II.
Despite her rebellious nature, Jaz quickly finds that military life suits her. There are many, many rules and regulations, enough to make her head spin, but she finds them comforting rather than stifling.
These rules make sense. They are clear and easy to understand. They can be followed.
It's a far cry from her childhood, where the rules always changed from one day to the next, where every interaction with her parents was a pop quiz in a subject she didn't know she was supposed to study.
Up until now, her life has been a seemingly endless checklist of how to be a good girl and a perfect daughter.
It's different here.
Here, there are only so many ways to be a good soldier.
And here, she hits her marks.
Every last one of them.
...
Of course, it's not easy.
She has to work twice as hard to get half as far, and when some of the other more...traditional guys aren't belittling her, they're grabbing and making passes at her.
To them, she's either good for nothing, or good only for a lay.
Elijah is the first guy she meets who treats her like she belongs.
He approaches her at the shooting range one day – she's nailed every shot, as usual – and asks her for some pointers. She scoffs and rolls her eyes, certain he's either being sarcastic or trying to get in her pants, but he just repeats himself, explaining that his specialty is explosives and his aim could use some work.
You sure you want lessons from a woman?, she asks, arching her brow at him.
Why wouldn't I?, he frowns. You're the best in our class.
She lets out a short bark of laughter, because as true as that may be, she's never heard a man willingly admit it. Alright, she says, a small smile lingering on her lips, let's see what you got.
He misses nearly every target and she almost has a stroke trying to suppress her laughter.
For the next two weeks, she spends nearly every morning helping him with his technique, and pretty soon, he's no longer the worst marksman she's ever seen. They become fast friends, bonding over prank wars (he wins) and their mutually shitty childhoods (she wins). In Elijah, Jaz finds someone she never had before – someone who has her back. And she has his.
The first time he gets a perfect run at target practice, she cheers loud enough to make him cover his ears, and when she graduates at the top of her class, he leads the crowd in chanting her name. For his birthday, she signs him up for extra rounds at the shooting range, and for hers, he plays the Aladdin soundtrack on all the speakers on repeat.
He pushes her to be better, and makes her laugh so hard she snorts, and takes five years off her life with every crazy stunt he pulls.
When he wants to annoy her, which is most, if not all the time, he calls her Princess.
And because he's her best friend, she lets him.
...
It becomes an unspoken rule that the two of them are a package deal. Eli and Jaz – he blows things up and she shoots them down. They're a lethal combination.
When they get tapped for a hyper-exclusive Omega team, he's over the moon, but she's not so sure. She's met and worked with a lot of guys from these so-called elite teams, and they're almost all the same – smug, self-centered, sexist.
In her experience, this usually plays out in one of two ways: either her new CO reminds her at every opportunity that she's good for a woman, or he pretends her gender doesn't matter while using some misplaced sense of chivalry to justify grounding her on more dangerous missions.
She wants to spare herself the headache and the wasted time. She wants to say no. But she is a woman in the Armed Forces and she knows that opportunities like this are few and far between.
So she accepts.
For all the women who paved the way before her.
For all the women who will come after.
...
When she and Elijah arrive at their new base, a man she can only describe as a life-sized GI Joe action figure approaches them, and she immediately knows he's going to be the kind of CO who benches her with the best of intentions.
Adam Dalton, he introduces himself, taking a glance at the personnel files in his hand. Elijah, he says, then looks over to her, and...Jaz? Nice to meet you guys. Glad you're joining the team.
She looks at him, squinting against the sun as he takes them on a quick tour of the base. How'd you know I go by Jaz?, she asks.
He glances back at her, flashing a quick grin. Felt right.
At that moment, she realizes she may have misjudged him. And a week later, when they're on their first mission and he trusts her to take the shot, she knows that he's unlike any CO she's ever had.
It's the first time she's ever been happy to be wrong.
...
With the new team, she finally finds her tribe. Dalton, Preach, and McGuire are all close with a long, shared history of their own, but they welcome her and Elijah into the fold like they're the last two puzzle pieces they've been searching for.
