Author's Note: Sorry for the delay! If it makes you feel better, part of it was from the monstrosity that was chapter four of Bad Things Happen, and the other part was because I was working on this, just not this particular part. Despite my love of dark fics and whump and hurt/comfort, I much prefer the vague/off screen action, rather than being hit in the face with graphic descriptions of violence. So this was a struggle to show the seriousness of the situation without it having to be all...squicky. Anyway. Delayed long enough! ONWARD!

It was freezing cold. And damp as hell. And smelled like mildew and damp dirt.

When he was nine, his parents took him on a road trip to Hannibal, Missouri, because he was in love with the story of Tom Sawyer. They stopped at Mark Twain's house, explored Lover's Leap, had their pictures taken in front of the Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn statue. It would be the last time they did anything as a family that wasn't part of a court case, but he didn't know it at the time.

The part he remembered the best though, was the Mark Twain Cave. Right next to their campground, his parents let him take the tour seven times, and every time, his favorite part was when they were deep in the cavern and their tour guide would turn off their flashlight and throw them into pitch darkness so thick he could feel it pressing down on him. It'd been ninety degrees outside that whole trip, but in the cave, he shivered in the cool and damp. The cave smelled different than anywhere else he'd ever been, and as soon as the lights were out, he could just imagine he'd stepped onto a different planet.

He felt like he'd just stepped back into that cave.

Rick blinked his eyes open. At least, he thought he did. It was dim and dark enough it took him a minute to realize they were open. Well, one of them anyway. His left eye was stubbornly refusing to open more than a mere slit and felt tacky and crusty against his skin.

Caged fluorescent bulbs with frayed wiring flickered overhead at odd intervals, casting shadows from the bars against the ceiling.

Bars?

He tried to push himself up and his back ignited.

"Mother fu-" he hiss through gritted teeth, biting down hard on his lower lip as he tried to keep quiet. Except ow, why the hell did his face hurt too?

"Finally," someone said off to his right. "I was beginning to wonder if I was gonna have to decide between the Kiss of Life or sharing my cell with a coma patient."

Rick snorted at that, except it came out barely more than a puff of air as he realized his entire chest ached, too, and trying to do more than lying there breathing was just a bad idea all around.

"Please tell me nobody kissed me," he grumbled, using his left hand to carefully prod along the side of his face, wincing when his fingers came into contact with a raised split of skin across his forehead, just over his left eye. The blood was dried and cracked, itching like mad as he tenderly tried to scratch it loose. That at least explained was his eye didn't want to open. "What happened?"

TC leaned over him, filling his entire field of vision. "What do you remember? And stop touching that. We don't have anything to clean it with and your hands are filthy."

Rick huffed irritably but stopped trying to rub at it. Still itched like crazy. "Uhh…I think I remember a firefight."

TC sighed. "Understatement of the year, but okay. Magnum and Nuzo got ambushed, it was an emergency EXFIL that went to shit. Took an RPG to the rotor, crashed into a mountain, decided to go for a spin down the side of it. Miraculously survived. Got picked up by the Taliban."

Images flashed through his memory as TC spoke. The smell of the hydraulic fluid, the screech of rending metal as the helicopter crashed nauseatingly end over end down the side of the mountain.

The crack of Dallas's neck snapping as he collided with the ceiling.

Matthews shot point blank by the Taliban.

Magnum dropping like a stone after being hit in the face with a rifle.

He groaned at the memory of that same rifle coming down on him. "Where are we? And how did we get here?"

"A cave," TC said succinctly. "I'd rate it one of five stars, would not come here again. Management is negligent at best, and no mints on the non-existent pillows. And a lot of people sharing one space." TC sighed, leaning back against the bars near Rick's head so all he had to do was turn his head to see.

It reminded him of a dog kennel. Cages made of scrap everything – wood, metal, rocks – lined a squared open space in the middle where a fire pit ringed with stones still smoked. Stringed lights like one would find in a mine lined the walls, though half the bulbs worked, casting everything into harsh shadows.

In the cages were people. Filthy, dirt streaked faces peered out from behind makeshift bars of iron and wood scraps, huddled together for warmth against the chill of the cave. They weren't locals – not by the color of their skin beneath the grime, or their clothes.

These were people that the Taliban captured for ransom from other countries. Tourists. Welfare workers and hospital staff and foreign journalists.

The cages were stacked on top of one another, and Rick shuddered at the implications for the people in the lower ones. He doubted plumbing was included in their amenities.

"And we didn't get here by walking," Nuzo said. "I'd guess three or four miles from where we went down, until they could get us to trucks. After that..." the older man trailed off. "Anyone's guess. But I doubt we're out of the Korengal. It's too good a hiding spot for them, which means it's a good enough hiding spot for us, too."

