and his barrel had already shifted an inch; his finger had already put pressure on the trigger. The second bullet flew true and the third guard dropped, not two seconds after the others.

The two ground ops stood absolutely still for a shocked second. Kick was the first to snap out of it, and he moved to breach.

"Shit, that was close." Hicks braced himself on the other side of the door, fuming.

"What the hell was that!?"
"What the hell was that?!"

Hesh and Hicks spoke at the same time, one yelling over the comm, and the other trying to maintain a semblance of stealth on the ground.

"I had him! You don't have to do my job for me!"
"That was the sloppiest takedown I've ever seen! You're lucky you have me on overwatch!"

"You think you ladies could scrap this out later? We're in the middle of something, here!" Kick hissed over his mike, trying to verbally smack sense into the two newbies.

"Roger that."
"Yes, mom."

Hesh groaned inwardly. This mission couldn't be over soon enough.