Pain
Surveillance ops were the shit. Especially on targets that weren't necessarily high-profile from a media standpoint, but experts in their individual field. They gave it to her as a light-duty assignment, Ricochet was perfectly okay with that. It gave her time and space to figure out how everything worked around here.
Vacation had been all well and good. She'd healed to the point that the medics didn't think she was going to be liability in the field; she maybe, even quite possibly could count the Army sniper they'd sent along with her as a friend now.
Maybe more.
She didn't want to think about any of that though. Instead, she wanted to think about the assignment. Watching over the supposed leader of a small cell white supremacist group. If COBRA was really creating homegrown terrorists, if they were really supplying guns and munitions to the national malcontents of the world, then keeping an eye on the little guys were the best option.
Blonde-haired and green-eyed, Ricochet didn't stick out in any of the places the guy liked to frequent. Or stick out at all in the white-bread, corn-fed small town Indiana. Which, would make sense, since her home town wasn't too far removed from being the same sort of place.
She was having lunch in the same diner that one mister Beauford Stickler frequented, half-aware of his presence with four of his best boys at one of the corner booths. They'd be there for hours. She had plenty of time to get to the peach pie for dessert.
Her spot at the window gave her the best vantage of all the comings and goings. Her cellphone, propped up by her left hand like she were watching movies, gave her the quick, covert ability to snap pictures. The Joes needed faces, identifications. She split her attention between the screen, and the world outside.
A family strolling down the street caught her attention. A mother and a father, and a girl, maybe ten or eleven years old. All three had ice creams, and the child was laughing. Strawberry blonde hair flashed in the sun, and Ricochet thought bitterly about Annie.
They'd had a plan. Another two years, and Ricochet wouldn't have reenlisted. She would have had enough saved to first foster, then adopt Annie. They would have been a family, just the two of them. Taking strolls, laughing over ice cream, watching movies, and building a life that neither would have without the other.
But Cambodia happened. And Annie was whisked out from beneath her nose. Adopted to some family somewhere. It still hurt. It ached like a motherfucker. Worse than being shot twice in the back. Worse than going back to the orphanage and discovering she was missing. It hurt like a sucking chest wound.
Ricochet already re-upped, joining up with the elite special forces unit. A small part of her hoped to balm that pain with chaos and bloodshed that came with covert ops. It wasn't working. It would never work. She knew her eyes were burning; she knew the blurriness wasn't anything aside from ordinary tears. She hastily wiped them away, and tried to wipe away the regrets that she would never, ever have a family where she belonged.
