Y is for Yearning (SPOILERS)
A/N: Tomorrow is the last day, Reader's Choice again. Give me your best ideas for Z. Let's make it good.
It had been five years. Five years since Max. Five years since the oil rig.
Five years without Cougar.
He always came here on the aniversary of the day Cougar died. He remembered the first time he had come here with Cougar. It wasn't much, an old plot of land on the edge of a small town about 50 miles from the Mexican border. Cougar had told Jensen that this was where he grew up, after his parents jumped the border before he was born. He was born and American citizen, and he said that always made his parents proud.
After he died, Jensen had come here a few months later, thinking the pain had died enough that he could stand on this spot without losing it. He was wrong. But he had gone there with a mission. It had been his sister's idea. She even helped him plant the tree. Five years after the fact, the tree was still growing strong.
"I miss you," he said quietly, sitting under it's branches. It was still too small to offer much shade, but it was getting bigger. "Every day. It gets easier after a while, but it never goes away. I wish you hadn't been such a noble bastard, Cougs. I wish you would have let me save you for once. ... I wish you were still here."
He got to his feet, then, and reached into his pocket, popping open a can of beer. He took a deep swig of it. And yeah, it still tasted like piss. "One for me," he said, then turned the can upside down and dumped the rest on the ground. "And one for you."
Wind rushed through the tree's spindly branches, rattling the leaves, and blowing the hat off Jensen's head. He tried to catch it, but it seemed to be caught in a up-draft. It rose higher and higher before getting caught in the branches, far out of Jensen's reach.