The days since then had come and gone. Her sandwiches, she noticed, no longer saw themselves slathered in ungodly amounts of cheese-adjacent mayonnaise, Bluejay had harassed her with significantly less unprompted, dubiously true stories, and Burn had… avoided her, mostly. A few tense stares in the hallway, a few heated words exchanged, but for the most part, her life had turned eerily calm. Or as calm as one can be when an incredibly friendly armed man is six feet away from you at all times. He was getting better at avoiding her attention, and Nicole couldn't tell if that was comforting or worrying. "Don't worry, it'll be like I'm not even there," he said, when he was first assigned to surveil her, and he seemed to be finally delivering on his promise.

The hangar was open to the brisk Alaskan air, and today it was a hub of activity as the pilots checked on their planes, touched up the paint, or just shot the shit. For Nicole, it was the latter. Jackal had come up to her earlier and asked for stories about her dogfight with the ace, and for once, she felt confident enough to share. Things are finally getting better, she thought, and for the first time in ages, her tired scowl had been replaced by a confident and almost borderline cocky smirk.

"You should have seen it, shit was crazy. We were over the magma, right? And the old man just dived straight on me. Like he was trying to run me through." Nicole leaned up against the F/E-18's fuselage. "I gave it some crazy high-G shit and turned right across his belly. Railgun was charging thiiiis close to my forehead." She held out her hands, visually illustrating their proximity. "Then- kwapow! Loudest shit I've ever heard in my life. Dude shot straight into the ground and kicked up fresh lava everywhere."

Dagger crossed her arms, hunched over a tall toolbox in the middle of the hangar. "Bull-fucking-shit. Just because I wasn't there doesn't mean you can play me for a fool."

"Oh, c'mon, Spook," Jackal stared at her from his F/C-15's cockpit, checking over its systems. "You can't expect me to believe a story like that." He shook his head. "Planes just don't move like that!"

"Most planes don't move like that." She pointed over her shoulder to her plane. "AoA delimiter."

"Shit, you got one of those?" Jackal's eyes lit up briefly, covered up by an annoyed huff. "Lucky…" He mumbled, trailing off.

"Hmph. You Feds got all the good stuff, and here we are with planes that… Well, I don't want to say were falling apart, but…" Dagger gestured to the F/D-14s on the other side of the hangar, the remnants of Cygnus Squadron. "...let's say… they'd seen better days even before this war started."

A jet flew overhead, unexpected by the pilots. I'm not doing anything, she thought. Might as well go planewatching.

She stepped outside to watch the C/T-17 howl in for a landing, the cargo plane putting its wheels down on the tarmac. She glanced back at the other pilots. "Yo, Jack, Dag, get over here!" Her eyes were wide with excitement. "It's a cargo plane!"

"Shit!" Jackal jumped from his seat in the F/C-15. "We're finally on the supply chain again?"

"You gotta be kiddin' me…" Dagger ran up to the hangar door, watching the plane taxi over in front of it.

As the crew unloaded crates, one sole, solitary, tiny container caught the eye of all assembled.

Coffee.

The pilots looked at each of the others, and they all knew what they had to do.

The box of instant coffee sat on the ping-pong table, the three pilots huddled around it at arms' length. This crate, to these people, at this time, was worth five hundred times its weight in gold.

"What do we do with it?" Jackal stared at the packets of instant coffee in the box, its lid propped open. "...There's not enough for the whole base, unless we want coffee for… two days."

"I… need it." Nicole grabbed fistfuls of instant coffee packets and started stuffing them into her flight suit's pockets.

"Woah, calm down, Fed girl." Dagger pulled the box away. "Save some for the rest of us."

"I know this is hard, guys," Jackal looked at the other two pilots with an uneasy expression. "But I think we have to share."

"Do you know how little sleep I get on a daily basis?" Nicole sighed, the dark bags under her eyes sharply visible against the deep tan tones of her face. "I am not sharing this coffee with anyone who does not yet know of its existence."

"You know what, Jack?" Dagger raised an eyebrow. "I'm with the Fed on this one."

"Thanks, Dag." Nicole smirked. "Come on, Jackal. Pact of silence. Shake on it."

"Ugh," The pilot groaned. "Fine. Three-way split."

"Pleasure doing business," she said, smirking wide. "I think we've got some good times ahead of us."