Behind Enemy Lines

By: TG

Summary: When Jack Frost, a disillusioned Lieutenant in the United States Navy, is shot down behind enemy lines, he begins to realize that his yearning for adventure might be his downfall. Luckily he's got Tooth, North, Aster, and a whole boatload of people trying to get him home, and he might just make it…if the mysterious tracker doesn't get to him first.

Warnings: Language, sex, misuse of history, scenes of war

Author's notes: a long-awaited update! i decided for my 20 year fic-iversary (july 14, 2022) that i wanted to attempt completing all of my posted wips, starting with this one. after 8 years of waiting, the end has finally come! thanks for all your patients and kind comments!


Aster stares into the eyes of each of the men he and Pitchiner have assembled for Jack's rescue mission.

"I want to make it clear," he says into the grave silence, "that I intend to put you in harm's way. Anyone who wants to back out of this mission should do so now — it's your last chance."

The silence continues. The chosen soldiers stand with straight backs and steely gazes, none of them moving.

One of their own is missing and in need of rescue. He's been out there on his own for days, doing his best to survive to keep fighting. It is past time to bring him home.

Aster feels the gratitude well up inside him as North's hand claps his shoulder, fingers squeezing and grounding him. He squares his shoulders and his mouth forms a wicked smirk.

"Alright then. Let's go get our boy back."


Hac is in chaos, its citizens cowering in their homes as Emil strides through streets full of soldiers with guns and military trucks. He feels more powerful than he's ever felt, standing amongst the carnage and spent artillery shells.

Let them fear him — let them all fear the Serbian army. As it should be.

"General Winter!" one of his runners yells. He turns to see a brown haired boy in camo approach. The boy stops just in front of him and bends over, trying to catch his breath. Emil rolls his eyes and taps the boy's chin impatiently.

"What, I'm busy."

"They've intercepted a signal! It's coming from the crash site."

General Winter straights up, his eyes boring into the runner. "Are you sure?"

The runner cowers a bit under his gaze but nods. "Yes, I saw the signal myself."

General Winter leers. It feels like Fate is smiling down on them today.

He'd left Pitch and Snow Queen to take care of the American pest, since Pitch is his best tracker. But now… Now the American is broadcasting his location, and it's time to give Pitch some backup.

"Prepare to leave!" he shouts. Around him men begin hopping into their tanks, eager to leave Hac behind and exercise a little more stress relief on an unsuspecting enemy.


Survive the supposed safe zone of Hac: check.

Get to ejection site and turn beacon back on: a-check.

Next on the old to-do list: getting the damn fly-over recording out of the chair.

It's easier said than done. Each soldier carries a pack of very basic tools on him for such occasions, so Jack's got that covered. But it's so cold up here, he can feel the freeze radiating up from the ground as he struggles to yank off his gloves with stiff fingers. It's even colder without them, and his fingers instantly turn red and painful as they become exposed to the air.

"Shit," Jack mutters. He scrabbles for the knife in his kit, a long, thin-bladed thing that will serve as his makeshift screwdriver. He manages to pick it up and jam the tip into the screws, but he can barely get his fingers to twist the way he needs them to. The knife tip keeps slipping out of the screw head, but after precious minutes he finally gets the first screw undone, smiling as it falls soundlessly into a pile of accumulating snow.

He knows he's a sitting duck out here, so he takes a moment to observe his surroundings before he continues. He should've been doing that to begin with, he knows he's not alone out here; it's only a matter of time until Black Robes comes for him, unless he was the one who exploded earlier.

"That'd be a little too convenient," Jack mutters to himself, watching his breath crystalize in the air in front of him. No, he has to assume that Black Robes is still out there — could be out there right now, watching him fumble with the second screw.

That thought makes his hands shake. He's so close to hope that he can almost taste it. He wants to see his sister again. He wants to see North and Tooth again.

He wants to see Aster again. Kiss him and run his fingers through his hair and tell him that the ghost of him is what kept Jack alive all this time.

Sandy's death will not be vain.

