Light clouds veiled the sky over Jason's head while a crescent moon timidly lightened the fallen night. The half of Bravo Team who was above the water surface had their eyes glued to the dark ocean in an expecting silence. Only one thought was on Jason's mind: it's time.

But still no one emerged.

Jason held his breath, pointing his flashlight down. Only the loud sound of the approaching helicopter made his head turn up to the little stars slowly filling the sky. He glanced at his mates on the USS Emerald. With the poor lighting he could barely discern their faces, but their apprehension shone all the way through.

Come on, guys! Where are you? Jason's heart pounded. He wished he had gone down with Clay. Down there, he would have known what to do, but waiting up here was a different story. One of his hands clenched around his flashlight, the other hold the edge of the boat so tight that if his nails had been more sharp, he would have pierced it.

A ripple on the water surface caught Bravo's attention.

Two seconds after, still nothing. Jason's heart struggled. Ten seconds passed; the little waves became bigger. Twenty seconds—

His three teammates finally emerged from the obscurity. A sigh of relief left Jason's lungs; Clay was blinking, his eyes fighting with the flashlight pointed at him. He was awake and alert. And combative, too, just like they were all used to see him.

Clay was fine. Or at least he would be. It was like if a heavy fog had just lifted, letting Bravo see a brilliant future, lightened even more by the hope they would be all together soon.

As Jason dragged the fatigued Clay on board, the cold water splashed on the boat's floor. Clay was breathing heavily, but his blue eyes were wide and attentive.

"You okay, kid?"

Clay took the regulator off his mouth and attempted to reply, but Jason interrupted him before any sound vaguely resembling actual words could come out. "You sure it's a smart move?"

"Let him do," said Trent, lifting himself on board and splashing more cold water on Jason's feet. "His tank is nearly empty anyway."

When Sonny's turn to settle on the boat arrived, his body heavily landed near Clay. Jason peered at them through the darkness; his teammates were shaking even though trying to fight it.

"Just take us somewhere dry, Boss," Sonny said. "I've had enough of this giant arctic pool."

The weak smile that drew on Clay's bluish face flooded Jason with relief until the sound of chattering teeth took him back to his driving duties.

"Seems fine to me. A little frozen maybe, but you and Sonny seem to struggle just the same." Jason said to Trent. "You okay?"

Trent nodded.

"You think it worked?"

Trent glanced at his back and then moved closer to Jason, lowering his voice. "He's not out of the woods yet. Still needs proper medical attention."

"I can hear you," Clay said between clenched teeth. "Don't worry, you're not gonna get rid of me that easily."

"Shh, adults are talking. Save your breath." Sonny gently patted him on his upper chest while waiting for the boat to be anchored to the USS Emerald and lifted up.

"Helo arrived ten minutes ago," Jason said. "It'll take off as soon as we get him on board."

"Us."

Jason turned to Sonny, his ear tended toward him.

"As soon as you get us on board." Sonny looked at his boss intently. "No way I'm leaving his side."

"I'm a big boy, Sonn—" Clay suffocated a cough, his hands scrunching in fists like as to fight with the fatigue.

All eyes instantly converged on him, the thick fog of apprehension filled the air again.

"Come on! It's just a cough," Clay urged, trying to lift up. "It's freezing here…" He laid back down, shoulder to shoulder with Sonny, craving a warm contact with his brother.

The boat trembled as it was secured, and Ray, Brock, and Blackburn rushed to it as if they were running from hell flames.

"Everything okay down there?" the commander asked, eyes fixed on his shivering men.

Trent hopped on the USS Emerald's deck and refused the thermal blanket Ray was handing him. "You couldn't expect Spencer to give us any trouble."

Glacial silence resounded in the night while Bravo's eyes squinted at Trent. Jason's body tensed while his attention turned back to Clay. With the lights all pointed to him, his pale face stood out as snow in the desert.

And yet he seemed better, Jason thought, reaching the others on deck.

