I tossed up which direction to take this in, but this made the most sense to me. It's a slow burn story, so patience is key, because I think it's going to be a long one. Hope you like this chapter and please let me know what you think :)
I don't own The Brave or any of it's characters... but I wish I did!
Chapter 3
It's been ten days since the team started their leave and went their separate ways.
Dalton had wrapped up his extra day with the DIA, managed to spring Patton from quarantine and then drove to his cabin in the mountains.
He had heard from each of his teammates once they arrived at their destination. It was just a habit of his to know that everyone was safe. As CO on deployment, he had to know where everyone was at all times. That tended to continue with him once everyone was stateside too.
He had continued to hear from McG, Amir and Preach every few days. The whole team had a group chat on WhatsApp and kept in touch regularly, most of the time trading insults and throwing shade at each other, in the way only these guys can. With love.
Jaz was part of that group too, but was yet to contribute to the conversation at all since flying to New York. They knew she had seen the messages, so they weren't worried, but she usually delighted in teasing these guys, so her silence was a little bit strange.
In fact, other than the "Safe and sound," text that Dalton had received when she arrived in New York, she had not been in any other contact.
Dalton wasn't too worried. He knew that Jaz liked her alone time, and after so many months of living on top of each other in the Quonset hut, he's sure she is enjoying her own space.
He also knew that she had a lot to process after this deployment. They all did really, but Jaz kept so much bottled up inside that hopefully she was now using this time to decompress. He just wished that she would share some of that with the team
Of course, that didn't stop him from checking his phone constantly throughout the day. Or checking every WhatsApp message to see if she had received it and read it. Maybe he should send a question to her specifically in the group chat to see if she responded? Maybe he should text just her and see if she responded? Or maybe he should just stop thinking about it. Jaz was more than capable of taking care of herself. She was a soldier for heaven's sake, and he knew she would surface when she was ready.
That didn't stop him from missing her though.
He missed them all, of course, but it was Jaz that came to mind when he had something to share. He had finally managed to teach Patton to obey some commands, and it was Jaz he wanted to share that with. He'd get a kick out of telling her, since she constantly laughed at the dog's usual indifference to Dalton.
The cabin had been a very welcome sight for sore eyes when he had arrived with Patton. This place was his refuge and he's so glad he has kept it all these years because there's nowhere else he would rather be. Especially after months of being here, there and everywhere.
He'd spent these ten days doing some general maintenance around the place. It remained locked up for much of the year and needed some airing and some odd jobs to make it comfortable again, and he was in his element doing so.
Preach wasn't far off when he called him a mountain man. Going hiking, fishing, swimming in the lake, chopping wood, cleaning gutters and working on some odd jobs was his decompression time. It soothed him, kept him fit and busy, and kept his mind off the nightmares that invaded his sleep some nights.
The pictures that go through his head come night time varied. Sometimes they showed Elijah when they had found him shot and lying prone in Jaz's arms. Sometimes they involved Preach lying in that hospital bed, or his final encounter with Hoffman. And sometimes they involved a figure dressed all in white, with blood dripping down her arms, hand chained above her head and a look that varied between fear, pain and despondence on her face.
He's not sure which one was worse, but he knew when he woke he had to get up and moving to banish them from his mind.
Jaz had spent the last ten days in New York, trying to figure out why the hell she had come here.
She had rented a small apartment through Airbnb, purely because New York was a city she knew. She knew the best places to get coffee, and the best food. And she also knew the places to avoid.
She was missing her team. She had seen all the messages being thrown around in their group WhatsApp chat, but she hadn't responded to any yet. In fact, other than a quick text to Top to let him know she had arrived safe and sound in the city, she literally hadn't text anyone since.
That doesn't mean that she isn't checking her phone a hundred times a day to see if anyone has text her. The guys have kept her entertained with their banter and at some points she has literally started to type a reply out to them, but she's always ended up deleting them before she hit send.
She's also typed out messages to Top. Multiple times. Yet again, they weren't sent. They were friends first and foremost. They have always got along really well, but she just can't bring herself to reach out and initiate contact.
Jaz knows it's a defence mechanism. If she has little contact with them, she will miss them less, right? The more she converses with them, the more it would be like being on the Incirlik base, and that is where she considers home.
Needless to say, she didn't have anyone to contact in the city either. She hadn't spoken to any family in years, and she never really had any friends in the city. She had mostly kept to herself at school, and then she had joined the Army right after that so there was no one to keep in touch with.
She hadn't made many friends in the Army. Sticking to her school pattern, she had kept mostly to herself throughout training and her first few deployments. Other women soldiers had either been threatened by her or kept their distance due to her loner reputation. Then as she firstly joined Delta Force and had then been recruited to Dalton's team, the women were very few and far between.
