Five Words... Ezra
Stargate
The SGC's first and only (for which their Commander sometimes thanked his lucky stars) civilian team sprawled happily around the soft, glittery, obscurely outlandish alien gateroom and gazed at their seventh's latest acquisition.
Their Commander was not going to be nearly as happy.
"Y'got any idea how to take it home, Ez?" Tanner said finally.
"Not the faintest, I regret to say," Ezra shrugged, still managing to be somewhat soigné despite his distracting apparel - or lack thereof. "Perhaps our esteemed scientific comrades there will have something to offer."
"Maybe if they pull it apart -" J D suggested. "Except... I don't really see how."
"That's not our problem," Chris drawled. "We just report it, they work out how to exploit it."
Ezra bridled. "Mister Larabee, given that it is now mine, I really think I should have some -"
"Take it up with the General, Ezra. After you explain what you damn well did."
"But Mister Larabee!"
"No way, Ezra. You did it, you can explain it."
"I was merely obeying our standing orders -"
"Yeah yeah, meet the locals, make nice with the locals, see what we can get from the locals."
His team raised various eyebrows at this version of the General's words, but none felt the need to argue.
"And I met them, and in exchanging... pleasantries was somehow duped into this."
"Duped?" Nathan snorted.
"Best find another way to describe it, brother," Josiah rumbled. "No one is likely to believe you were hoodwinked into anything."
"Let alone the intectivoid version of strip poker," Nathan snorted again.
A touch of asperity sharpened Ezra's voice. "Given that it was that or -"
"The locals' version of Guess Who's Coming AS Dinner -" Buck added helpfully.
"Ah would appreciate a little more gratitude, gentlemen. We're alive, and we have acquired as ordered."
"Gratitude y'got," Vin said cheerfully. "Help in explainin' how you rigged th'game an' won us the tackiest an' most overkitschified Stargate in the known universe."
"Now mainly of use as an oversized alien Wheel of Fortune." Buck turned admiring eye to the spangled, stridently sparkly and disconcertingly salacious decoration on the huge stone ring.
"There you're on y'own."
"If we can even get it home." Chris was measuring the atrocity with his eyes. "Y'know boys, I think it may be bigger than the SGC's."
Ezra scowled, and twitched the iridescent alien blanket/tablecloth/toga/whatever it was he was wearing (having lost everything but his boots before he cottoned on to the game and promptly won everything in sight).
"Look on it this way, brother," Josiah laid a heavy hand on one bare shoulder. "At the very least, it will stop our Marine brethren's endless comments on how 'civilians' could not be relied on to win anything in this war..."
~oOo~
Wizard
"You're not a real wizard, are you?"
Little Billy Travis's innocent question caused a ripple of unease through the knot of people gathered on the saloon porch. Josiah looked pensive, J D scared, Buck twitchy, Nathan downright unhappy, Vin... all too thoughtful. And Chris pissed and angry. Of course.
Mary, the boy's mother, nervously shushed him. Ezra had been shuffling tarot cards, as much for the practice as anything else; his hands still as he looked down at the boy for a moment, eyes softening from their usual guarded coolness.
"Now that, young man, is the question." He flipped the star-and-moon decorated cloak he wore (bought cheaply, if they all but knew it, at a city costumer) and drew out a wand that for all intents and purposes looked as if it could be made of pegasus bone. And for all they all but knew it, might have been.
Ezra paused, then gave them all a smile with that glint of elves' gold. "The trick is, to make sure no one but you thinks to ask it of me."
"An' if they do?" It was Vin who asked that one, the one everyone was trying not to think.
Chris threw a black look at him, at them all, then leant over to speak very softly, so only their pet trickster could hear. "You sure you can do this, Ez? Still think Josiah looks more like a real wizard."
"That he does, Mister Larabee. But," Ezra slid the wand through light, practiced fingers, "he isn't. Nor is he anywhere near a cheat -" his lips twisted painfully, "- or liar enough."
"You know what'll happen if you're sprung by -"
"A real wizard? I've been careful not to consider that, sir."
They all knew, of course.
"We were all aware, Mister Larabee, that claimin' the territory was protected by wizardry - which as Ah recall was my idea in the first place - meant... it would one day necessitate producing a wizard." He flicked a speck of glittery dust from the cloak, and rose to his feet, glancing at Chris's hand on his arm. "We chose to take the risk that that day would not come."
~oOo~
Hyperdrive
Ezra sighed and leaned back, hands sliding comfortably - not to say avariciously - over the controls.
He did so like winning one over on his beloved mother. Undutiful, perhaps, but this time even Josiah would agree she had earned it. After all, she had stolen the one and only working hyperdrive from the spaceship Four Corners of the Galaxy, which her son (in his moments of sentimental insanity) called home: hardly a way to foster filial devotion, more a certain path to having him run off or even shot by the temperamental captain who had given him a job as a hired gun and then - maybe - accepted him as a friend.
Ezra had no intention of losing the home, the job or the friend.
So he had no real qualms about quietly returning it to Larabee and his five rambunctious crewmates, hopefully before dearest Maude even noticed what her little starplane was lacking...
~oOo~
Stake
"Now Mister Conklin, do be reasonable."
Ezra wasn't precisely nervous, no (or at least, if he was, he wasn't about to admit it) but had to admit that his grip on his custom-made (and brand-new, never before used) stake was a trifle more white-knuckled than he liked. To be sure, finding out that sometime during the night a good quarter of the town had been stalked, corned and 'turned' was disconcerting to say the least.
Mind you, he couldn't help thinking that the local vampires showed the usual amount of dire taste. Given that they could have gone for the lovely Misses Travis or Recillos, or a number of other attractive ladies - or for that matter one of the more robust and imposing and, well, handsome, of the male population (including his fellow peacekeepers... or even his less than noble self) but no.
Ezra gripped the stake a little tighter, and wondered where the hell said fellow peacekeepers were. He really didn't care for this unpleasant business, even if the stakee was - like Conklin - someone who even before undeath could only be improved by it.
The wizened revenant that had been the wizened pain-in-the-posterior local banker snarled and bared his long, sharp, yellowing fangs.
Ezra sighed, and told himself yet again that he really, really had to learn to get out of bed earlier if the comfort of a featherbed morning sleep meant he had to deal with vampires before coffee...
~oOo~
Unsub
"The unsub..."
Words fail him sometimes.
Not often. Not BAU Special Agent Ezra Standish - the team's spokesman and voice - whose honey-rich drawl and gently ornamental lexicon so neatly smooth over the harsh and ugly edges of a case, so deftly cloak the starkness of horror with their softening - distancing - flow. Words are one of his particular, peculiar gifts. Distance is another.
But this is different.
This is his friend, and this is the stark reality of his friend's tragedy.
"We've done all we can on the profile, Chris. The unsub was a woman, Christ. A woman close to you..."
He stares at the evidence he has laid out before Senior Special Agent Chris Larabee, at the tarnished, scattered, pathetic remains of a murdered wife and son, and then at the wound raw on Senior Special Agent Chris Larabee's face, the reflection of the man's heart. He wishes Vin or Buck was here, taking this profile and trying not to slash Chris's heart with it, and failing.
But Buck was in the hospital - thanks to this same unsub, he had no doubt - and they were all terrified that Vin...
Wherever he was...
That Vin would be next.
-the end-