Trent went on, "Nothing I couldn't temporarily resolve, guys, but—"

But it's better move. Jason nodded at him, his eyes rapidly going back to the ghostly figure of his young man still on the boat.

"Your chariot awaits, pretty princess," Sonny said, offering Clay a hand to get up.

The MEDEVAC was at the other end of the deck; the pilot was ready for the take off while an EMT was waiting for his patient.

"Come on." Jason nodded, his hand stretched out to help Clay and Sonny down the boat.

Clay looked around, eyes rapidly moving from place to place. His chattering and shivering from the cold quickly revealed to hide an unsteadiness in the movements, and if Jason was not there to catch him, he would have fallen face down on the metal of the ship's floor.

"Hey, hey, hey!" Sonny hopped down while all Bravo rallied to Clay.

"I'm fine." Clay wavered while silently insisting to stand alone, but the grimace on his face made clear to all who stood by that it was not the time to let him do.

"No way, bud," Sonny placed his wet body under Clay's arm and guided him toward the helicopter. "You're stuck with me."

"Sonny!" Blackburn's voice calling froze him in place right before he stepped on the helicopter with Clay.

"Let him go," Jason said flatly. "He's already done two immersions in a short time, no way he can dive with us to finish the job."

Blackburn stood stiff in his position, eyes fixed on Sonny. "Don't let Spencer out of your sight."

Sonny nodded, observing the apprehensive looks Bravo Team darted at the EMT securing Clay on board, and then he hopped on, his focus shifting on keeping his brother awake.

The guys could only step back and get down, so to not be hit by the rotors as the helicopter took off. The deafening noise seized the fear-induced silence. Jason stood among what remained of Bravo while the salty smell of the ocean, carried by the wind gusts, filled his nostrils. His eyes remained glued to the MEDEVAC until it disappeared behind the clouds in the night sky. His heart was heavy, but he could not stop to think about what just happened to his man.

"Come on, we still have a job to do."

Dry air made its way into Clay's lungs bringing along a strong smell of clean. His eyes fluttered open, but closed right away as the light hurt them. Clay breathed deeply, his chest felt like if a weight had just been taken off of it, and finally he managed to take a glimpse at the surroundings.

Grey metal walls, curving and cramping, were all around, and that room had... portholes? There was a weird atmosphere there; some feeling Clay could not really name hovered in the air... What the heck am I doing in a submarine?

"Look at that, the Sleeping Beauty's finally awake!" A distant and muffled voice came. Sonny's voice. Of course. His brother always kept his promises, and he had promised to stay at his side.

A soft warmness caught hold of Clay's body. The tight and damp wetsuit had left its place to a short-sleeved hospital gown, and a light blanket rested on the top of him as like in a comforting embrace. Definitely not a submarine, he thought, turning his head around to see where his brother's voice came from.

"Hey, no. Don't try to get up, bud." The thud of an hand on glass accompanied those words. "Don't get me come in there," Sonny insisted.

Dizziness struck Clay. "Yeah..." He laid back on the not very soft mattress. "That didn't seem a good idea anyway..."

Sonny's bearded face looked down at him from the porthole. "Don't you do that ever again. Ever," he said in all seriousness.

Clay mumbled, clenching the sheets in his hands to stay gripped to the present.

"I really thought we were gonna lose you this time, brother. We all did."

Memories came back at Clay all at once. The fight underwater and the rapid ascent, his trouble breathing, the whole world spinning, the freezing cold, and then Sonny trying to drive him crazy in the back of the helicopter. But other than that… He must have lost consciousness at some point because after that there was nothing. Apart from the fact that he woke up in that kind of a metal tomb, two meters large and three meters long, and not much higher.

Clay still wasn't himself. "You mind fillin' the gaps?"

"Long story short? You messed up on your first mission back," Sonny said in a tone that could sound reproaching to anyone, but not to his brother, who knew him better than Sonny knew himself.