The men had been a different story. She had seen it all. Those who thought women had no business in the military. Those who thought she was in the military for their own pleasure. Those who questioned her skill set and kept her grounded wherever possible, and those who couldn't accept that a woman could perform a task equally or better than they could.
That all changed when she joined Special Operations Group 7. She had repeatedly asked herself over the last three years how she got so lucky as to find herself on this team. She had meant every word when she told Top that he was the only CO who looks at her and doesn't see a woman first. That goes for them all. She had never been as comfortable with a group of people as she had been with her team.
These guys were her friends. They were her family.
So again, why the hell did she come to New York?
The only answer she could come up with at the moment was because she needed some space to decompress. It had been a tough deployment and she wasn't denying that she had put on a brave face numerous times.
Losing Elijah had broken her heart. Being captured and tortured had almost broken her soul. Hossein being a casualty felt like a dagger in her side, and seeing Preach unresponsive and in a coma had made her question what was really important in life.
All of those things were vivid in her dreams and nightmares. There was one other image that haunted her too. Her CO, sitting in a chair, covered in blood and with a gunshot wound straight through his forehead.
Her CO, she kept reminding herself.
Some nights she slept dream free, but the times when the nightmares invaded, she got up, put on her running or boxing gear and tried to banish them from her mind.
On the eleventh morning, Dalton woke up panting and sweating after a particularly vivid nightmare. Images of Jaz being led away by the Quds, of Jaz being dead when they had blown open that van and of Jaz being covered in blood with Hoffman standing over her, had swirled around in his head. The difficult missions had started to integrate in his slumber and waking up had never been such a relief.
He must have been tossing and turning and calling out, as Patton was right next to him, instead of on his bed in the living area, nudging Dalton with his nose as if to check that he was ok.
The sun hadn't even risen yet, but he knew after that nightmare, there was no way he would be closing his eyes again any time soon.
He sat up in bed and reached over to scratch Patton.
"I'm ok buddy, I'm ok." He said reassuringly, although he wasn't sure if it was directed at Patton or to himself.
He checked his phone and saw that there were no messages. After a fleeting feeling of disappointment he got himself up and went to put the coffee pot on and thought about what sort of manual labour he could put his body through today to drown out those lingering images.
Instead of labour he decides to hike to a waterfall that he has always loved, but hasn't yet visited since his return. It was a good couple of hours away on foot, so he knew it would be an all-day outing, but it was exactly what he needed.
After drinking his coffee he washed up, packed the essentials in a back pack, including board shorts to swim in, made sure he had food and water for himself and Patton, and set off for the day.
He left the porch light on as there was a fair chance it would be getting dark by the time he got back.
An hour into his hike, Dalton still had the images of his nightmare ingrained in his mind. He pushed himself harder, walked faster and tried to sweat it all out.
Like most soldiers, the horror they see on deployments often gets revisited in their dreams, but the images of Jaz were something else. She was on his team. He was her Captain. He was directly responsible for her safety, and he hadn't been able to keep her safe. Sure, they had got her back, and she was back to being a fully integrated part of his team, but he knew those images of her would stay with him forever.
What he didn't know was whether that was because she was simply under his command, or whether it was because she had somehow gotten under his skin.
Whatever it was, he used it to fuel his fire and continued to push himself. The sooner he got to the waterfall, the sooner he could cool off with a swim in the lake at the bottom.
He quickly checked his phone again for any messages as he knew the range in these areas was dodgy at best, fading in and out the closer he got to the waterfall.
Nothing.
No news is good news, he kept trying to tell himself. If only he could get rid of that little feeling of disappointment which had lodged itself deep in his gut.
And his heart.
Jaz woke herself up screaming. She sat up straight in her bed, gulping for breath and reaching desperately to put on the bed side lamp.
These damn nightmares are really starting to piss her off.
She also missed her team more than ever right now. Every time she had cried out in her dreams whilst back on base, one of them had always come to check on her. While a part of her hated letting them see her weaknesses, the comfort they gave her and knowing they were close by, always made her feel more at ease.
None of them were close by at the moment and she wasn't quite sure what to do with herself.
She sat there in bed, trying to calm her breathing down. Lifting her sweaty hair off her neck, she reached over for her phone to check the time. It was only 5:15am, and although she generally woke up early on base, she wasn't naturally a morning person, and loved an excuse to sleep in.
Jaz knew after that nightmare that there was no way she would get back to sleep, so after waiting another five minutes, still taking big deep breaths and trying to stop her hands from shaking, she got up and made herself a coffee with the apartment's Nespresso machine.
