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Chapter Eight

Once again it seemed like everything was set. Drummer had taken full control of the cockpit and was in constant communication with Tool down on the ground to make sure that they were headed in the right direction while the rest of the team sat on either side of the cabin in silence. Only Doc dared to move back and forth between the two places, quietly communicating with Drummer for a few minutes before he would return to his seat and cast a glance down at the others. He didn't need to speak for them to understand. They were on track, but they had absolutely no idea of what they were supposed to be prepared for when they landed. Barney was going to beat them to the location, there was absolutely no denying that.

But what would have happened by the time they got there?

The silence in the plane was almost unbearable. The original members of Barney's team were all on the edge of their seats, the tension in their bodies evident in the bulging veins and muscles that showed in their arms. And though they wanted to speak up, it seemed that none of the newer recruits had yet figured out how they were to broach the subject that sat at the front of everyone's minds. A look was shared between them as they quietly begged one another to be the first to speak, glancing first at Mars and Galgo who instantly shook their heads and turned to Thorn. But Thorn wasn't interested in the idea either, and quickly turned to cast his gaze between Luna and Smilee, who sat side by side against the metal wall of the cabin and instantly turned to the other.

Well, they knew it wasn't going to be easy no matter which one of them spoke. This whole thing obviously went a whole lot deeper than Barney. The question was, just how much deeper?

Luna shifted a little against the hard metal of the bench on which she sat. "So," she started slowly. "Before we all get killed over this-"

"You didn't have to come," Lee cut her off quickly, with a dark look that would unnerve almost anyone. "You could have stayed behind."

But Luna continued on as if she hadn't heard him, altogether ignoring the look that he gave her. "Who is she?"

Nobody jumped up to respond as every set of eyes fell down to the floor or their clasped hands in order to avoid catching Luna's steady gaze. A majority of them had gotten the hint of what this mission involved when Drummer had first arrived at the hanger with Trench and Yang in tow, but nobody had been forth coming with any other answers after that. They treated the entire thing like it was some sort of taboo subject to breach, for they wouldn't even say it with one another around for fear of someone overhearing their conversation. But enough was enough. Now that they had all chosen to rush head-on into this dangerous new mission, they at least deserved to know what and who they were putting their lives on the line for. They weren't just outsiders this time. They were a team.

And Luna would not be swayed by their silence. "Hey, it's one thing to have some random girl show up at the hangar with Barney and then storm off when she gets mad at him," she started, her eyes narrowing further as she looked across the opposite bench at each of the older men. "But when he freaks out and bolts because this girl was kidnapped, this obviously goes way above and beyond personal. So what's the deal?"

Again she was met with silence. Only when she heard a slow exhalation of air and the sound of Doc's head falling back against the wall of the plane did she turn her eyes to a single target. "It was about twenty-four years ago-"

"Barney won't appreciate this," Lee warned him with a dark growl.

"Yeah, well Barney ain't here," Doc countered. "And if I was them I'd want to know what the hell was going on too."

Though he was unhappy with the decision, Lee didn't say anything further. Instead he folded his arms tightly over his chest and leaned back as far as the walls of the plane would allow, turning his head to look off toward the cockpit instead. When Doc was satisfied that he wouldn't be interrupted again, he looked back at Luna and continued.

"We were on our way back from a mission, just like normal. But the plane we'd been using had been banged up pretty badly and Barney had smashed his hand to shit. We didn't have much of a choice, so we landed in a little town somewhere in the corner of Spain."

Luna nodded, settling back to hear the whole ordeal.

"I had to basically force Barney into a hospital to have his hand looked at," Doc said, rolling his eyes a little at the memory. "And that's where he met a young nurse by the name of Blanca Valdez. We weren't there long, but by the time we got the plane up in the air again I could tell that he wasn't really thinking of getting home anymore. So the two of them kept in contact…he visited whenever he could…and before we knew it, he found out that she was pregnant."

"This life isn't for everyone," Gunnar put in, his fingers twitching a little as he looked over toward Doc. "You either need to be in or you need to get out and stay out. But for a while there, Barney thought maybe he'd be able to have a foot in both worlds."

As they established eye contact, Doc nodded. "It wasn't working out well. He was missing all of the important things that a father ought to see. Her first steps, her first words…everything that would slowly start to establish Mickey as being…well, Mickey. Pretty soon she started to not care about the fact that her father was supposed to be coming 'round for her birthday or Christmas. But when he missed her sixteenth birthday-"

"That was the last straw."

All eyes then fell on the speaker, almost surprised to see who it was that had decided to enter into the conversation despite his initial resistance to the idea. The displeasure was still written plainly across Lee's face as he stared down at his clasped hands, his fingers still filled with tension. It was almost as if the memories themselves were a source of anger for him, the way he seemed to utter that last sentence.

"Mickey worked her ass off so that she could graduate from high school early and do something that would make Barney really proud of her. She was supposed to graduate on her birthday, and even though he promised that he would make it, we were on another mission. We missed the entire thing by a matter of hours. When we finally got there Mickey wanted nothing to do with him and told him to leave. She was tired of always being his second choice."

"I always thought he kept in touch with Blanca," Gunnar added quietly. "Even if Mickey wouldn't talk to him…"

"I don't know," responded Lee. "But had I known that she was sick-"

"We'd have been there, man," Caesar told him reassuringly.

