Content warning for this chapter: Accidental, nonfatal injury to a child.
"You're gonna be just fine, little buddy," Sonny tells the kid. "Stay with me, okay?"
The little boy doesn't answer, doesn't react as Sonny switches out the saturated bandage for another. The kid cried at first, but now he just looks tired and listless, blinking slowly at the ceiling with big, long-lashed, Jersey-cow eyes. He's maybe seven years old. Too damn little to be dealing with this shit.
The good thing is that Trent says the boy will be fine as long as they can keep the blood loss under control until he can get stitches and antibiotics. The bad thing, of course, is that the kid's got a goddamn bullet hole in his leg.
Turned out Mandy's source wasn't trying to lead Bravo into an ambush; it was just plain, run-of-the-mill bad intel. The building where a prisoner was supposedly being held turned out to be nothing more than a multi-family home full of frightened kids and their mostly frightened mothers - plus one particularly outspoken lady who didn't much care for the idea of a bunch of burly foreign men with weapons entering her home, and who didn't seem all that intimidated by said weapons.
Clay isn't here. According to Cerberus's nose, which Sonny trusts with his life, he never was.
They're right back where they started, except for the part where they're now responsible for getting a bunch of civilians caught in a crossfire.
It's not entirely their fault. Bravo finished searching the building, confirmed their boy wasn't there, and tried to head out and leave the families in peace; perhaps a bit shaken, but none the worse for wear.
Unfortunately, a neighbor who'd seen them enter didn't much care for the U.S. military and went to get backup to help him express that sentiment. The shooting started as soon as Bravo tried to exit the house.
Considering the amount of bullets flying and the number of civilians present, they're honestly probably lucky the boy was the only casualty. Not that that's much comfort to him. Poor little guy.
There wasn't much more Trent could do for the kid that couldn't be handled by someone else, so he went with Ray to the top floor to try to get an angle on the shooters that are preventing Bravo from getting the hell out of here. That left Sonny to take care of the little boy, which makes the second time in less than a week that he's been responsible for trying to keep a kid from bleeding out.
When Sonny told himself that anything was better than sitting on their asses, he really wasn't thinking about children getting caught in crossfire. Pointless crossfire, which makes it even worse.
A noise behind him has Sonny instinctively turning, shifting so he can get a blood-covered hand to his Glock. He relaxes when he sees that it's just the hollering woman from earlier. She might be pissed off (probably rightfully so), but he doesn't think she's an actual threat.
She sweeps a withering gaze over Sonny, then looks beyond him and catches sight of the child on the floor.
Sonny may not have any kids of his own, but he does have a mama, and he knows that expression.
While still maintaining pressure on the kid's wound, Sonny shifts to the side so the woman can drop to her knees beside her son. She cradles the boy's face in her hands, talking to him soft and singsong. The child focuses on her, blinks, smiles a little.
Sonny wishes he spoke the local dialect so he could tell her that he's sorry, that her boy will be okay, that she just needs to stem the bleeding and get him to a doctor for stitches. Automatically, Sonny looks around for Clay so he can ask him to translate, and then immediately gets punched in the gut by the fact that there is no Clay anymore; not here, and not anywhere else they can figure.
When the woman is done talking to her son and gently smoothing her fingers through his hair, she turns her attention, and voice, back to Sonny. He winces and leans as far back as he can without letting the kid start bleeding again.
Some things transcend language. He's definitely picking up the gist of her opinion on him.
Tirade finished, the woman gives Sonny a hard push to the chest, which he wasn't expecting. He falls back, turning loose of the kid. Before he can get himself back up, the woman's slender hands have already replaced his, pressing down firmly on the wound. The new bandages aren't soaked through yet, so the bleeding must be slowing.
"You'll, uh, need to get him to a doctor," Sonny says. The woman looks at him and says something that he would imagine concerns his parentage and character, and probably also what he can go do with a camel.
Sonny is headed to the top floor to check on his team when he realizes that the shooting has stopped. Hopefully that means they're all fixing to be able to get out of here.
Halfway up the stairs, Sonny nearly trips over Brock, who is sitting leaned against the wall with his dog in his lap.
Brock says in a distant voice, "I think … I think Cerb got shot."
No. No, goddammit.
The dog looks alert, bright-eyed and panting, but the fur at his neck is matted with blood. Sonny takes off the dog's vest, runs his hands along Cerberus's sides, head, neck. Nothing. The dog doesn't whimper. There doesn't seem to be any clear source for the blood.
That's when Sonny realizes that Brock is just sitting there, not helping him check the dog, and the relief he'd been starting to feel plummets straight into dread.
"Shit," he says. "Brock. Hey, look at me. Are you hit? Is that your blood?"
Brock blinks at him in confusion, furrowing his eyebrows. "No," he says, then looks down at the blood running down his arm, streaming from his fingertips onto Cerberus's fur. "Oh."
"Goddammit." Sonny keys his radio. "Bravo One, we good for exfil? Bravo Five is hit. Need to get him out of here."
"Coming to you," Hayes responds shortly.
Within a couple minutes, the rest of the team turns up on the stairs, reporting that half the tangos are dead or down and the rest have taken off. Trent goes a little pale when he sees the amount of blood Brock has lost, but declares him okay to move once his upper arm is bandaged.
Ears still ringing from the firefight, Sonny helps a wobbly, confused Brock to the helo. They're almost there when Brock's knees give out and he nearly faceplants into the sandy dirt. Together, Trent and Sonny manage to get him inside and lay him down flat, legs propped up. Cerberus curls up next to him.
No one tries to talk on the flight. Trent tends to Brock, monitoring his vitals, making sure the blood loss is under control. Everyone else just sits and listens to the helicopter's steady thrum.
A medical team meets them at the base. To make sure the medics will be able to treat their patient without getting their arms bitten off, Ray coaxes Cerberus away from Brock's side, at which point Brock's eyes pop open and he starts trying to sit up.
"Stay still," Sonny orders him.
"It's just my arm," Brock mumbles, like a goddamn idiot.
"There are arteries in your arm, you goddamn idiot," Sonny tells him, but Brock isn't paying attention because he's too busy trying to sit up so he can see where his dog has gone.
"Stay down, dammit! The dog is fine! You ain't!"
At that point the medical team swarms the helo, and Sonny steps back and lets the stubborn hair missile handler become their problem.
Inside the base, Mandy is waiting to see Bravo arrive. If she's got half a brain cell - which she ought to, being a good idea fairy and all - she won't say, insinuate, or think anything close to I told you so. Sonny never has gotten around to yelling at her about what happened in the village where they lost Spenser, but he figures he will sooner or later, and today seems as good a day as any.
But she doesn't say a word. She just watches, looking hollow-eyed and sad, as they pass.
Sonny goes to stand in the shower and try not to think about the fact that Clay has been missing for five days now. Even if they had gotten him back today, they might not have been able to bring home the same guy they lost.
But it's a moot point, because they didn't. They didn't get him back. Not any version of him.
For another three days, Mandy and her people search and find nothing. Bravo Team clings to sanity by rallying around Brock, who bounces back surprisingly quickly after receiving a blood transfusion and sleeping for 14 hours straight. Sonny is pretty sure they're smothering him, but he must know they need it, because he doesn't complain.
Just after dawn on the eighth day after they lost Clay, Blackburn throws open the door to Bravo's quarters. Like the rest of them, he's been aimless and subdued for days, but now he's a bundle of tightly controlled energy.
"Gear up," he says. "Spenser's alive. And we know exactly where he is."