"Yeah." Clay stared at the chamber's ceiling while a bitter smile made its way on his pale face. "I'm well aware of that part." He soundly emptied his lungs before filling them deeply again. "How long do I need to stay here?"

Sonny scratched the back of his head. "The right amount of time."

"You're not very helpful." With his throat sore, Clay swallowed uncomfortably.

"Hey! I could be out there blowing up things if I didn't have to babysit you here."

Clay's eyes smiled. "No, you couldn't..." he said in a retrieved moment of lucidity.

Then he started to feel his eyelids heavy. Sonny's face was blurred, but he could bet his brother had one of his smirks directed right at him.

Clay tried to focus on the porthole. "Sorry if I ruined the fun for you..."

Sonny's heartbroken expression was the last thing Clay was aware of, aside from the weird sound of the voice saying something touching like: "There's nowhere I'd rather be, brother."

But it must have been only a dream, Sonny could have never been that fluffy to him.

What made Sonny hate hospitals was not the strong smell permeating the walls nor the weak lights, sometimes flickering like in the most splatter horror movie. It was more about the unsettling atmosphere that hovered all around. The sound of death could be heard in those corridors more than it could be heard in the battlefield. But unlike in the battlefield, there, he had no defenses.

However, there he was now, sitting in a room with another room inside it. Like those stupid Russian dolls, what are they called… Sonny tried to remember while his mind went back to a mission at the Ukraine/Russian border, long before Clay's arrival on Bravo, when he had bet with Brock that he—

A shiver ran down Sonny's spine at the sound of an alarm coming from the room at the other end of the corridor. Then it was silence, and as quickly as it raised, the commotion outside that weird room he was in dissipated.

No, Sonny wasn't afraid of hospitals, let nobody doubt that. He just hated them. A lot.

And for a good reason, he thought while staring at the sleeping Clay through the curved glass of the porthole. That metal chamber that kept his brother safe reminded him of the torpedo tube he had been trapped in a full bunch of months ago, and that gave him a light sense of claustrophobia. That memory was so distant and yet so vivid in his mind, making him feel the chills every time he thought about it. But that didn't mattered now; what mattered now was Clay.

Clay had been inside that thing for a couple hours, then he had been taken out for a while, and again brought back inside. It drove Sonny crazy that his brother was in and out of consciousness so quickly that he couldn't have a straight conversation with him, but the doctor said it was just as thing usually worked with those kind of injuries and those kind of therapies.

But Sonny didn't trust doctors…

"How's he doing?"

Sonny jumped from the chair at the sound of that familiar voice.

"How's he doing?" Jason repeated as Bravo entered into the decompression chamber's room.

"Seems fine." Sonny glanced at the small room inside the room, his eyes suffering from the weight of the blue bags that judging from his mate's appearance must have marked his face too. "That's what they say."

Jason peered at him with a straight expression, silently asking, are you sure?

"His pretty face is definitely rosier than when we got here." Sonny said, trying to convince himself first.

They both looked through the porthole. Under his golden beard, Clay's skin was, indeed, of a more natural color, and his lips were not blue anymore, but his expression while asleep was not yet as relaxed as they expected it would be.

They turned back to Trent in a vain hope he would know something more, that the extra medical training he had could give him some advantage on them.

"You should see your own faces." As Clay's voice came small to their ears, Bravo Team rallied to the porthole, fighting with each other to take a peek inside.

"I don't have a mirror in here, but I bet you're all look nastier than me." Clay wore a cocky smile while his eyes opened to the sight of his concerned brothers.

"We always do, GQ. We always do," Sonny said while grins drew on his teammates' faces.

Clay didn't make the effort of lifting his head from the pillow while blinking slowly. Maybe he couldn't. Then he turned toward the porthole. "How did it go?"

Furrowed brows met puzzled eyes. Could he still be confused?

"The mission, guys." Clay licked his lips. "Didn't you had to go back down to the wrecks?"

