Author's note: Takes place before the Tracys recover Jeff.
"Cookie for your thoughts?"
Scott smiled as a chocolate crinkle was held in front of his face. He grabbed it and shook his head.
"Just trying figure out how the guy who called me in the middle of night in college because he couldn't kill a cockroach, is now part of the, uhm."
"'Dirty three dozen,'" Conrad finished dryly with the global media's nickname for the GDF's kill-squad; he blew out a sigh, "I shouldn't have joked about that."
"So you're not..."
"I am," Conrad cut off Scott's relief-filled response, "it's not what you think, or what the media portrays it to be. We can't just go around killing random innocent people in random wild shoot outs with the 'bad guys', or because we believe them to be a threat to the world at large, and not without consequences. Otherwise that piece of human shit that killed my parents would have dead a long time ago."
There was a faint bitterness in his tone.
"I see," Scott floundered, cramming the cookie into his mouth to stop himself from revealing that, no, in fact, he did not see.
"Let me tell you how we're chosen, at least as much as isn't classified," Conrad sat down across from his ex-boyfriend, and potential future one, "The GDF wasn't and isn't looking for stone cold killers. They started out with roughly a thousand candidates from both within and without the GDF, whittled that down to under two hundred, and from there reduced to thirty-five."
"Thirty-five?"
"No one wanted their designation to be '007'," Conrad chuckled, "so publicly the numbers are 001 to 036."
"So no Triple-Zero?"
"What designation do you think Colonel Casey has, Scottie?" Conrad asked as he tilted his head and gave Scott a look, "anyway, the goal was not to find people who would pull the trigger at the drop of a hat, but to find the ones who wouldn't. The ones who would only kill if every other option was gone. It's put me in some very interesting company," Conrad conceded, and wisely didn't mention Scott's little brother, John, was part of that company.
"Ah."
"Is this going to be a problem?"
Scott studied Conrad for a moment. Gray-brown eyes almost impassive, and mentally shuddered at the thought of never seeing those eyes again.
"No, it's not."
And those eyes lit up for him.
"And for the record, I only called you to kill that cockroach as an excuse. I was just missing you, Scottie."
And Scott knew his own eyes lit up in return.