Good Friday, everyone! Today we have something a little different: a look into a familiar mind, brought to you by the one and only BrambleStar14. This should be fine, I'm sure.

Once again, thank you for reading, throwing a follow/favourite and for Xehan's enthusiastic reviews.


Relief Efforts

Written by BrambleStar14

"Again I'm all alone and left without a reason

To hope you learn, to watch you turn a blind eye to a feeling"

-The Broken View, 'Something Better'

Hunter couldn't sleep.

Not that he'd tried, really. Not tonight. He didn't want to face whatever was in his dreams, and the urge to do something dangerous or reckless or damaging to himself, to his only female teammate, to anyone, was close to overpowering. He didn't want to wake up to her eyes on him, to feel the unspoken comments from the rest, to see icy blue locked onto his own rage-filled form as he did everything in his power to hold back the wildfire caught in his chest, locked away, drowned in a way that felt so wrong to everything he was.

For once, it hadn't been him that had locked it up, sealed it away and encased it in steel.

The dark-haired man hadn't laid down with the rest of them to drown himself in the darkness of sleep. He hadn't flipped the coin for whether or not he woke up screaming where they could all hear.

Where she could hear.

Instead, Hunter had sat there, his back slumped and an invisible weight pressing down against him, some phantom pain caught in his ribcage, where his heart normally burned but instead merely glowed with small, sad embers, the ghost of a flame, the best he could do.

Blue eyes stared at that sleeping form across the improvised campsite, watching blonde hair and a peaceful expression that didn't seem to hold nightmares, like she'd been freed from her personal demons, temporarily at least. She'd severed an old bond that had been keeping her from truly resting, truly finding herself comfortable in their presence. And he could feel it already, that pain like his nerves were exposed to the air, raw and bleeding.

It was hard, much harder than he might have expected, to watch her like he did now, the remains of the bonfire between them sparking every now and again with a discharge of embers into the air, but doused by the brief thunderstorm that had struck them without warning and so brutally put those flames out.

Seeing her like he had, every day, had been hard, the reminder of what she'd been, even for a brief night, just for an hour, being able to bask in somebody that connected with him, enough to make his chest ache in ways that he'd never felt under Ian's blades or torments.

Now, he just wished they were still at the stage of her hesitant avoidance and his attempted disinterest. This was something more permanent. It was out there now and she seemed to have settled her past and put it behind her.

Being a Phoenix meant cutting old ties.

Why did that mean that she found it so much easier than he did to sever that part of their shared past?

Why had he forced them to this? What had been the point of it? What had he been trying to prove? Who had he been trying to prove it to? Green eyes, ever-watchful, seeing everything that even he couldn't? Blue eyes, searching for a past that they couldn't let die? Blue eyes, staring into the mirror for a man they could no longer recognise?

Did it even matter anymore?

Swallowing thickly as the sight of the campfire blurred in front of him rather suddenly, he raised a hand to his face and ran his forearm over his eyes with a low growl of frustration, his other hand curling into a furious fist in the dirt. He felt the earth caught in his grip and for a wild moment, the rush of helplessness overtook him again, that sense of spiralling out of control into a freefall. His instincts screamed at him, to lash out, to toss that dirt into the embers and dash them out for good, to darken the clearing, to bring that blizzard chill to the rest of them.

And just what good had that done him so far?

Damn Hannah Steele.

He couldn't even burn in that familiar way that kept the endless worrying about what anybody else thought at bay. Now, he just felt numb. Empty.

Pretending that he couldn't feel the green eyes watching him from nearby, pretending that he couldn't feel the curiosity and the deep-rooted possessiveness that was practically cast over him at that campsite like a shadow to wrap him in comfortably and uncomfortably familiar darkness, he reached out, blindly finding one of the blades in front of his and Ian's bedrolls and clutching it in hands that couldn't even suppress the shaking that wracked his whole frame. Stumbling to his feet unevenly, Hunter turned his back on the rest of Phoenix and almost staggered away before either blonde, awake or asleep, could see the ravaged wound in his eyes.

It was easier to lose himself in the long shadows of the forest, something familiar now, concealed within darkness that he knew so well, that belonged to him and him alone, cloaking himself in the void that Harper found suited him so well. It helped him keep memories at bay, hold them all back as they threatened to burn to cinders in front of his eyes in echoes that he couldn't control, until they were ashes that slipped through his fingers, irreplaceable and irretrievable.