"What's our status?" Rick asked, allowing himself to drop back down, back flat against the cave floor, his eyes automatically closing against the overhead bulb. The ground was sharp and uneven, but at least he could feel it. Situation aside, at least he wasn't paralyzed from the waist down. At least there was one upside to this misery.

TC didn't immediately answer, and Rick cracked his own good eye open again.

"Well, don't keep me in suspense with all the good news," he drawled.

Nuzo and TC shared a look before TC took a breath and opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get a word out, Rick suddenly realized what he was missing.

There were only three of them.

"Where's Thomas?" he demanded, jackknifing upright so fast he saw stars and couldn't help the stifled cry of pain as his back made itself known again. Their cages were small, but right next to each other – TC propped him up to be able to look around and Nuzo was alone. A quick glance around the cages lining the rest of the cave told him what his gut already knew.

Magnum was gone.

"Is...is he dead? Did they leave him on the mountain?" he demanded, voice shaking more than he would like. This was war. Loss of life was expected. He'd lost more than one friend already, but not Magnum.

Not Thomas.

"He's alive," TC soothed, firm hands on his shoulders to keep him from turning around and aggravating an already serious injury. "At least he was last time we saw him."

"Last time?" Rick echoed. "What the hell? How long have we been here? How long has he been gone?"

"Do I look like I have access to a clock?" TC snapped. "I know what you know, Orville."

Rick bit his lip, physically stopping himself from snapping the first thing that came to mind. It wasn't like they weren't all in the same boat.

Cage.

Whatever.

"Do you know why he isn't with us?" he asked instead. There were multiple reasons why Thomas wouldn't be in the immediate vicinity beyond just the knee-jerk assumption that he was dead and left on the mountainside to be picked over by scavenging animals. Ranking officers were sometimes kept separate from other prisoners, or if they thought that Thomas had some sort of intel that they didn't. It could also be just a psychological tactic to make them freak out.

Which was working.

Because Thomas had the self-preservation of a lemming, and while he was ninety-nine percent a happy-go-lucky man who could be friends with anyone, he also had a singular talent for inciting violence with the same minimum effort.

TC shrugged. Nuzo, on the other hand, rubbed his chin where stubble was just beginning to grow in, his blunt fingernails scratching at the short, rough hairs.

"There was something funky about that ambush," Nuzo said.

"You mean besides the part where like fifty Taliban fighters somehow managed to get wind of our position and had a look out with an RPG stationed in one of the many, many options for escape routes that we could've taken to get the hell outta there?" TC asked.

Nuzo ignored the sarcasm. "We know what the Talib are like. Maximum damage, maximum terror. Soft targets over heavily armed specialty units. But they almost ignored Markham's group. They bunched up on one flank between Thomas and Robin and 'em. Like they were trying to separate them. And they didn't go for the larger group with Markham, they went for Thomas." Nuzo paused, head tilting to one side, thinking.

Rick and TC let him.

Nuzo and Magnum had approximately one thing in common besides being Navy: they were deceptively smart. While Thomas was a master of 'winging it', Nuzo was the other end – calculated. A lot of junior officers thought Nuzo was on par with an ox for intelligence as soon as they heard his accent and saw his rank – but unlike Thomas who was happy to let people make their assumptions, Nuzo usually smiled, nodded, and then spouted off some Plato or pointed out a brilliant tactical maneuver that saved time, money, men, and made the other side look like idiots.

"I take that back. I don't think it was Thomas they were after," the chief guessed. "I think it was Robin."

Maybe it was the head injury talking, but that made less sense, not more, and Rick pointed out as much.

"No, you didn't see it – the hajis were making a move on the both of them, but the more I think about it, the more I swear to God I heard one of them yell about a journalist."

"Told you those were Taliban Bullseyes," Rick snarked. TC just rolled his eyes.

Nuzo have a quick side half-nod. "I'm not saying there isn't some room for error – bullets flying, two birds in the air in close proximity, more than a few people shouting…but journalist sounds pretty goddamn similar in Dari and Pashto as it does in English. It was either Thomas or Robin they were after, and it makes more sense for it to be Robin. At least, if they were only after one of them."

"But why the hell would they care about Masters?" TC asked. "He's not famous – he's not a household name that America would get up in arms about if they found out he was missing or being held for ransom."

"Does it really make more sense that they were after one random SEAL who, while a general nuisance, isn't exactly responsible for a lot of high profile damage?"

"Depends on what you call high profile," TC pointed out. "Together, we done some damage – especially since working with Hannah. A lot of high profile targets were on that list, and you and TM were boots on the ground for all of them."