"Who do you think you're talking to?" Jason grinned, meeting his men's looks as they all realized Clay wasn't confused at all; he actually seemed the more lucid among them.

"We went, we made our move, and left the ashes behind," Ray said. "Only Brock enjoyed it a little too much."

"Maybe we're not letting him out as much as his species requires." Sonny barked at Brock, his eyes smiling.

Clay's muffled laugh resounded, adding up to the rest of the team's chuckles. It would take a while before Bravo Team could feel whole again, but that little moment they were having was close enough to that sensation that filled their eyes with gratitude.

Blackburn's entrance put that feeling on hold, but only for an instant. He didn't have to say a single word; the doctor confirmed Bravo's impression on Clay's conditions, they could read it on his face.

Sonny looked around at his brothers' exhausted expressions. As the relief seized control of them, the fatigue of the last day spent diving in the freezing ocean and worrying about Clay started to weight on them all. Now, seeing Clay resting peacefully in his hospital bed, although closed in that hermetic giant box, they gradually started to settle down, too.

Everything that could go wrong with Clay's first mission back on Bravo had gone wrong; from there things could only go better. Sonny could read that hope on his brothers' faces, but he was the kind of guy who always expected the other shoe to fall, and valuing the situation, he was not too convinced they had a full pair on their hands already.

Bravo's chuckles and mockeries filled the sterile air, as if they were training at the base or chilling at the bar, but just like in the middle of the ocean winds change rapidly, in a flash, Clay's body started shivering uncontrollably.

Horror took hold of the guys' smiling eyes while Clay's rolled back. A sudden chill gave Sonny the goose-bumps and his heart stopped at the sight of Clay's torso jumping up from the bed.

"He's having a seizure!" Trent hurried off the room to find a doctor.

Bravo rallied to the porthole, ready to break in the chamber to step at Clay's side and calm his body down. Dread rapidly filled the air, creating a silence interrupted only by the thuds of Clay's body slamming on the thin mattress.

A man in scrubs rushed into the room and opened the first door of the decompression chamber, losing some time to force Sonny out of the way. Despite hating the idea of being trapped in that death tube, Sonny would have instantly jumped in if that meant helping his brother.

Jason put a hand on Sonny's shoulder, motioning him away to give the doctor some space to seal the door behind him. Through the porthole, the team stared at Clay's ghostly face in horrified silence while their hearts raced as they never did.

Clay's jaw clenched, his teeth gritted with an agonizing sound. The blanket slid off Clay's shaking body while all his muscles contracted.

"Do something!" Sonny yelled, punching the metal wall.

One minute felt like an hour. The pressure indicator slowly moved its little arrow until the pressure inside the part of the chamber the doctor was in matched the one inside where Clay was.

Clay's legs trembled, his knees bent, his heels made leverage on the mattress, his shoulder sank in the bed. The gown shifted, exposing Clay's thighs to the sight. Once again, the consequences of the Manila bombing were there under Bravo's eyes. The shadow of the possibility they could lose Clay weighed on their hearts.

The doctor reached his patient and injected him something, then rapidly moved his gloved hands to force him down, keeping him still. Clay grounded his teeth, his restrained body struggling to free itself.

Take your hands off him, Sonny refrained himself from saying. The man was trying to help; Sonny wanted him to do something after all, and like it or not, he was doing something now.

No one on the outside dared to even breath until Clay's exhausted body laid stone-still, just like the air all around seemed to suddenly be. It worked.

"What the hell is going on?" Jason's voice resounded grave, demanding an instantaneous answer that didn't come.

The atmosphere was thick and a dreadful expectation feeling hovered in the room.

"It must be for the extra dose of pure oxygen they're giving him," Trent said quietly, drawing all eyes on him.

Clay's limbs were now abandoned heavily on the mattress, eyes quietly sealed and his expression not so tensed anymore. The doctor approached the porthole and looked solemnly at the SEALS. Sonny felt his muscle stiffening even more, hanging from the man's lips.