He takes a deep breath to calm himself and continues with hands as steady as he can make them. The second and third screws fall into the snow with their brethren, giving him virtually no trouble. The fourth is stubborn, screwed in tighter than the others, but eventually Jack works it free and watches it fall.

He sits back on his heels in triumph.


Aster walks across the wing of the ship and tries not to think about how he watched Jack and Sandy do the same thing just days ago as they prepared to fly their routine mission.

It was anything but routine.

God, Jack doesn't deserve any of this, but it's in Aster's hands now.

He ducks beneath his helicopter's whirling blades and slides into the back alongside North and a few other mission volunteers. The rest are scattered in two other helicopters — two for cover, one for rescue. Admiral Pitchiner gets in the front, and after the okay signal is given, all three helicopters lift off.

Aster doesn't much like heights, doesn't much like flying. But there's something mesmerizing about the twinkling blue waters of the ocean beneath them, and the way the water melts into the land and the way the land rises up into mountains.

The mountains of the demilitarized zone are actually quite beautiful, Aster thinks as the helicopters weave around monoliths of rock and the tips of snow-covered trees. The entire area is snowy white and misty, like something from a movie.

Underneath him right now is natural beauty and the horrifying prospect of humanity's great evils.

He grips the sides of his seat to hide his shaking hands and prays that they're going to make it on time to save Jack.


Pitch climbs the crest of the hill in complete silence, making sure not to step on any twigs or bone-dry leaves. He knows the American is here — he can practically smell him out there in the clearing. He's been following the kid's trail for days now, and he's gotten used to all of the subtle little signs of his presence.

This is definitely the place.

He crouches down behind a thick bramble of tree branches and hauls his sniper rifle into a firing position, looking into the clearing through the high-powered scope, sweeping right to left in a slow arch.

Pitch's sights land on the flashing light of the beacon, and for a moment he considers shooting it. He's not sure how long it's been on — maybe it's always been on, and the Americans have already ascertained that their missing soldier is not there.

If so, that's their mistake, because just to the right, leaning up against the seat that the beacon is attached to is a rifle. And next to that rifle, resting on the shoulder of the seat, is a glove.

Hiding behind the chair, then.

Pitch looks up from his scope, wanting to verify with his own eyes, but he's too far away and the whiteness of the area is dazzling.

Well, that's fine. He's got forty-eight hours. Let's see who can wait longer.

He settles in a bit deeper into his makeshift nest and goes back to peering through his scope, surveying the area in slow sweeps across the horizon, but something niggles on the edge of his hearing — a soft buzzing, like a gentle hum from a great distance. He tries to ignore it — he's so close to his goal he can almost taste it, can almost smell the iron tang of the American's blood —

The buzzing is getting louder, clearer, identifiable.

Helicopters.

He doesn't have forty-eight hours to finish the job assigned to him — he has mere minutes.

He's got to kill the American now.

It goes against his own instincts but his drive to accomplish his assignment overrides his own learned knowledge, so he gets up from his crouch and abandons his nest. He's not without caution, moving forward in a low crouch, his gun tucked into his shoulder and prepared to fire. He is fully aware that he is now a moving target in black in an empty, open, icy white field, just as vulnerable as the American he's so desperate to end.

He makes it all the way to the chair without so much as a movement in his surroundings, which is suspicious in itself. He had expected an attack of some kind, or for the American to attempt to relocate for safety. Maybe he fell asleep. Maybe he doesn't know Pitch is coming for him.

Pitch trains his gun on the lump behind the chair as he crosses to the side, prepared to pull the trigger as soon as the American's white hair comes into view.

When he gets around to the back side of the chair he stops up short, his eyes widening in growing realization.

The American is not there. It's just his glove and his gun.

He's been had.

"Shit."


Jack tracks Black Robes as he moves into the clearing, watches as he discovers Jack's ruse.

Time to go.

He pops out of the snow bank he'd hidden himself in, gun already drawn and finger against the trigger. He knew he'd have mere seconds to get the drop on Black Robes, so he set up as many advantages as he could. Black Robes whirls around, his cumbersome rifle flicking up a little too late.