The stakes are high in their line of work, and the tensions are higher, but they get along well and get the job done.
One day, in between missions, they're engaged in a friendly shooting competition against another team on base. She makes a particularly difficult shot, taking the win for her team, and McG lifts her up in a bear hug, whooping Way to go Jazzy!
She wrinkles her nose on instinct – no one's called her that since she was a kid, and it immediately reminds her of pigtails and scuffed knees and being young, wild, and foolish. She remembers other, less happy things too – her parents' expectations, her repeated failures to meet them – and she doesn't like how easily that self-doubt grips her again.
She arms herself with some choice words for the medic, but he's already letting her go to run off and gloat. No one beats our Jazzy!, he shouts, ecstatic.
It's only then that she realizes he's not being patronizing – the pride she hears in his voice is genuine.
It's only then that she realizes she no longer needs to keep proving her worth to herself or anyone else.
She is a skilled sniper and a valued member of her team.
She is exactly who she wants to be.
...
Almost immediately, she regrets not shutting down McGuire when she had the chance. Because Elijah relishes the new nickname and encourages McG at any chance he can get, which is more or less all the time. Between the two of them, she can't go anywhere without hearing someone call out Princess! or Jazzy! after her.
But they're her guys, so she lets them.
...
Elijah is laughing when he goes down.
She had just cracked a joke as he opens the door, and then there is gunfire and shouting and everything goes to hell. He's blocking her line of sight and she's about to tell him to get out of the way when he falls backwards and takes her down with him.
Eli, this is not the time to be practicing trust falls!, she yells, firing off as many shots as she can while trying to pull him up with her other hand. He doesn't say anything, which is unusual for him, and that's when she realizes there's something wet seeping between her fingers.
She looks down, sees the blood, sees his eyes, wide open and unblinking, and then she starts screaming.
The next part is blurry.
McGuire's at her side shouting something and Dalton and Preach are running after the enemy soldiers, and Elijah's in her arms, but he's so silent and so still. Why isn't he moving? He should be jumping back up and declaring himself the prank king, making fun of her for being so gullible.
The look on your face! I can't believe you fell for that! She can hear his voice so clearly in her head but when she looks down at him, he doesn't say a word.
He never will again.
When they make it back to base, he's taken away and she gives her debrief and McG and Preach hover around her for a while until Dalton tells them to give her some space. She pulls off her clothes and hops in the shower and watches the water turn red with her best friend's blood.
She doesn't sleep that night.
It's almost midnight when she wanders outside with a blanket and curls up in a chair, watching the moon hang in the sky as the stars twinkle. She's struck by how normal it is, how ordinary. Elijah is gone and the moon still shines and the stars are just as bright today as they were yesterday. Life moves on.
She keeps her eyes towards the horizon, and a few hours later, the sun rises, marking the start of a new day.
The first day without him.
...
Losing Elijah is like losing an eye. Or her trigger finger.
He is that important to her, that much a part of her.
She keeps turning to her right, where he always stood, expecting to see him there with a grin on his face and a glint in his eye. In her free time, she wanders around base, looking for his drawings in the sand.
He once told her, in another life, he would've been an artist.
In this one, the wind has erased all traces of him.
Of course, she knows the risks that come with their line of work. She knows this, but it's Elijah. He's the kind of person who runs headfirst into danger but is never touched by it, the kind of person who makes you wonder who he made a deal with to get so damn lucky.
Elijah is—
Elijah was.
Elijah was the best person she knew, and now he's gone, and she misses him so much it feels like drowning.
She misses the sound of his laugh, and the way he was always trying to one-up her, and the fact that he was the only other person on the team who also liked runny eggs for breakfast. Hell, she even misses him calling her Princess.
But life moves on.
And so does she.
The day after they ship him back stateside, she heads to their favorite spot on base and sticks a marker in the ground. His body may be gone, but a piece of him remains here, with her.
She draws a crown in the sand and imagines him smiling.