Every so often, the dark-haired man found himself numbly walking through patches of moonlight and starlight, silver cast down onto eyes that stubbornly refused to look up. If she wanted to let go of the stars, he could too. He had to. There was no other choice now, if he wanted to keep himself from completely breaking down into something that not even Ian could want.

Harper was the only one that would ever feel any connection with him now, anyway.

The patches of silver moonlight kept piercing through comfortable shadows and he flinched every time as they caught his eyes like club lights, blinking as memories caught in the back of his eyes, brought to the surface and each one like a bolt to the heart.

Hunter could see Mark's smile from the bar, that thumbs up and a wild gesture, pointing at a blonde in the crowd as a message came through to his phone with a name and a request. He saw the woman caught in the glow of a thousand lights above, lose herself in the song like it was a part of her, like it was everything she was in that moment. He felt the tug inside of him even now, captured in the echo of her movements as her eyes never left his in the maelstrom of movement and energy, like she was born to storms, natural or otherwise. He saw her watch him regretfully from the doorway of the club, like she wanted nothing more than to stay. He'd wanted her to stay.

He still wanted her to stay.

Too late now. Too late to find out if it had been a good idea or a bad one. Too late to know for sure.

There was a small sound, water on metal, and he glanced down at the blade in his hands as a single tear ran down the length of the instrument. A moment of realisation hit him, his ribcage unnaturally tight as he could feel the same smile from Errera on his face, something open and soft.

Hunter could see Blizzard above him, hissing those poisonous words down just like Harper had when he'd been doing everything he could to provoke the deep-seated rage and resentment inside of him to the surface. He could see her reminding him of what he'd lost to become what he was now. He'd seen her letting whatever they were go.

A half-snarl, half-sob caught in his throat and he lashed out suddenly, trying to slice through the silver starlight that was illuminating far too much within him, gouging deep into one of the nearby trees and forcing the broken sound of who he'd left behind into a feral, savage cry. Realisation struck immediately, the sound echoing in the clearing around him like mocking, haunting laughter and he fell silent, fists clenched and chest heaving, every breath cold inside his lungs, cold enough to burn.

He didn't want the only thing he felt through the numbness to be pain. Not again. Not ever again.

With his sudden unnatural silence and drawn from his spiralling memories, the second-newest Phoenix paused, hearing a nearby rush of water, something to cut through the blind escape attempt he'd been making from his own past and his own regret. There was no hesitation as he stumbled towards it like he could barely think straight. He could certainly hardly see in that moment, so blinded was he by hot tears, the closest he could get to anything resembling fire but even that suppressed and doused as well.

When he broke through the treeline and found that slope leading down to the water, he almost snarled at the silver reflecting in the surface, more light cast down from above, from stars that were out of reach of something like him now. Steeling himself, he staggered to the edge of the rushing stream, falling to his knees so that they splashed into the surface, unwilling for a few long seconds to look down and see whatever would be looking back up at him. He'd been ignoring starlight for weeks now. He could ignore it here too.

Slowly, Hunter tilted his head down to gaze into the water, pretending that he could ignore the tears dripping to add to an uncaring stream that washed them away like Blizzard's discarded memories. He saw the dark hair catching silver, the twisted, grieving expression, the blue eyes that practically swam, unable to summon his usual anger or wicked delight or anything else he'd picked up from the devil on his shoulder.

You're not my Jason Shaw. He's dead.

Hunter had to close his eyes for a moment, fists clenching at his sides, one hand clutching the blade tightly enough that it felt like he was gripping the blade instead of the handle by how it cut into him. It was a familiar pain, something he could ground himself in, bring himself back from the brink of whatever he was on the verge of becoming.

He opened his eyes again and caught his own judgemental gaze. "I'm still me," he breathed, like he was begging for an answer to a question he didn't ask. "I'm still Jason Shaw."

This was who he'd always been. It had to be. Why else would he have ever caught the eye of something like Ian Harper? This was Jason Shaw. Hunter was Jason Shaw. Even if Hannah Steele couldn't recognise him anymore.

Slowly, he held the knife up in front of his fingers, examining it as it too caught the moonlight, something bitter catching in his throat that sounded like a ragged laugh. It tore at his vocal chords intentionally, by design.

The blade wasn't his.

Of course he'd brought Harper's knife with him. It was fitting in a way. He needed some way to carve what was left of his soul out of his chest. What better blade than the one that had already done most of the work?

"Hunter?"

The voice was quiet but familiar and he might have tensed if it had been either of the two that he'd expected to follow him out here. Instead, he slumped suddenly, like the strings guiding him, puppetted in turn by madness and grief, had been cut. Slowly, his head turned to see Phil standing there, just a few steps back from the edge of the water, watching him with intense scrutiny that made him feel exposed again, the raw and bleeding pain on display.