It didn't need to be said that half the time, Rick was on the ground with them – he was just half a mile away looking down a scope and calling out targets from a distance. Or that TC was more than just EXFIL. Taliban had very much a hierarchy when it came to pinning blame. The leader was the responsible one – that was who they had bounties on. Would they take out the whole team or group involved? Without question. But they were a tribal group, which meant tribal retribution.

Enough so that Rick often quoted 'dishonor on you, dishonor on your cow' whenever the subject came up, no matter how many times he got yelled at for it.

"It's not exactly advertised who's responsible for strikes like that," Rick said carefully. "You know that means you're suggesting a traitor."

Nuzo shrugged. "It's a tactic as old as war itself. We got people in the admiralty selling plans for our carriers to China. You think the Taliban couldn't put the squeeze on one of the local translators? Or that they couldn't embed their own? Background checks aren't exactly a hundred percent in this country."

"But why not kill us outright?" TC pointed out.

"Who's to say they weren't trying to? How many people you know walk away from a wreck like that? Or an ambush of fifty to one? Maybe they just seized an opportunity from the failed attempts to kill us. Four American military members as hostages – I don't think many could turn that down."

It was what they intended to do with the hostages that concerned Rick. Taliban didn't believe that torture didn't work. Or they just didn't care. They were more of the 'I believe in shooting the messenger, because it sends a message'. Captured former commandants of the Afghani secret police admitted that they were instructed to commit such atrocities that people were afraid of them before ever meeting them.

Rick glanced up at TC and could tell the big man had the same concerns.

If they were after Robin, why, and if they thought Thomas knew anything about him…

Rick let his head drop back onto TC's extended leg, focusing on the cave ceiling above him rather than what he remembered of the bodies they'd recovered from Taliban 'interviews' or Thomas's personality.

"He's not coming back any time soon, is he."

Thomas gasped at the shock of cold water to his face, sucking in a breath before he had chance to think about it. He sputtered and coughed and choked, reflexively throwing himself forwards.

Well, he would've.

If he wasn't tied to where he was sitting.

He tossed his head, shaking the water out of his face and his hair, blinking blearily against the dimness of the room as it swam slowly into focus.

It wasn't a room. Not really. Carved out of a rock wall, it still had a door and bare bulbs for lighting, claustrophobic and small, the air reeking of mildew and damp and something he didn't want to think about.

His head pounded in time with his heart, the dim light doing nothing for the spiking ache that went across the crown of his forehead. More than just water dripped into his eyes, stinging even as he attempted to blink it away.

He was far from alone. At least four – assuming he wasn't seeing double – unfriendly faces glowered back at him. The one directly in front of him still held the now empty bucket, a Kalashnikov hung with a three point harness across his chest. The other three were similarly armed, but their hands rested at the ready, palms flat against the stock of their guns with their fingers alongside the triggers.

Impulse made him want to ask about the others. Were they alive, were they dead, were they okay – but prudence kept him from asking. Let them think he cared more about himself than the others. Don't let them become pressure points. Instead, his opted for default mode.

Sarcasm.

"You know, proper gun handling says 'keep finger along the receiver until ready to fire'," Thomas slurred. "Don't want to accidentally shoot your buddy in the ass, do you?"

The three in the back frowned, glancing between each other, but the man in front, the one with the bucket, huffed a snort of laughter without humor, and with no other warning, swung the bucket with enough force that when it collided with Thomas's skull, he thought for sure he was going to pass out again. Stars burst across his darkening vision and he tasted blood and dirt across his tongue and was honestly surprised that when he spit out a glob of blood and torn skin, a tooth didn't go with it.

"Kahāṅ hai sahāfī?"

Thomas's brain pulled up blank. Not Dari or Pashto. Which wasn't all that unusual. Taliban had no unifying language, and anyone who came into the country to join their fight didn't always bother to learn a new language. It sounded familiar, and if he hadn't just been bashed in the head with a heavy object, he might've recognized it.

"Kahāṅ hai sahāfī?"

"I don't speak…whatever that is," he said. "I don't know what you're saying."

Two of the rear guards decided they didn't appreciate his tone, and as one threatened – at least, that's what Thomas was guessing, given the tone – the other raised his rifle, pointing it at Magnum's face. Language or not, the message was clear: we don't like your attitude.

Well, look at that. Something the Taliban and American military leadership had in common.

"If you didn't need me alive, I'd still be on that mountain." Thomas pulled bruised lips back in something closer to a snarl than a smile. "We both know you're not going to shoot me, so threatening to isn't gonna do fuck all."

It didn't matter if they understood the exact words. They knew he wasn't afraid of them like they wanted him to be. They didn't shoot him.

