Yes, I have returned, and no, I'm not dead. Something close to it, but still among the land of the living for the most part. In the shortest form of an explanation I can offer, I was working on a horse's hoof a few weeks ago, and she spooked and stomped on my hand. Both of us are okay, but she ground three fingers and the thumb of my right hand into the concrete floor, and it ended up breaking my thumb and index finger, and severely bruising the other two. I tried for a little bit to only type with my left hand, but that was slower than I wanted to deal with, and text-to-speech was doing my accent all kinds of dirty.
Long story short, I'm back with another chapter, and mostly full use of all my fingers, and I wanted y'all to know that I didn't abandon you guys or this story. So, read on, and try not to hate me too bad for the shorter chapter or the delay.
Brock Reynolds was nothing if not observant.
When it came to the goings on in and around Bravo, there wasn't much that he didn't notice.
People didn't notice him right off the bat, if they noticed him at all, and he was quiet. He was constantly in the background, and he hardly ever said a word when the conversation wasn't pointed in his direction. He liked it that way. Things were easier to see when your mouth wasn't doing the judging for you.
He spent most of his time in the background of every situation, constantly listening and watching, paying attention to everything that was going on around him. When he had trained to be a K-9 handler, quite a few of his peers believed that he'd never make it through training, because he was too soft spoken to control a dog like they were supposed to. Shock bloomed on every single one of their faces when they realized that he didn't have to be loud or brash for Cerberus to respect him and respond to him. They were a match, plain and simple, and Brock liked the fact that his dog often noticed just as much, if not probably more, than he did about their surroundings.
Throughout his childhood, Brock had never had an interest in being a member of the military. He'd wanted to be a detective. When his mom had given him a children's crime scene investigation kit for his ninth birthday, his father had scoffed, but Brock thought it was the best birthday gift he'd ever received. He'd gone around the house for days, lifting fingerprints off the family's dishware, making clay molds of his older brothers' boot prints in the yard, and reading tirelessly about how the study of blood splatter could make or break a crime scene. His father had shaken his head, squinted at him in something between amusement and confusion, but he'd let him remain in his own little world, learning all he could about his dream profession.
Until some people came knocking on the door of his childhood home three months later, informing them that his eldest brother Matt's platoon had been ambushed overseas, and that he wouldn't be coming home. His heart had split in two that day, and his parents didn't hear his voice for almost a year afterwards. He decided then that being a detective, while something he would always want, wasn't what he was going to do.
He'd spent the next few months focused on which branch of the military he could best slot himself into, and when he came across the idea of being a SEAL, he knew he'd found the path he was going to pursue. But just because he decided to follow in his brother's footsteps, didn't mean that he stopped learning everything he could about being a detective. His dreams didn't tend to die that easily.
Now, sitting next to Clay in a dimly lit hospital room, he wonders, not for the first time, what his life could have been like if he'd made the choice to be a detective. If his brother hadn't died, and if Matt had never been in the Army in the first place. All the what-if's that Brock tended to avoid because they dredged up nothing but the hurt that he'd spent years tucking away in his heart so that another living soul never had to see what was underneath the quiet, stony exterior.
What if Ash had never released his new book? What if the Navy hadn't blamed Clay for the information in said book? What if they'd never taken him off active duty? What if they'd never sent Bravo on a mission, and left Clay behind. What if Clay hadn't been attacked?
Brock liked asking questions, liked learning things that could be used to better something later on. What he didn't like, was questions that would never have a singular right answer.
He sat in a chair next to Clay's bed, the younger man finally having been given an actual room in the hospital instead of an examination room tucked in the back alcove of an emergency department. There was a book balanced in his lap, but if you asked him about the words printed on the page he'd been staring at for twenty minutes, he wouldn't have been able to tell you about them. He couldn't help but keep his ear tuned to the heart monitor, just in case. He hated that Clay still hadn't woken up again, and that even though he'd been awake for a little while before they'd moved him to a new room, he hadn't been entirely coherent after his panic and adrenaline induced exclamation to them back in the emergency room.
Sonny and Jason had decided to go to the Bulkhead and ask around for some information, and Ray had gone with them because it didn't take a genius to know that Bravo might not be able to explain away busting someone's head over a bartop when they weren't even on a mission.
Technically they weren't even supposed to be getting involved at all.