"Your friend will be fine. He experienced a known complication to the hyperbaric oxygen therapy," the doctor said in a thick Asian accent. "But it should have been resolved now. And if it happens again, I'll be right here."

Sonny couldn't feel completely relieved. "Isn't it better to take him out of that damn thing?"

"At the right time," said the doctor quietly. "We need another half an hour for this session to be complete."

Half an hour and then what? Sonny asked himself, his hands itching.

Resignation could be breathe at full lungs in the room. Blackburn sat on the chair in a corner of the room, Trent, Ray and Brock silently settled on the floor, right next to the chamber, but Jason and Sonny could not take their eyes off their suffering brother.

"Look, there is nothing you can do now," the doctor said from inside the chamber. "It will be better for everyone if you go resting a bit."

Bravo Team peered at each other intently. Their eyes were red and weary, but their looks determined.

"We're not going anywhere."

Yet another hospital room, Clay thought, slowly opening his eyes to the new environment. New, but not unfamiliar. All the hospitals of the world looked just the same from a laid-down perspective. And smelled the same, moreover… Clay could say he had tested a few of them all over the globe already.

He was so sick of it. He wanted to go back to the field. He wanted to fight with real enemies, not the ones in his body; not the ones in his head. Clay only wanted to feel part of the Team and to operate side by side to his brothers again.

His brothers… Clay looked around in search of them, his muscles were heavy and hard like if he had just completed an intensive training, and a metallic taste couldn't just leave his mouth. He soundly exhaled; his brothers were still there. Before he could abandon himself to the relief of the dreamland again, Sonny's sorrowful eyes met his tired ones.

Sonny jumped to his feet, and the rest of the guys mimicked his movements. In no time, Clay was surrounded by concerned faces. He felt their pain, but why? The last thing he recalled was them laughing and joking outside the decompression chamber.

"What happened?"

Jason looked at him, puzzled. "You can't remember anything?"

Clay shrugged.

"You experienced some side effects of the therapy you're getting," Trent explained. "But you should be good now."

Hopeful smiles drew on Bravo, but puzzlement didn't leave Clay's eyes.

"You can't just avoid complicating our lives, uh?" Sonny hesitantly patted him on the shoulder.

"That's my job." Clay could not help but close his eyes; his body didn't give him a break. "Why else would you have chosen me as Bravo Six?"

"You wish we didn't?" Jason's voice sounded almost like he expected an actual answer, but the thought his boss could seriously believe Clay could ever wish something like that was just ridiculous.

A reassuring smile appeared on Clay's face. "There's nowhere I'd rather be."

"In an hospital bed?" Sonny scoffed while Bravo all looked at each other, relief hovering in the air.

"That's good," Trent nodded at Clay. "Because you'll have to stay here for a couple more weeks."

"Wha—"

"You'll need a few more cycles in the decompression chamber," Trent continued, "and after that, a few more days have to pass before they will let you fly 18 hours straight to come back to The States."

"But you're not gonna be alone, brother," Sonny placed his muscled body right where Clay could see it better. "This time I'm gonna stick with you, making sure they do things right. And that you behave."

"Like I said" —Clay's tired eyes sparked with gratitude— "there's nowhere else I'd rather be."

Bravo smiles were once again the last thing Clay saw before the dreamland claimed his conscience.

Author's note: That's it! Thank you all very much for reading through until the end of the story.
And thanks for your patience and your support while I was writing this. I did appreciate every single review and word of encouragement I received throughout the whole story.

The ending turned out a bit fluffy maybe… but I needed a fluffy moment to wash away all the pain I inflicted the guys.

Clay feeling part of the team again despite he's not yet ready to jump back in action is something that I missed after the Manila bombing (although the storyline they gave him then was intriguing and deep enough), as it was Sonny and the guys being given the possibility to stay at Clay's side. The job comes before anything in the Military, and the guys have to follow orders, but I just thought that maybe this time they could give them a break and allow them to nurse their brother in their own special way.