"Falcon." Jason spoke quietly, his voice still shaking ever so slightly, tremors caught in the two syllables far more telling than anything he could have said. "It's a large forest."

He didn't need to accuse. They both knew he'd been followed. He hadn't exactly been subtle. That cruel and self-destructive part of Jason wondered just how many of Phoenix knew he was here, that he'd had to get away from them before he ripped himself apart in front of them.

"It is." Phil didn't bother to hide his intentions, gesturing idly to the river next to Jason. "Mind if I join you? I could go for a dip."

"I bet you could." It was bitter and empty, and he shrugged with a shoulder rather lifelessly, rotating the blade in his hand, the point pressed to the index finger of the other, not quite breaking the skin but dangerously on the edge. Hearing Falcon splash through the water to take a seat in the shallow stream at his side, Jason decided to cut to the chase rather than letting the man fall into his usual therapy bullshit of slowly guiding him to the point. "What do you want, Phil? Really."

In the corner of his eye, he couldn't see Blake look at him. In fact, the man seemed content to stare down into the water. Whether he'd seen Hunter's tears or not was a complete mystery to the man and he wasn't sure if he wanted the truth. The two of them sat there, bathed in the light and out of the shadows as Falcon weighed up his words.

"Club Errera, yeah? I've been, couple of times. Enjoy it?" It was soft, but not in the way that implied he was walking on eggshells.

"I… what?" This time, he couldn't stop himself, couldn't help himself as he cast his eyes over to Phil, swallowing hard, completely thrown by the question.

"Did you enjoy it? You don't talk about before. Ever." Falcon must have known. Ian must have shared his file around with the unit by now. There was no way that none of them had known his life, or what he'd been before. Then again… He grimaced and set his jaw.

"Doesn't matter if I did. We leave all that behind when we sign on." The words were hollow and empty.

"But you didn't." Blake's words cut across him like the most efficient of blades, though they didn't leave wounds like Ian. Or like Hannah. They just carefully removed the hasty, self-placed bandages to expose raw and festering wounds. His self-medication had worn off and now there was just the cold reality left to them both.

Swallowing hard and snapping his eyes back down to the water, he shrugged his shoulders like he was trying to be nonchalant. "Doesn't matter. It's over now. We're done." Hell, they'd never even gotten started, but this still felt like he'd been drowned in the river, like his fire was never going to reignite.

"Did you recognise her, Jason?" He didn't bother to fight back against Phil's question, nodding slowly, miserably, closing his eyes to hold back the hot, stinging tears. "For how long?"

"...since the start." It wasn't something he was ashamed of. Instead, he looked back with something close to regret.

Whatever Phil thought of that tone, he didn't say, instead carefully working through whatever he wanted to say. "Were you ever going to acknowledge it?"

This time, Jason didn't bother to hide the laugh, one of complete self-loathing as his head tipped back to gaze up at those blurred stars overhead as they shone there like some mocking reminder. Byzantium's aurora was out of sight tonight, any reminder of the last few months of his life gone, absent, leaving only the reminder of what he and Hannah had so briefly shared.

"No."

Liar.

Was he? He didn't know. He couldn't tell. Whatever he said now was distorted by their new reality, warped by guilt and regret and loss.

Falcon merely nodded at his side, still staring down at the river and giving Jason the privacy to silently let those tears stream down his face as he watched those stars mournfully. "She reminds you of back then, doesn't she?"

The knife suddenly stabbed downwards in a reflexive motion that plunged it into the riverbed and let the water rush against the metal, hitting the flat of the blade and forced around it, a relentless pressure against his hand to keep Harper's weapon in place of the inevitable tide. "She was never supposed to be here! That was… that was supposed to be something from before. Something…" He trailed off, the words like bile in his throat. Something he could go looking for when Harper threw him away.

That same ragged, desperate, hopeless laugh catching in his throat again, he continued, unable to help himself now. "Fuck, Phil, you've got no idea how that felt, back then. I wasn't this, and for just a brief moment, I see her and it's like we just… I knew her. Instantly. Could feel that connection and I thought that she might have felt something too. She was going back on deployment but every day, I looked out for her, just in case she came back. Just in case she wanted to see if-"

He cut himself off with a growl. Hunter's growl. "And then she showed up here. I don't want that. I don't need a reminder of what I was. I'd found something here, with you guys." With him. "She was supposed to know me when I wasn't… I've done things, Phil."

