So, this was done at the expense of several readings that I've been attempting to get around to for the last week. What an amazing response, though, all of you absolutely humble me. I'm going to space it out and (hopefully) post each new one on Thursday/Friday nights so I have your reviews to look forward to over and get me through the chaos of the weekends. There are two more chapters and a tiny fifth part to finish it off if everything goes to plan. I'm working on a couple of Outtakes as well, so they'll go up over the next couple of days. This one kind of glosses over some things that I'm going to leave to your imaginations but you probably shouldn't read it if you're in the mood for happy.
Part II: VI-X
vi.
Terry Lake seems to take even more notice of Don in the sixth week at Quantico. Everyone does, if he's going to be honest about it. Alex, Carter and Richard are the subjects of scrutiny from most of their peers as well. It doesn't seem to bother them quite as much.
Ian Edgerton is a Bureau tracker, they'd discovered, and legendary sniper. He'd been known to take certain recruits for private training and the other instructors tended to look the other way. The debriefing session had led to early morning sessions with the man for all four of them and it can be nothing but a positive thing – at least when they aren't in the sessions.
The extra attention from the instructors doesn't alarm Don nearly as much as the same from their peers. It adjusts the composition of the fabric of Quantico and he isn't sure he likes that.
Don is completely caught off guard when a letter from his parents arrives towards the end of the week. His mother's handwriting is soft and a little apologetic and his father's is less angry than he'd feared and might not be apologetic but at least it is there.
There's nothing from his brother.
There must be something telling in his eyes because Alex and Carter are far less rambunctious than usual and allow him to stew in his silence all day. After dinner Richard takes him to the gym, without a word, and doesn't say anything when rage that he didn't know was there comes spilling out with the first punch he lands on the bag.
Terry says good morning the next day as he enters their behavioural science class and quirks a dark eyebrow as her eyes flicker over the faint bruising already showing on his knuckles. He thinks briefly of the ice compresses that he'd kept on his hands until the early hours of the morning and shrugs with one aching shoulder before quirking his lips in a half grin to match her eyebrow and heading back towards his seat.
She sits further towards the back that class, only a row ahead of Don, and Alex grins, Carter waggles his own eyebrows suggestively and Richard watches with an easy smile and something in his eyes that Don can't quite figure out.
They run that night because, even if it isn't overwhelming anymore, the screaming and ghosts are still there and they seem somehow less when their muscles are screaming too.
vii.
The second fitness test comes and goes and Don has to work harder than ever to pull ahead because somehow, perhaps when they weren't looking, the gauntlet has been thrown and he refuses to fail. Carter and Richard are right at his heels this time around and Alex pulls ahead for just a split second but can't make it count.
The competition sets their blood alight and the four of them are almost giddy with adrenaline when they are sent for showers. Don allows more animation to show through than he has in a long time and it is infectious.
Terry Lake and three other girls sit at a different table, across from theirs, at dinner that night, and it feels like junior high all over again. Alex and Carter bump and push and steal things from each other's plates and act more like teenagers than Don ever remembers acting. Richard watches with an indulgent kind of amusement and Don, almost despite himself, allows himself to be drawn into the sneaky roughhousing.
The girls approach them after dinner, which Don attributes to the blatant winking and grinning on Alex and Carter's parts, and they gravitate both together and apart. Don discovers that Terry fits perfectly beneath his arm and against his side, the two girls, Erin and Charlotte, are as alike as Alex and Carter are, and Alice, the girl who has no qualms about invading Richard's personal space is the only person he's ever heard call the other man Dick and get away with it.
He writes back to his parents, finally, that night. It takes more effort to keep his secrets than it usually does and he feels an odd sense of satisfaction when he keeps them behind his fingers and off the paper.
viii.
The eighth week tips his world on its axis and it somehow keeps turning regardless. Edgerton happily tortures them under the guise of training every morning, the four girls have become a regular, if somewhat transient, addition to their lives and he is in a perpetual state of mental and physical exhaustion that he thinks might be the closest he's going to come to content.
On the Tuesday morning Alex is missing from their session with the sniper and Don's mild surprise is the only reaction. As they dress for class Richard quietly asks Don not to say anything to Alex when he joins them for breakfast.
Don doesn't because he knows better than anyone how sometimes silent acceptance is all that's needed to put things, things that fight their way free through weak spots in your guard when you least expect it, back in their box.
On Friday evening they both join he and Richard on their run and when they all collapse in a panting, sweating heap Carter breaks the silence. He manages to be louder than any of the screams and paints a haunting picture with only a handful of words that settle like icicles along Don's spine.
He knows with a chilling certainty, as Richard's eyes darken and Carter's slide away from his and Alex's remain curiously blank, that those icicles and three pairs of eyes are irrevocably a part of his fabric now.
ix.
Another letter from his parents arrives in the ninth week and somehow all their guards are lowered to the point where Don simply lets the envelope flutter down to land on his bed and turns away from it.
Richard tucks it under a stack of notebooks while Alex deliberately knocks the bedside table over and Carter bursts into raucous laughter and cries out for a taxi.
"Campus is a dry zone, Doherty," he chuckles. "Especially if you can't hold your liquor."
Don turns back towards them with an amused glint in his eye as the letter drifts even further into a box somewhere in the back of his mind.
After dinner the girls take them by the hands and the slow arc of the moon across the sky finds them sprawled out upon the field, with grass underneath their backs and hands underneath their clothes, as cracks in each of them are slowly filled even as new ones open underneath their skin.
They, all of them, give and take and heal and hurt, all at once. Somehow it is the best night's sleep any of them have had since arriving at Quantico. Each of them, even if they don't say the words, thinks that it is the best night's sleep they've had that they can remember.
x.
Somehow, perhaps while they weren't watching or maybe while they were trying to outrun their ghosts, they'd become a group all their own inside of Quantico.
Terry still fits just as perfectly beneath Don's arm and the spark in her eye still does something to his stomach every time he sees it. Alice still calls Richard Dick and gets away with it and he thinks that Erin and Charlotte are somehow blurring the differences between Alex and Carter even more.
Their next Hogan's Alley exercise the instructors send them through as a group of eight. They set two separate records for least time taken and least shots fired.
Edgerton comments on it on the Friday of their tenth week, wryly asks them "How does it feel to be the closest thing Quantico has to a high school it clique?" and Richard looks at him out of the corner of his eye around the scope of a rifle with a raised eyebrow.
Don isn't listening, too intently focused on the target at the other end of the range, and takes his shot. It pierces the cross in the centre of the paper forehead cleanly.
Alex and Carter don't even acknowledge the statement further than a dismissive scoff as they line up to take their turns behind Don and Richard.
Rolling his eyes as he hits the control to bring the paper targets down to them, Edgerton mockingly scoffs back in reply. He looks at the targets appraisingly.
"I'll say one thing for you, stupid jocks or otherwise," he says, taking in the neat clusters of holes. "Haven't seen shooting like this in trainees in a long time. Two laps of the field and then back here, I want to brief you on tonight's activities."
Typical Ian, even giving stick to his favourites. I wonder how bad he is with the other recruits?
See you next week!