Silence once again filled the cabin. Nobody was entirely sure what they could say after that. Family always made things complicated, but this seemed to be a whole new level of ridiculous that the team now had to contend with. There was evidently no real love between Mickey and her father, at least on the part of the daughter, but there had to be more to the story than that. Mickey had seemed so confident that Barney wouldn't bother coming after her when Church opted to use her as bait. Yet even she couldn't have ignored the obvious personality traits that made up the man they knew as Barney Ross. If he had willingly put his life on the line in order to come after them when they had been captured by Stonebanks, Luna knew there was no possible way for him to ignore the summons that Church had left in his video.

Not when the life of his own flesh and blood was on the line.

For a moment, Luna contemplated her own thoughts. "Were they ever happy?" she asked carefully.

"For a little while," Doc nodded, a small smile coming to his lips as the memories began to surface. "I remember the day Barney found out about Mickey. I don't think I've ever seen him so stunned before in my life."

The group of older men chuckled in unison at the idea of their leader being so uncertain about anything. None of them had been present that day, but they could only imagine just how uncomfortable he was at the idea of fatherhood. Save for the times that they had each spent with Mikayla growing up, they had never known Barney to really take to any other child that they had come across. They always seemed to make him a little nervous…and a little sad as well.

"But you could tell," continued Doc. "You could tell that the instant he made it to the hospital and held onto her for the first time that he was in love with her. Mickey had this ability to just capture his heart and hold onto it as if her life depended on it."

"That was the problem though," Gunnar interrupted, scowling a little. "Barney loved that kid so much that he didn't want her anywhere near the life he had made for himself. That's why he kept her and Blanca at arm's length."

It was a problem that Lee had come to understand well. Being Expendable meant long days away from home where there was always a risk of not coming back, and when he had been with Lacy he hadn't wanted her to really know what it was that he did in the time that they were apart. It wasn't like you could really go into detail if you were trying to describe this job on a dating website or anything. And being upfront was out of the question because you could hardly expect someone to fully understand what it meant to be a member of the team. In a way, this team was the only family that they had come to know. And though Barney had sort of managed to have one foot in each of those worlds for a little while the stress and strain of his commitments had taken their toll on his relationship with his daughter.

Blanca had been a little better able to understand it though, Lee remembered. Though she had clearly been heartbroken at the idea of raising her daughter without a father figure who was constantly around, she had accepted Barney's need to keep the two of them out of his life in that regard. He had always wanted something better for Mickey, and that meant making sure that his little girl never came to know how many people her father had killed on the job. She wasn't supposed to know how much money he was quietly putting away so that he could send it off to her mother to help with her finances, or even how many lives he had ended up saving because they had gone and taken down the bad guy. And that had meant that he would forever be unable to be the hero that almost every father wanted to be for his daughter.

Instead, he was the bad guy.

Lee sighed, his face scrunching up into a dark frown. "How did she even get involved in this anyway?"

"What do you mean?" Smilee asked, clearly confused.

"Barney never told her about what he did," said Lee. "Anytime we saw her, we were always weapon free and dressed in civilian clothing so that things still looked normal. We were just some of his friends."

"Friends who probably saw her more than her dad did," Toll Road pointed out.

But Lee ignored him, giving his head a shake as he turned to look over at Trench. "You said Bonaparte gave you her name?"

Trench nodded. "Same as usual."

"Sounds to me like Daddy's Little Girl has some secrets of her own," Smilee commented. And when he felt the heavy glares of the others upon him, he just shrugged in response. "Think about it, guys. If she supposedly didn't know anything about Barney and the team, then what happened? It's not like Church just hunted her down and kidnapped her. He laid a trap, set her up and then took her hostage. She was on a mission just like the ones we take on."

Trench held his hands in the air. "I didn't even know he had a daughter."

Lee frowned, looking at him in confusion. "Weren't you guys on the same team with Stonebanks?"

At this, the larger man shook his head and leaned forward so that his elbows pressed into the tops of his knees. "Barney and I worked together with Stonebanks, but I left before he officially started the team."

Well, that certainly explained the lack of tattoo, Luna thought to herself, considering that every other person who had become part of the team had invested in the piece of body art. Hell, even Conrad Stonebanks had had one, and he was more than happy to flaunt it in front of them when Barney had initially captured him. But that problem had been rather quickly remedied. Stonebanks was no longer in a position to show off his tattoo or taunt Barney's mental state.

"But trust me," Trench continued quietly. "If I had known that she was Barney's kid I'd have found someone else."

They had created quite a mess for themselves, Barney and Mikayla. And in true Expendable fashion it seemed that the team was going to be responsible for getting him out of it before either of them got hurt. There was no doubt in any of their minds that Church wanted to hurt Barney bad, but just how far would he take it? Would his execution be immediate? No, that didn't sound likely. Holding Mikayla hostage meant that he had plans for the both of them, and knowing what they did of Church led them to believe that both of them would be made to suffer a lot of physical and mental torture before he would finish with them. That gave them a window that they couldn't pin point at all, much to their frustration.

All they could do now was hope and pray that Barney didn't do anything completely stupid before they got there.