Jack's gun jerks in his hands once, twice. The sound of the gunshots echo through the forest. One of them hits Black Robes in the chest, stunning him but not enough to put him down for good. Heart in his throat, Jack pulls the trigger four more times in sheer desperation and misses.

Okay, he supposes that's what he gets for firing in sheer panic.

Black Robes takes advantage of Jacks misfires and manages to get off a shot of his own. Jack feels the pain of it before his eyes even register that Black Robes pulled the trigger — well before he hears it echoing away.

The pain is intense, borderline unbearable. He cries out and instinctively drops his gun to clutch at the bloody wound. It's a graze — he knows, because there's no blood spray behind him and a bullet of that caliber would have surely been a through-and-through — but it's still the actual worst, and his arm hangs limply at his side.

No arm, no gun —

"Fuck!" he spits.

They're too close at this point, and Black Robes has smartly abandoned his rifle in favor of a handgun.

Easier for him to handle in close quarters, bad news for me Jack thinks as he ducks beneath it. Black Robes pulls the trigger on him but the bullet squeaks by, missing Jack's face by centimeters. It's so close Jack can feel the heat of it.

He needs to get rid of the gun.

He pops back up and, running out of options, open-hand slaps the gun out of Black Robe's hand. Black Robes makes an angry sound as it goes flying into deep snow.

And that's why you always hold a gun two-handed.

Jack doesn't waste any time — even a second of indecision could kill him. He lashes out, putting all of his hand-to-hand combat training to use. Black Robes is close enough to punch, so he gives him a right hook, feeling the satisfying crunch of Black Robes' nose against his knuckles.

Black Robes' head snaps around with the force of it, so Jack takes advantage of his momentarily poor balance and wraps his arms around Black Robes' waist. He yells with the effort it takes to pick the other man up off the ground, his wound screaming in protest, and then drops him onto his back in a bodyslam.

He'd kind of wanted to suplex him, but their body positions were all wrong for that. Would've been epic, though.

Black Robes hits solid ice, and Jack gives him a vicious grin at the sound of his breath wheezing out of his open, soundless mouth.

Jack follows him down, kneeling on his stomach, doing his best to keep him from getting back up. Black Robes puts up a good fight; he manages to get Jack in the side of the head with a sharp elbow, sending sparks into his vision and momentarily disorienting him. Jack blinks over and over, trying to clear his eyes. There's no time for this — not now, fuck.

He's got a secret weapon — time to bring it out. With his nondominant hand he does his best to hold Black Robes down by the neck, choking him. With his other he reaches into his pocket and pulls out an item he'd grabbed from the chair earlier — the screwdriver knife. Black Robes' hands scrabble at him, a last ditch attempt at survival, but Jack is in a steadier position. He flicks the knife open and brings it down in a wide arc.

Jack feels the knife slide into Black Robes' chest and he bears all of his weight down on it, driving it in deeper. Black Robes screams and his body jerks. Blood bubbles up past his lips, and then Jack is scrambling off of him, not really wanting to watch another person's last moments of life.

He sits there in the cold, wet snow, panting, arm radiating pain, and lets his head fall back to gaze at the sky.

What a hollow victory.

It takes him longer than it should to realize that it's not his body that's shaking — it's the ground beneath him. He looks up, squinting through the bright whiteness toward the trees, and sees something very peculiar.

Trees are being felled — and not just one or two, but lines of them.

He puts two and two together and realizes he's been found by more than just Black Robes.

"Fuck," he hisses, scrambling to get off his ass and get moving as the tanks break through the line of trees. "Fuck fuck fuck."

He makes a run for it, zig-zagging away as large caliber bullets break the ground apart at his feet. Snow and chips of ice and rock fly up in all directions, surrounding him in debris and smoke. Men and tanks line the treeline — the only place he can go is the edge of the cliff. There's a statue there that he can take refuge behind for a moment while he figures this shitshow out.

Or he would have, if the anti-aircraft gun on the tank hadn't blasted a hole in it and rendered it structurally unsound.