They did, however, swing the gun stock around to slap him upside the head with it, and he felt his teeth slice into the side of his cheek as his head whipped to the side from impact.

The leader repeated the same question in the same vaguely familiar but unknown language.

"Habla español?" he suggested, smirking through the blood pooling behind his teeth.

That threw them off.

The leader frowned. Clearly, he recognized English, even if he didn't speak it – or maybe he actually understood Magnum's sarcasm with the first answer, which earned the bucket to the face – but Spanish wasn't something he'd come across. Now the man was second guessing his intel.

Magnum gave a snort of derisive laughter, but almost choked again when he dislodged a glob of congealed blood from his nose.

"Gato tiene su lengüeta?" The idiom lost something when translated, but the man got the general idea that it was unlikely Thomas was cooperating instead of mocking him.

In retrospect, he probably should've expected the blow, but he chalked it up to two serious head injuries. The kick caught him off guard. Even if he had his hands free, he wouldn't have caught himself before slamming the back of his head against the ground, his entire weight plus the chair falling on top of his bound hands.

He really hoped that crunch was the chair breaking, and not all of his fingers.

It took a second to remember to breathe.

It took a couple more to remember how.

"Kahāṅ hai sahāfī!" the man was shouting now. He grabbed a fistful of Thomas's BDU shirt, yanking him up several inches off the ground. Thomas couldn't even hold his head upright, instead lolling backwards. "Kahāṅ hai sahāfī?!"

"English, mother fucker – do you speak it?" The breathy rasp wasn't quite as effective as Samuel L. Jackson's classic delivery, but it achieved something. The man dropped him back to the ground, standing over him with his feet on either side of Magnum's ribs as he dug into his vest pocket.

He reached down again, but instead of grabbing onto Magnum's shirt, he fisted his hand in his hair, wrenching Thomas's head back up to shove a worn piece of paper in his face. ""Kahāṅ hai sahāfī? Cur yā? Kahāṅ hai cur yā?!"

Magnum really wished he knew what the man was saying, because as his vision cleared, he finally saw what the man was holding. It was a black and white surveillance still photograph, he recognized the only two people in the picture immediately.

It was a photo of him…and Robin Masters.

Taken at a distance, it was the two of them talking. Robin had his glasses down around his neck and his helmet removed, but the journalist label clearly visible. Thomas almost had his back to the camera, but for whatever reason, he was looking over his shoulder at someone out of view of the camera making his face clearly visible. It was unmistakably him and Robin, no point in lying about it, but what the question was, he didn't know. The Taliban didn't capture people for intelligence or information – they knew enough about military tactics that by the time they had information they could confirm, it would be worthless. The odds of anyone besides someone wearing stars on both shoulders would have anything worth knowing was slim to none. Taliban captured foreigners for two things: ransom, or public denouncing of their home countries involvement with Afghanistan.

This was clearly neither.

"What about it?" he asked, wincing when the man's grip in his hair only tightened. "I'm not trying to be an ass – I don't know what you want me to say. Na mey-danäm. Za na pohegam!"

The man with the picture spit in disgust, but at least he released Thomas's hair, letting his head drop back to the rocky ground. It still hurt, but at least it wasn't like falling the distance from sitting upright to the ground.

The man muttered something incomprehensible, dragging his hand over his face as he scratched his beard with blunted nails. With little warning, he spun on his heel and kicked Magnum as hard as he could in the side.

There was an audible crack that even he could hear over the sudden roar in his ears. Thomas didn't even have the air the shout, his breath catching in his throat as he felt something ignite as he reflexively tried to curl in on himself, but the ropes that bound his hands to the chair held fast as he choked on air like a fish out of water. Even if he wanted to answer, or knew what the hell he was asking, he couldn't.

The man was screaming at him now, enraged beyond reason, spittle flying from his lips as he hauled off and kicked Thomas again.

And again.

And again.

In his rage, his aim was off, and a kick meant for already broken ribs missed and caught Thomas on his chin, cracking his head against the ground in an explosion of white and the sudden absence of sound that whined in his ears like a shorted speaker.

The last thing he knew was he finally recognized the language – Urdu – and understood the question: where is the journalist?

Author's Note: Shorter than every other chapter, but this is a more typical length for me. The whole story so far in a word document is over 50 pages long and currently a little over half the length of a NANO novel, and it's nowhere near to complete. No worries about it being a 'short' story, or that all breaks will be this long (I am, however, dangerously behind on another fandom's exchange fic, so I might disappear for a bit). Anyway, as always, shout out to pandigirl19 and blazeofobscurity over on Tumblr for listening to me plot this out and give me helpful feedback at all hours of the day and night! Let me know what you think! Feel free to come find me on tumblr as disappearinginq!