(A/N) - Warg here; after seeing how the Freelancers remember the people from their pasts, Interphase offers a chance to see how the people from their pasts remember the Freelancers... Thanks to Guthans for the review on the last chapter; for the continuation of Al's adventures between the Phases, see Colorado's first chapter of Phase Two.


Shed Limits

Written by WargishBoromirFan

Ezekiel Jenkins


"Yeah, I'm black, but honestly, I never really considered myself African-American, just a Kentucky boy, if you want to get specific. I've got no ties to Africa that the rest of the human race lacks and we've been there near as long as there's been an America. The family history, with a good deal of extrapolation, goes back to the 1860s. The reason we don't know much of what was going on before that was that the inventory records predating that time were burned. Along with the rest of the plantation. So I guess you could say that my family's always liked fire, Shermans, and other instruments of mass destruction, whether we were technically sanctioned to use 'em or not. Grandpa Jacobs tried to find out more, but I take it as a sign that we're supposed to focus on the forward. I just carry on a proud tradition of not looking back at my past unless it tries to bite me, and then applying the tools I've gotten from it to fight back."

- Agent Georgia


If the boy had set the butt of the rifle on the ground, the tip of its barrel would extend over his head. It might have made it easier to bring it to the shed as a walking stick, even loaded, but his mother and grandfather's warnings haunted him all too loudly, echoing off each other on a thousand different topics as he fumbled with his unbalanced load.

"Zeke? Watcha doin'?" The nine-year-old sighed heavily at the sound of his younger brother, tipping the barrel into the dirt.

"Go away, small fry. Aren't you supposed to be with Abe or Momma right now, anyway?" The younger brother shook his head, watching him with large brown eyes and quivering in place. If Zeke waited long enough, his little brother would doubtlessly get bored and leave him be, but the toddler had a fascination beyond his years with the tractor shed and everything it contained. Forbidding him from the place after he'd somehow managed to wrangle the blasted vehicle out of park and into a wall had only increased his desire to revisit it, and it would figure that as little patience as a four-year-old would have with anything else, he'd zero in on that tractor in its shed. It was the last place he'd known their Papa was going.

Zeke had gotten focused on it, too, but with a different goal in mind. It'd been the last thing his Papa had meant to go fix, after all. Zeke meant to fix it right. "All right, fine," he said, shifting the gun upwards, away from his younger brother. It was too long to fit nicely over his shoulder, and the weight made his stance awkward. "But you gotta stay out here and be my lookout. We don't want Momma or Grandpa or Abe to have to hear about this."

"Watcha doing?" the younger boy repeated more emphatically. Those were some of his favourite words, alongside "why?" "how?" "what's that?" and "me, too?" Their youngest brother was beginning to speak and seemed very fond of the word "no," as Abe and their mother said Zeke had been at that age, but "no" didn't seem to enter the third-born's vocabulary. He was generally perfectly tractable... as long as you didn't mind answering a million questions and fending him off with a stick to keep him from trying to do everything that caught his fancy the moment when your back was turned.

There were some questions that Zeke really didn't want to hear, much less answer. "You know what happens if a sow hurts her litter or a boar gets too mean?"

"We're not s'posed to play with the big pigs." Another thing he'd had to learn the hard way. Usually, the hogs were shipped out for slaughter, but their grandfather would rather lose a pig than a grandson. It was easier to breed more of one than the other, and their Momma could use a hog butchered at the farm if they had to.

"The tractor got too mean." Zeke shrugged the rifle upwards suggestively. It had broken. He didn't know how, he didn't know why, and he frankly didn't care all that much. This wouldn't truly fix anything, not really, but if they couldn't fix the tractor and Grandpa had to sell his farm they could move someplace safe and civilized like Owenton or Georgetown or maybe all the way to Lexington or Cincinnati and he'd never have to look at another tractor or shed or pig again, unless it'd already been cooked.

Zeke didn't know why his father had wanted to move the family out to the farm in the first place - sure, Grandpa had needed help and Momma wasn't going to abandon her father, but it shouldn't have come at the cost of his. Papa had thrown himself at farm living with cyclonic enthusiasm, insisting that it'd be good for the boys, fresh air and physical activity and animal husbandry and plenty of room to grow, but Zeke was quickly beginning to look back at that cramped apartment they'd lived in before his younger brothers had come along with halcyon nostalgia.