"We all have, Jason. Do you think anyone with the name Phoenix is clean?" Falcon spoke the words quietly. They weren't self-recriminating, just a reminder of what they'd all agreed to when they took the monikers, wore the armour, accepted those new bonds.

"None of them were her! She was something good, one of the few good things…" He trailed off, shaking his head in abject misery. "She doesn't recognise me. I did a good job helping her with that. Ian did a good job with me, didn't he? I did a good job going along with it."

"You sounded happy at Errera. You could have been happy with her."

The words burned and for a moment, Hunter rejected it, something that might have been sparks burning in his chest instead of a tight, ragged, icy pain. "I'm happy here!"

This time, Falcon looked at him for the first time, his expression non-judgemental, but rather pointed, and Jason glanced back down at his reflection again, at the tears making their way down his face. The fight went out of him in a heartbeat.

"I am… this is who I've always been, I just-" He cut himself off with a half-sob. "This is what was underneath it all. And she looks at me like-"

She'd looked at him with something approaching victory. Like she was free of him. And whatever was left of who he'd been at that DJ deck, the man that had played her song, he'd felt that as keenly as a blade to the heart.

If there was anything left of Jason Shaw, she'd left him to bleed to death, or to drown in Hunter.

"Can I have the knife, Jason?" This time, Phil sounded like he was trying to corral a spooked animal backed into a corner, and the smile on Hunter's face was mirthless, eyes closing tightly to block out the sight of silver for just a few seconds, but all he could see were blue eyes.

"Why? Worried I'm going to slit her throat in her sleep? I wouldn't." He couldn't.

"I'm worried you're going to give yourself scars instead of her." It was blunt, but blunt enough to cut through that emptiness and find something raw. He didn't know what it was, what wounded thing had threatened to emerge from Hunter and take his place, but it left him recoiling in realisation, in panic, in stunned, appalled silence. Jason's head whipped up to stare at the Phoenix second in the moonlight, horror sliced into his features and limbs suddenly trembling all over again.

"How fragile do you think I am?" He practically breathed the question into the air between them and Falcon didn't respond, something intensely sad in his eyes as he examined whatever was in Jason's blue.

Something about that look, the prelude to grief buried within it, about the reminder that he was barely hanging by a thread, caught at something inside of him, something that shifted logs just enough on a bonfire to rekindle it a little and send a few sparks into the hollow emptiness that had replaced club lights, pulsing songs and starlight. The hand holding the blade swung downwards, sinking it a couple of inches into the shore behind them and leaving it there. Without really thinking about it, he found himself returning his fingers to the water, letting it stream and slip between his digits like lost time, lost chances.

"Can I ask you something, Jason? I need you to answer it truthfully." Now, for the first time, Falcon seemed hesitant to ask the question, but pressed forwards regardless when the only reaction that he got was a small, barely there nod. "When she spoke about Dominic. Did it hurt you?"

Jason had been unable to hide the grimace when he'd picked up Hannah's undertones then, and he grimaced again now, expression twisting in something approximating regret, despite how irrational it seemed, how much it left him furious at himself. "Why should it? It hurt her more."

A ghost of a smile passed over Falcon's features, relief flaring in his eyes but only stoking that stubborn irritation inside of Hunter.

"Do you still feel that connection to her, Jason? She reminds you of who you were, but it's more than that, isn't it? You can still feel what you felt then." Blake was remarkably astute sometimes, but it didn't make the observation any less raw, didn't make it any less painful as Jason's head tipped down to stare at his own reflection, something less in it than what he'd seen back at Errera.

"It doesn't matter, Phil."

You're not my Jason Shaw. He's dead.

Won't happen again.

"All I know is that we could have been…" He trailed off miserably, the unknown 'what if' catching like an empty abyss, unexplorable now, without the familiar starlight that had kept them connected for years. "We could have been." He couldn't finish it, but it somehow felt like he'd said what he'd meant to.

There'd been something.

"It was easy to ignore her, or try and keep her at arm's length. Anything else and she'd have known me like this, wanted to snap that bond, y'know? But I can feel it now. I could see it. She's snapped it now. Moved on with her life and left that behind. It doesn't mean anything to her anymore."

He felt empty without it, like part of himself was missing. Whether it was the best part, he couldn't tell. But it was certainly the good part.

"Does it mean anything to you, Jason?" Falcon sounded for a second so very sad, unable to keep his tone impartial and professional and it was that question, asked in that way, that finally struck the nerve, that found the exposed part of his soul that he couldn't burn out or drown or carve away. He shot to his feet in the water. He couldn't be here anymore, couldn't sit in the starlight that went nowhere instead of somewhere.