Fuck.

He might have to jump.

He will jump, if only to keep them from getting their hands on his dead body.

Jack's getting dangerously close now, and he's out of time to try and figure out a way to escape from this. Bullets are still flying all around him. It's honestly a miracle he hasn't been hit again — or maybe he has and adrenaline has just eaten up all the pain. He doesn't have time to stop and find out, and at this rate he might become a splatter at the bottom of the mountain anyway, so what does it matter?

In that moment, in a break in the gunfire, he hears it — the whirring sound of helicopter blades.

At the edge of the cliff three helicopters finally come into view, and they're American. Two of them instantly begin to open fire on the men and tanks at the edge of the clearing.

Jack could've fallen to his knees in that moment — his knees actually buckle in the face of the sheer relief he feels, and he feels almost dizzy with the euphoria of possibly getting to live for another day. Somehow his body remains standing, through nothing other than his own strength of will.

A third helicopter comes into view, rising up from beneath the cliff face. It's open side is facing Jack — it's his rescue, he realizes. He glances over the faces inside and feels his breath catch when he sees Aster looking back.

Aster.

Aster gestures below, and Jack looks down and realizes North is on the rope, and what they want him to do.

Jump, Aster mouths. Jack's entire body tenses, preparing instinctively to do as he's told, but his joints lock up before he can go for it.

Aster is so close. Safety and warmth and food are so close. Salvation.

But the fly-over footage is still back there, in the chair. The reason Sandy died.

All of those dead bodies. The feeling of the muck between his fingers and in his mouth, the scent of death and decay. All those people with their dignities stripped away, no justice left except for what lies on that little disk.

And Jamie and Sophie, and all of the people of Hac who are just as innocent, under the thumb of an evil regime, who risked their lives to help him.

He can see Aster's confusion and cringes at himself for all of the trouble he's about to cause.

Jack turns and flees back into the hail of bullets.


Aster watches Jack turn his back as the world explodes around him in a haze of smoke and gunfire and his hands tighten around the sides of his seat with a death grip.

"What the fuck is he doing?!"

"For real," North mutters next to him. "That little idiot."

"Looks like he's going back for something," Admiral Pitchiner says into her headset, her voice level and cool as always. She's right, of course — Jack's trajectory indicates he's heading back for his seat. But why? He's about to be rescued, he doesn't need anything that's in those seats — all of that stuff is survival gear.

After a moment of squint-eyed fast thinking, it finally dawns on him. There's only one thing he can think of that Jack would risk all their lives to go back for.

"The fly-over recording," he says, meeting Admiral Pitchiner's eyes.

"Well, it's too hot to set down," she says. "We need to provide cover for him."


Jack runs full tilt toward the people trying to kill him like an idiot, heart pounding in his chest. It's terrifying to run directly into enemy fire like this, but he feels bolstered by the helicopters at his back. He knows Aster will do his best to keep him alive.

He drops down and goes into a slide, ignoring the way the rough ice drags and tears at his legs and hip. It puts him in the perfect position to grab the chair to stop his momentum. He scrambles onto his knees, keeping his head low, and digs his raw fingertips into the metal lid of the IDEM to pry it off. The screws are already out, but it feels like the lid is frozen to the casing. He scrabbles at it until his fingers bleed, knowing the longer he takes to get it off the bigger the chance someone could get hurt or even killed. After long, terror-filled seconds it finally pops off in his hands, and he lets his numb fingers drop it down into the snow, uncaring of where it lands.

Bullets whiz past him where he kneels, and he flinches at their closeness. With the lid off it's just a matter of finding the release for the disk, so he puts his head back down and feels along the inside of the casing with shaking fingers. It's hard to feel anything with them, but his knuckles register the elevation of buttons and valley of slots. He hits on the release on accident, and the disk finally comes out.

Clutching it in his torn up hands he abandons all pretense and runs straight back to the helicopters. He's got no mind for crouching or zig-zagging — all he's focused on is getting this evidence back, and hopefully living to tell the tale.

He's held them up long enough, anyway.