But said little brothers wouldn't understand, having been born on this farm. They were sort of annoying like that.

They wouldn't remember Papa like he and Abe would, just that he went away one day when the loud car drove up to the farm with lights whirring and paramedics floating the stretcher out between them from the back and then it had left really quietly, much slower than it'd come, and he hadn't come back.

So it was up to Zeke to take care of the tractor. Abe was busy taking care of Momma and Grandpa.

"But I like it," his four-year-old brother pouted, as Zeke expected he would. "Can we get a new one? A big one?" Maybe it was a sign of intelligence that the little kid talked so much, and a mark of his mental steadiness that bounced back quickly, but Zeke wished the oblivious little snot-nosed runt would shut up.

"Only if you stay outside and stay quiet." There should be no witnesses. Grandpa didn't need them, and even something so lifeless and and unfeeling as the tractor ought to go out with the same gravity that Grandpa gave an unruly pig. Its sin had been greater, after all.

The little one nodded solemnly, but Zeke didn't trust him. "I mean it. You stay out here. No peeking."

"Will it bounce?" Few four-year-olds had any sort of grasp on rebound trajectories, but trust his kid brother to have thrown enough metal at metal to think about what he hadn't even considered.

"Maybe," Zeke grunted, shrugging the rifle back into a slightly less uncomfortable position. "It's none of your business." He fumbled one-handed with his liberated key to the two-month-old lock, and walked in and shut the door behind him, leaning against the replaced shed door to keep out followers.

Facing the tractor itself was at once a heart-pumping thrill and a supreme letdown. The gun was too long and heavy to aim straight and steady at that dull, broken grille, his leg bumping up against the door as he attempted proper stance like his momma had shown him, his hands pulled as close to his chest as he could manage with the oversize stock butting into his shoulder before he was able to get the barrel level. He'd only get off one shot before someone heard or his "lookout" got bored and jealous and ran off to tell their mother. He'd have to make it count. The grille was cracked, but would it absorb the round or just spit the shell right back at him? A headlight seemed too petty and too hard to aim for. The wheel then. The front left.

Tensing his shoulders in anticipation of the kickback, Zeke lined up the sights as evenly as he could and squeezed the trigger. He'd fired guns with Momma and Grandpa and Abe, but always something smaller, something lighter with a little less recoil. For its size, the rifle wasn't so bad, not like the shotgun that had knocked Abe in the nose when he tried to get fancy, but the weight was unsteady enough when he wasn't taking the recoil directly to the shoulder. The bullet flew at the tractor, and he flew to his back, bouncing off the door before sliding down to the dirt. The gun landed atop him, driving the air from lungs and tire equally. Those treads had been built to take a lot of abuse, and Zeke's diaphragm, despite the fights he'd survived with his brothers, had not been built against a sudden collapse under pressure.

Once he could inhale again, Zeke shoved the gun off of his chest and picked himself up to his elbows. His head seemed to weigh as much as the rifle as he studied the slowly deflating tire, still more or less in shape thanks to its deep treads and thick lining.

It wasn't enough. There wasn't any sort of stand attached to the muzzle to set it up as a tripod and fire off quickly, but Zeke yanked the gun into the closest he could bring it to position, turning over and squaring his torso so that he could fire off another round from flat on his belly, then another, then another, reveling in the kick that forced his legs back against the wall. He knew they were coming, that Momma would just shake her head, take the weapon away from him, and ask him why, even if that wasn't a question he felt up to answering at the moment. Not until the rounds ran out, at least, and a rifle magazine could hold more than the shotgun. Maybe, and he wasn't really counting on it, but maybe, he'd be able to say something about the reasons he'd snuck out here with a gun and key that he wasn't supposed to touch unsupervised once he had results to show from them. Even if those results included rebound. He turned the gun from the wheel, laying down an uneven line of suppressive noise as he worked the hefty warm barrel from one side of the tractor to the other. Zeke was surprised not so much by the sound of his little brother pounding at the door, whining to get a turn, as by the fact that he could hear the kid over the empty click of the rifle.

Zeke checked the chamber, like Momma had taught him, but it wasn't jammed. There were no bullets left.