It wasn't just about whether it meant anything to him. It wasn't just about him. It was about the two of them. It was about festering wounds that had been drawn into the light and about whether either of them could ever hope that they'd scar over. He was bleeding. She wasn't. That was all there was to it, now.

It wasn't like he'd made it easy for her. What else could expect than for her to heal those scars without him?

He tried to put any fire into his tone. He failed completely.

"All I know is that there's no room for Hunter with Blizzard." He kept the codenames. It was the only way that the sentence made sense to him. Lowering his head to hide those last few tears as his vision finally began to clear, he felt something settle over his face, something unnatural even to Hunter, but with nothing else to replace it. It wasn't a mask. It felt like bandages had been wrapped over his features, keeping that raw pain masked, disguising those invisible scars.

It would have to do.

"Enjoy your dip, Falcon." His tone was as empty as the rest of him as he walked away from the Phoenix second, leaving that blade stuck from the ground behind him, reflecting the starlight but abandoned, upright and unnatural against the backdrop of nature.

Like some twisted grave marker.

Phil didn't know quite how long he sat there after Hunter's footsteps, even and measured again instead of stumbling and pained, had faded from earshot. He didn't make any move to get up from the stream or retrieve the blade that Jason had stolen from Ian. The older Phoenix sighed heavily, running one hand down his face now that Shaw had left, grimacing at the mess that Hunter had become with a few specific wounds ripped open by Hannah Steele.

He had known that Jason was hiding something when it came to Blizzard. That much had been obvious by his stubborn refusal to accept her or to give her anything except deliberate ambivalence or violent sarcasm and angry glares. Even if she hadn't made it obvious the moment she'd seen the man, Phil would have suspected that Jason had known her from before and that she'd known him in turn, judging by her constant instinctive efforts to approach him. But this… tangled mess?

None of them had been expecting that.

If what Jason felt was real, and that Hannah had cut him loose forever, then he didn't know if Harper was going to be able to keep him from detonating even worse than the current inevitable collision course that Shaw's past and Hunter's present were on.

Whether Jason or Hannah knew it or not, that small connection that they'd forged had been a key piece of Hunter's memories, something that even the vicious Phoenix had been able to look back on and smile.

Now, Blake didn't know whether he wanted them to be able to revive that tattered, snapped something or abandon it altogether and let Harper and Shaw try and work things out. Because those two would have to speak about this sooner or later.

Speaking of which…

"Did you know?"

He asked it aloud, his voice carrying to the last row of trees before the embankment down to the stream and sure enough, a second later, Harper emerged from the darkness like he was born to it, his face completely unreadable as he slid down to stand next to Phil, his eyes as empty as Shaw's. The look was less out of place on him, but he wasn't smiling. His lips were twisted slightly down. His gaze was fixed on the reflection of the night sky below him.

Noticeably, Ian didn't answer the question, moving his eyes to his own reflection and not for the first time, Phil wondered what exactly his team leader saw when he looked in the mirror, especially one as warped and actively twisting as the water beneath them.

Changing his strategy, knowing the usual bluntness didn't usually work on Ian, he tried again. "You didn't seem bothered by the thunderstorm, this time."

This time, something mirthless crossed Ian's face that might have been a grin, eyes carrying some private joke that only he was privy to. Normally, Shaw was around to share in the punchline. It was strange how quickly Phil had adjusted to the other man's presence at Harper's side, how familiar the two were with one another that it felt odd now, incomplete, to see either of them without the other.

"Ever the psychologist." It was all Harper said for a moment and Phil couldn't even summon the usual frustration that he'd been so easily deflected. He could read everything he needed to in the unusual mask Harper wore over whatever he felt. Then, green eyes found Falcon's reflection and Ian relented. "I had something else to worry about."

Concern, genuine or otherwise, was something that didn't seem to come naturally to Harper. But now that they were alone, with neither Hunter nor Blizzard to hear them…

Casting a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the Phoenix campsite, where Hunter had stalked away with something approaching grief but renewed, stubborn fury to mask the numbness that he felt inside his chest, Falcon asked one more question, just to see how much he'd be needed over the next few weeks.

"And are you worried about that? About him? About them?"

Harper leaned down to retrieve his blade, examining his own gaze in the reflected starlight and Phil saw the silver caught in his green eyes, giving them just a little more life than usual.

"Should I be?"

It could have been nonchalance, could have been dismissive, like there was nothing to be concerned about. It could have been rhetorical.

They both knew that it wasn't.