Disclaimer: I own neither NCIS nor Dark Angel.
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Seeing Eyes
Chapter 10: Interlude
by marbleglove
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Logan held on to Max's hand with a strength that would have hurt most girls. Max may not have even noticed. There was something incredibly hot about strong women, but at he moment he just needed the grounding that grip could give him.
Looking at the flag of Freak Nation he felt hopeful and worried and like there were a thousand things to do and that he wouldn't' be able to manage it at all. Just the thought of it all made him nauseous and despairing. So he kept his grip tight and focused on the hope.
It would be enough. They would be enough.
They had to be.
He'd had that thought before, that "they had to be enough." Of course, it had been a different "they" and it hadn't even been true. They hadn't been quite enough.
McGee and Ziva died and the country had still been devastated.
He'd walked away after that.
Gibbs had accused him of running away, but it hadn't been. It had been a thought-out decision, made carefully and correctly. He had finished everything that he could, completed the proper paperwork, and only then turned his back on who he had been and walk away, calmly and decisively. And he had done it all because he couldn't bear being responsible for stopping attacks and being part of a team again. Being a vigilante was better. The closest he came to teamwork was trading favors. The only responsibilities were the ones he accepted, the ones he knew he could take. It was a good life.
For the first six months of being Logan Cale, way back when, it had felt like acting, like being undercover. That had been fun. But then he had let himself sink into the role in exactly the sort of way that an undercover agent had to struggle against. He let himself go completely under, and ten years later he was Logan Cale, through and through. Aside from sporadic contact with Abby and Palmer, no one he knew even knew about Tony DiNozzo.
And yet, Logan Cale found himself back in the same situation as Tony DiNozzo had been in. There he was, staring at the waving flag of Freak Nation: part of a team, responsible for the lives of these soldiers, and clutching the hand of a strong, beautiful woman whose death would break him.
He felt a desperate urge to walk away again. Instead he tightened his grip on Max's hand. This team was still alive and fighting and he'd be with them to the end.
He just wished he had a better sense of whether "the end" was in a few minutes, in a hail of bullets; in a few weeks, in an apocalyptic plague; or in a few decades, of old age, having accomplished everything that flag promised, or at least a good start at it.