As Hawk is berating his daughter, all of the rest of the adults are either doing the same or are too stunned to move. Lifeline just stands there, stunned as he realizes that his children were the ones in charge of the rescue operations and that he really had seen Jamie Barney that night; and he hadn't been hallucinating either.
"Congratulations, kids. I think we got all of the snakes out of the base and retook it for the Joes." As Hawk said this to the quiet room, everyone starts slowly sliding away from Overdose. Storm Shadow suddenly falls from the rafters and landed face first on the floor in a "frog-splash". He is already unconscious and the Joes have no problem taking him to the brig.
"And this one is best known as 'The SBD King!" says Mindy, laughing along with everyone else.
Lifeline grabs hold of AJ's sleeve as she dodges Beach Head; unfortunately, it was the arm with the stitches that Jamie had put in it. "Why didn't you tell me? And since when did you have the smarts to pull a mission like this off?" he asks her.
She flinches as his hand closes over the bandages on her arm and winces when he pushes the sleeve up to find out what had happened.
"What happened?" he asked, looking sternly at her.
"It's nothing," she responds. "I was concentrating on getting us out of the Pit and I guess one of the snakes had a knife handy."
Both of them look up as they hear the raised voice and the sound of a powerful slap from across the gym. They watched silently as Jamie's broad, proud shoulders drooped in defeat; she turned, and pace by slow, measured pace, walked out of the building. Her long legs gave her a long stride, and when she reached the door, she nearly tore it from the hinges barehanded before striding outside and slamming her big body into her Cherokee, backing out and whipping through the gears in a bid to get away from there as soon as possible.
"And now you're going to tell me just why you all chose to put yourselves in this kind of danger," he rumbles.
"Dad," she responds, "Hawk wanted us to keep it a secret just in case of a mission like this, but we've basically been training all of our lives for this. And it wasn't just me that had the brains. We all had something to contribute, and specialties that allowed us to pull it off with a large amount of luck and a good dose of help from God."
"Not to mention a lot of stupidity from the Cobras and massive muscle and electronic power from Jamie," EJ added with a laugh.
Lifeline hugs AJ hard, and reaches over and grabs EJ, dragging him in as well.
"Thank you, you two. Thank God that neither one of you were seriously hurt. I don't know what I would do if something happened to you. I lost your mother the hard way, and I don't want to lose either of you the same way. I love you too much. And if you ever do that again, I will blister your butts. I don't care how big you get."
AJ snuggles into him, as does EJ. "Don't worry Dad," she says softly, "We won't."
"Or maybe…" EJ starts.
"Don't even think about it," Lifeline tells them sternly. All three of them burst into laughter. They all know that if they ran into the same situation that they wouldn't hesitate to do the same thing they did this time.
"By the way," Lifeline asks his twins, "What gave you two the right to practice the type of medical techniques that you were using?"
EJ looks over at AJ and they both grin and reach into their back pockets, pulling out their wallets and flipping them open to show Lifeline their medic licenses.
"When the heck did you two do this?" he asked in surprise.
"General Hawk had us, Jamie, Trini, Serena, Wendy, Carson, Rance, David and Ritchie sent through the corpsman course last summer, as well as basic training. We hate to admit it, but we had the highest scores in the whole class," EJ told him modestly. "Jamie and Trini even went so far as to take the surgeons' course while we were there."
Movement catches their eyes and they all turn to watch something strange- Deep Six was involved in PDA! The man was normally so undemonstrative that he made a couple of pissed off badgers look cuddly, and here he was, showing affection in public. All of them made a note of the date, in order to tease him about it later.
"Are you okay?" he signed to his daughter.
"Yes, I'm fine, Dad," Sydney signed back.
"You weren't hurt, were you?" he signed.
She pulled up her pant leg to show him the hand shaped bruise around her ankle. "This was the worst of my injuries, Sir," she signed. "Clutch lived up to his codename a little too well," she joked.
"That's good," he signed, laughing, and reached out, pulling her into a tight hug.
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