Jaz loved coffee and sat cradling it in her hands while she watched the sun start to rise out the kitchen window. This particular nightmare had shaken her more than any other before.
It had her father in it, and he hadn't been a part of her nightmares for a very long time.
Jaz finished her coffee, and with her hands still shaking she dressed in her running gear, threw her hair into a ponytail, grabbed her phone and went out to pound the pavement.
She had always loved physical exercise, and she had never struggled with the army's strict fitness regime. She thrived on it actually, and she used it as an escape.
Twenty minutes into her run, she still couldn't banish the images from her head. She'd had a lot of nightmares this deployment, particularly after Elijah died. She would relive him being shot countless times. And after Tehran, the nightmares had taken it to a whole new level, including losing Hossein and her entire team.
This nightmare in particular is not one she had experienced before. This one involved Elijah and Top, both lying there with bullet wounds in their head, blood everywhere and her father standing over them with a smoking gun.
What the fuck?
While her father used to be a figure in her nightmares, it had been years since he had invaded them.
So why on earth had he just made a comeback?
She only had one answer.
It was because she was back in New York.
At the end of her previous deployments, she had always spent most of her time with Elijah. His family had always welcomed her like she had been around forever, and she loved seeing a family with so much love for each other.
She still kept in touch with them, but it hadn't felt right to go and see them after this deployment. She might towards the end of her leave, but she didn't want to remind them that she had come home, but Elijah hadn't. It was definitely times like these that she missed him the most.
This was the first time she had been back in New York for years, and it pissed her off that the memories of her father affect her so much, that he had invaded her rest time. Being in this city, that held no happy memories was toxic. She had no intention of seeing her father. She didn't even know where he lived these days, but knowing that she was in the same city as him was a clear step backwards for her.
As she continued to pound the pavement, she made a snap decision.
She needed to leave New York. It wasn't good for her mental health and she desperately wanted to continue working on that after a few sessions with Xander back on base. Realistically, she should never have come back, but her stubborn streak had her thinking she could handle it.
She had been wrong.
With that decision made, she wondered where she should go.
She has no idea, but she would figure that along the way.
After running for nearly an hour, she went back to her apartment, showered quickly and sat and ate some breakfast. After she rang her Airbnb host to inform them she would be checking out early, she began throwing all her stuff back into the bags she had come back from Turkey with.
She had a couple more things to take care of, including hiring a car.
Two hours later, she left the city, and she wasn't sure if she would ever be back.
Patton trotted along next to Dalton as they made their way back to the cabin.
They had spent a couple of hours at the waterfall, exploring the rock pools at the bottom of it and swimming in the lake. Dalton didn't know if Patton had ever been swimming before, but he had now, and since he would be with Dalton all the time from now on, he'd be doing a lot more of it.
Dalton had sat on a warm rock to take a couple of photos on his phone. He wasn't usually one to take many photos and gave McG and Jaz a lot of flak for always being so snap happy. Having said that, he thought it might be nice to send a couple of pictures to their group chat when he got within range of cell service. It really was one of his favourite spots in the world and he wanted to show them.
He wasn't walking back at the same pace as he had on his way to the waterfall, but he was right that this had been the best way to free himself from last night's nightmare. The peace he found in nature and the outdoors calmed him. And while he knew there would be more nightmares, for today he had successfully conquered this one.
Now that he and Patton were about half an hour away from his cabin, he took his phone out of his pocket and saw that he was back in range.
He quickly sent off a couple of photos and an explanation to their WhatsApp chat, and sure enough, within ten minutes or so, McG responded with a quip about Amir not being able to touch the bottom whilst standing in those rock pools.
Dalton continued his walk back, chuckling to himself, especially when Amir just responded with the 'middle finger' emoji.
After thinking about it, he quickly sent the 'crying with laughter' emoji to the group chat and put his phone back in his pocket before he rounded the last corner to his cabin.
As soon as he did, he saw a car parked out the front, blocking the front of the porch where he had left the light on.
He hadn't been expecting anyone. His sisters usually always messaged him before turning up, and that wasn't very often.
He slowed his gait momentarily, and habit had him looking around cautiously and checking for dangers or clues, but he couldn't see anything and there wasn't anyone in the car.
All of a sudden, Patton perked his ears up and with his tail wagging he ran around the front of the car to the other side.
Dalton walked slowly around the car to see Patton jumping all over someone who was sitting on the step to his porch. They were laughing and telling Patton to calm down and stop being silly.
Dalton would know that deep, throaty voice anywhere.
"Jaz?" he asked as he stopped dead in his tracks.
She looked up at him, with Patton sitting on the step next to her.
She paused for a moment, picked up her phone that was sitting next to her, held it up to him and asked incredulously, "Since when do you send emojis?"
What did you think?