Aster bites his lip, feeling the panic and adrenaline well up inside him, drowning out every other part of his awareness.

"Fast rope!" he barks. "We need a fast rope, he's going to have to jump. Nick —"

"Already on it," North says. He's already working the harness up his hips, fastening and tightening the belts as fast as he safely can. Another soldier knots the rope to the harness' carabiner and gives it a few tugs to make sure the knot is secure. After a last minute check of the equipment, North meets Aster's eyes.

"Will be very careful with Jack," he says, his normal jovial smile gone. "Will not drop him. On my life."

"Trust you, mate," Aster says. He holds out his hand and North clasps it in his, his big palm warm and his grip sure.

"Going out," North says.

"Going out," the ropeman repeats.

North wastes no time, clamoring out of the open side of the helicopter and onto the skids. He waits until he spots Jack — a hard feat, through all the smoke and flashes of gunfire. Aster sees his eyes narrow through his helmet, and then he makes the hand signal that indicates that he's going to jump.

Aster watches North fly through the air and swallows. Two men now vulnerable to enemy fire.

His friends. People he loves.

"Sniper!" one of the gunners on the second helicopter cries into his headset. "Sniper in the open!"

"Cover!" Aster yells. He fits his back against the shell of the helicopter, next to the opening so he can peer out from relative safety. He can see the man from there, covered in leaves and twigs and paint but no longer hiding. The man stands up, fully exposing himself, and takes aim as Jack runs across the open clearing. His shot looks clean.

"We'll take him," the gunner next to Aster says. He takes swift aim and pulls the trigger. Aster watches in real-time as the round pierces the sniper's head and the man's body flies back, gun dropping from senseless fingers.


Jack makes for the cliff edge like a bat out of hell. The fast rope meets him there, and he makes his leap of faith through a hail of gunfire into the waiting arms of Nicholas St North. The moment North wraps his beefy arms around Jack's waist is the moment he realizes he's finally safe, and he has to fight the urge to go slack in the big Russian's arms out of relief. There's no harness for him — no way to get into one even if there was. So dangles up above the treeline as his rescue is confirmed and all three helicopters turn away from the carnage. He'd forgotten about his bullet wound, about all his aches and pains, but it comes back to him in this moment — when he's most vulnerable, of course.

It's alright, he thinks as his vision flickers at the edges. Nick's got him, after all.

On the periphery of his slowly waning consciousness he hears Aster calling for the fast rope to be pulled up. He clings as best he can with his last remaining strength, and when he's level enough with the skids to step onto them, he nearly collapses.

"Shit," North says directly into his open comms, reaching out to catch him. Jack laughs breathlessly and lets himself be pulled into safety.

He sits where he lands, unwilling and unable to move another inch, and sighs.

North pulls himself in with a grunt, and wriggles out of his harness while another man disconnects the fast rope. It's a funny sight that Jack will have to tease him over later, but right now he's fighting the sinking of his own eyelids.

"Hey Jack," North says once he settles — when had that happened? — and claps him on his uninjured shoulder. Jack's whole body jerks forward from the strength of it, and he grins, covering North's hand with his own.

"Hey North," he replies. His voice sounds wrecked, but he's never been happier to greet his friend in his entire life. His eyes shift over to Aster, on the opposite side of the helicopter. "Bunny."

Aster gives him a sour look at the nickname — or tries to, at least. Jack can see through the facade from a mile away. He's got one more thing left to do though before he can fall into his feelings.

Jack bullies his dead limbs into working again, fumbling around his chest pocket until his fingers grasp the disk he'd tucked away there. He pulls it out and taps Aster's hand with the sharp corner of it. "This is why they killed Sandy."

Aster takes the disk and puts it in his own chest pocket, and then covers Jack's hand with his own, swiping his thumb across his knuckles in a caress that everyone else deems fit to ignore.

"Also, I think Admiral Pitchiner is holding a letter for me that I'd like to get back."

"Think I can help her find it, mate," Aster says, his eyes warm and full of promises. "Why? You stayin'?"

"Yeah. I think I found my reason."