They had spoken with the detective that was in charge of Clay's case when she'd come to get both his and Jane's statements, and she hadn't seemed very surprised when she'd only been able to leave with the latter. Apparently the police and the bar-goers had told her what they could of Clay's injuries, and the hospital staff had told her the rest, so she didn't have very high hopes about being able to get anything out of him for a little while. The doctors had offered to wake him up, and before Bravo even had a chance to argue, the detective had declined. At least she knew that nothing good would've come from that either way.
Sizing up Detective Winters probably should've been harder than it actually was, but Brock found that, as far as he could tell, she was being completely transparent with them. Which was odd, only because Bravo's run-ins with the law were quite the opposite of satisfactory, and they owed Blackburn more of his favorite liquor than the man would ever be able to drink.
Having dealt with a few detectives in the past, Brock knew that getting them to share information about a case was almost harder than pulling teeth, but Detective Winters volunteered the information they asked for pertaining to the process that Clay would be facing when he was well enough to do so. Brock supposed that it was probably due to the fact that they were on the right side of the investigation this time, and that much he was grateful for.
Halden assured them that when they caught the remaining four perpetrators they were looking for, there would be a larger case built for them to be prosecuted against, but until then, they were working with what they had to charge the two currently in custody. Brock knew that it was likely to be a long and arduous process, and that there may not even be any breakthroughs in the case for weeks, and that was if they were lucky.
Not knowing was what made Brock anxious. Having the lingering thought in the back of your head that there were four people on the loose that had hurt their brother and could very well do it again given the chance was weighing on his mind. Sure, Bravo wasn't leaving his side, and they would be able to deal with any problem that came their way because they were all back together again, but it didn't make him worry any less.
He looked up, pulled from his thoughts, as Jane came through the door to the room, now holding two takeout containers full of what Brock hoped was Chinese food from across the street. Lisa had ordered the two of them food, seeing as how the rest of Bravo had gone to either chase other leads or harass the doctors into giving them more of a in-depth prognosis regarding Clay *cough*Trent*cough*. Jane had remained at Clay's side the entire time, even though Jason had assured her that they could handle things from here.
She was holding a laptop, precariously balancing the takeout trays on top of it, and as she made her way back to the chair she'd been occupying the entire time they'd been in the room, she passed the tray on top to Brock. He thanked her, but didn't have the heart to tell her that he really wasn't hungry. He'd told her when she left that he didn't want anything, but clearly that hadn't deterred her in the slightest. She was hard-headed, and it didn't take Brock's wannabe detective skills to know that.
It would seem that Clay may have met his match, and probably didn't even know it yet.
Brock was confused at her outright defiance towards Jason, at her demanding tone when she'd tired of them telling her that it was okay for her to leave. No one talked to Jason that way and lived to tell the tale. Of course, as Jane had so dutifully told them, Jason wasn't her boss, and he could 'damn well quit acting like it'. It was refreshing, if he was being honest.
Now, however, it was just the two of them and Clay in the room, and Brock was happy for the lull in the pacing, sighing and grumbling that had been there for as long as the rest of his brothers were. Brock loved them dearly, but the only place they could remain even remotely quiet was when they were on one of their stealthier missions, and even then it was a stretch. He was happy to stay behind while the rest of them went to do what they needed to, anything so they wouldn't have to stare at their youngest brother like he was on display.
He tried not to stare outright at Jane, instead choosing to watch her out of the corner of his eye and continue to pretend to read his book. He didn't even remember the title of the damn thing, and that was saying something since it was only in his go-bag because he had been dying to read it. He hadn't asked Jane any questions, even though he'd been dying to since the rest of the guys had filed out almost an hour ago, but he knew that eventually something would have to give. They knew nothing about this woman, about why she was still here, and why she hadn't made any move to leave. So he tried to wait her out.
It only took about ten more minutes of waiting.
"If you want to say something, you should just say it," she drawled. That had been something else that Brock had been unprepared for. Translating Sonny's accent had taken years for Brock to become something close to good at, and even then, he wasn't sure all the time what Bravo Three was saying to them. Jane had a southern accent, but he couldn't tell exactly where she was from, and it wasn't very high on his list of things he wanted to ask.
She must've been unnerved when he didn't say anything, because she looked up from her laptop to find him staring at her.
"Are all of you this dense? I really had it in my head that at least one of you would be able to talk to me without the attitude. Or at least talk to me at all," she groused. "Look, I know you've got something on your mind, you've been reading the same page of that book since before I even went downstairs. So," she gestured with her hand. "Speak."
The amusement must have shown on Brock's face, because her eye twitched when he didn't speak. As far as he was concerned, that was Cerberus' command, not his.