He was shaky enough to use the rifle as a crutch back to his feet, once he'd put on the safety, then allowed the gun more of a controlled fall into the dirt rather than set it down. "Zeke! Momma's here! My turn now!" He set his back against the door, waiting for it to open into him.

It wasn't that Zeke was trying to hide the evidence from his mother, a hard enough task when he wasn't standing right before the wreckage with the smoking gun at his feet. But Zeke needed something against his back if he wasn't going to lose what was left of his own balance, and the door was the only thing within range that was whole enough to hold him upright. The extra minutes before he caught sight of her expression weren't an all bad thing, either.

Evie Jacobs-Jenkins had always been a practical woman. She had a soft spot for men with big dreams for the future, but she'd always believed the best way to reach that bright future was to take the tools she had to hand - whether those were the trowel and the post-holer, calculus and physics, or patience and the wisdom of when to be silent. She was silent for a long time before her son opened the door.

Jenkins men, Ezekiel would reflect as an adult, had a dangerous urge to build, to fix, to improve, dangerous because he doubted his father or any of his brothers had any concept of scale or their own limits.

Abe still ran the farm, though their mama had never officially retired, perhaps because she still feared her eldest would come to trouble without someone to remind him of what he couldn't manage by himself, too. Abraham still took on his brothers' and mother's burdens unasked, after all, even when Zeke wished Abe wouldn't always be so reliable, so self-effacing, such a humbly steady rock with no ambitions of his own that he made his younger brothers' successes look like selfish arrogance. Ezekiel had to comfort Abe, sometimes, too, and it would be easier if his attempts didn't stink of hypocrisy in the wake of the latest reason he'd had to return to the farm since the second-born had been old enough to escape.

Gene, too, had followed his middle brothers to college, so far avoiding the mountain of debt that had plagued Zeke's early career and the Navy job that had paid for both the younger boys' educations, but Eugene was yet too young and naive to assume he could fix anything less than the entire galaxy, and had not yet declared if he was planning to start with the physical, the mental, the social, or the political methods of solving universal ills. He'd gotten an undergrad in some philosophy major, decided the work wasn't hands-on enough, and was currently wrapping up the missing hours for some sort of chemistry-law degree with a double minor whose specifics changed every quarter.

Zeke limited himself to trying to improve the structural layout of his adopted city of Cleveland, building a strong marriage with his brilliant, practical wife Asha, and fixing the wonky handle on the bathroom door when it stopped clicking back into place. He'd given up on trying to fix the rest of his family.

And Phin... Well, Phineas was the reason Ezekiel had returned. It was hardly a surprise, really.

If any of the boys had taken after their father... Momma always said that Zeke looked the most like him, but Phin had their Papa's enthusiasm. He might have had Momma's intelligence, but that didn't help when the third-born had the same lack of self-preservation as their father. Phin had gone to the navy to avoid Zeke's student loans, just as he'd joined the football team despite not being built for it, just like he'd gotten into fights with his older brothers just because he'd wanted their attention. Phin could be an annoying little shit and Ezekiel was half-convinced that his younger brother's masochistic streak was five miles wide, but surely he was too smart to do this.

Phineas had turned his skill-set to supplying an ODST group, the last Zeke had heard before his younger brother dropped off the radar for the last time. He'd gotten hired by some black-ops hush-hush paramilitary group, but Zeke wanted to believe it had been for the same job as he'd done for the Helljumpers. He wanted to believe it, but this was Phineas. If he'd been given a chance to join the front lines despite being five-ten with the reflexes of a drunken squirrel and the spatial awareness of a dog with its head caught in a paper bag, Phin would writhe and wriggle until he could prove that his dexterity and intelligence more than made up for his lack of physical strength. Or die trying.

Everyone who'd met Phineas Jenkins had called him brilliant. Everyone who knew him well called him an idiot.

Under the circumstances, as Zeke helped Abe and Gene load the discretely-packaged boxes of personal items stamped with a three-pronged unit symbol and the unfamiliar name "Agent Georgia" into the old shed at the back of the farm, Asha trying to keep their mother occupied in the kitchen, he was very tempted to go with the latter. This time he couldn't even grab up a rifle to push his limits. Abe and Gene might grab some clays later, celebrate what they could with three out of four sons returning home for a rest, but Ezekiel saw no point in trying to shoot the sky.