Looking at him with pure frustration shining in her eyes, she stared at him for a long moment, before she rolled her eyes and went back to clacking away at the keys on her laptop. Brock looked back down at his book and smirked to himself. He didn't want to piss her off necessarily, but he wasn't above having a little bit of fun with the situation.
He started reading the page in his book again, and this time he actually managed to get through it. He read a few more, taking his time while glancing across the room at Jane every few minutes, before he finally gave up and decided to give it a shot. Hell, if she stuck around for too much longer, she'd be inevitably stuck with all of them anyways, and he knew that it could be less than pleasant for all of them if they didn't at least try.
"How did you two meet?" he asked her quietly. He supposed that starting with the easy questions might break the ice a little better.
"Ah, so you do know how to talk. You had me worried there for a second," she said, not looking up from her laptop. "I met him on one of the trails up at the reserve when I was out for a run with my dog."
"You have a dog?" Brock didn't mean to sound so surprised; plenty of people had dogs. But, he was a sucker for the canine companions of the world, and he felt bad for thinking that he might have spoken to Jane sooner if he'd known she had one.
"Yeah, I do. His name's Boone, and he's a German Shepherd. He loves Clay, wouldn't get off of him when we met," she responded, finally looking up from her laptop.
Brock felt like an asshole for how he'd been acting, and he didn't even know why. Jane hadn't done anything wrong, quite the opposite, in fact. She'd stayed with Clay when she didn't have to, had even fought to be able to. She hadn't taken no for an answer from any of them, and she seemed to really care about Clay. Even if it was all an act on her part like Jason and Sonny liked to think, Brock didn't know what reason she'd have for going to all the extra effort to put on a show for all of them. She didn't even know them.
"I have a dog too, and he also really likes Clay," he told her. He didn't know what to say to make up for the actions of his team, so he thought that maybe dogs were a safe enough subject.
He must have been right, too, because her eyes lit up when he said it. "Really? What's his name?" she asked.
"Cerberus. He's a bomb sniffing dog, but he did a lot of his primary training with narcotics," he explained.
"Whoa, really? Boone was a narcotics dog too. He's retired now, but he loves letting me know that our neighbors are smoking pot on the regular. It's his favorite part of our morning routine," she laughed. Brock laughed with her.
He didn't know why he'd even been hesitant in the first place, because Jane seemed like a really nice person and he could see why Clay would've been attracted to her. When they'd finished laughing, Brock tried to find the right words to make up for how stupid Bravo had acted over the course of the past few hours. He didn't know if there even were any, but that didn't mean he wasn't going to try anyways.
"Look, I'm really sorry about the way we treated you. We're all really protective of Clay, and he's been burned by other girls in the past. That's not an excuse, I just thought that maybe you should know, it's not because of anything you did, I promise," he said sincerely. He was hopeful that it would at least be a start.
"I kinda figured that it had to be something to do with that. I'll admit, I haven't known him for long so I don't really know the whole story, but I like him. And for the love of God, don't ask me why, 'cause I couldn't tell you," she smiled. "But I do. And I'm not going anywhere, at least not until I know he's gonna be alright."
And Brock couldn't fault her for that.
They chatted for a little while longer about dogs and how funny it was when Jason's eye would twitch every time he looked at her. When Trent finally came back after about an hour, citing that he'd been held up at the nurses station talking with a friend from way back, he found Brock and Jane with their phones out, sharing pictures of both their dogs like the proud pet parents that they were. It wouldn't take much for the rest of Bravo to come around, and it would hopefully take a lot less for Clay to come back around.
Brain damage was still a crucial concern, but Trent told them that they were still banking on it being a severe concussion, and hopefully nothing worse. Bruising had taken over his entire face and most of his chest, but Brock could still see their little brother underneath all the mottled colors, and he knew that whatever Clay faced from here on out, he wouldn't be facing alone. Bravo was back with him, standing at his side, and they wouldn't be leaving him again any time soon. For now, Brock could only hope that the kid's trust in them hadn't been damaged too badly to be repaired. He could also hope that Jason would pull his head out of his ass long enough to see what an asset Jane was, and just how much she cared for their boy.
He had a feeling that one of those things was going to be a lot easier to accomplish.
I know it's a relatively short chapter, but I'm working on extending the plot out a little bit so that I can squeeze a few more chapters out of this, and rearranging the plan I had set out is proving to be a lot easier said than done. Anyways, I hope y'all enjoyed it, and thanks for all the comments, they really keep me going. Until next time!
