Chapter Text
The door stuck when he tried to open it one handed, and he forgot about his injured shoulder until he knocked it against the door, pain shooting down his arm into his fingertips and causing him to clench up inside the sling. He was exhausted, strung out on pain meds and antibiotics and still reeling from the whirlwind known as Jake Jensen, a dervish in neon shirts with flailing hands and a filthy mouth. The ride from base back to his house had been a blur of noise, chaotic color and cheerful expletives, and a part of Cougar still couldn’t tell if he was coming, going, or still on the road somewhere.
The rest of him stood swaying in front of a reluctant doorway and wondered if maybe he’d left something vital on the hilltop lying beside his favorite scope in the morning light, something sharp and important that he needed to be real again.
He won the battle with the door and stumbled in; remembering at last moment to drag his duffle behind him, dumping it inside the door and taking three short steps into the middle of what had once been his living room.
It was nothing more than an empty cavern of light blue walls, muddy brown Berber carpet and a tan sofa that had come with the place. Cougar’d sold his TV, the few luxuries he’d gathered over the years, and his kitchen table and chairs. Those things he couldn’t sell he’d placed in carefully labeled boxes, taped shut and neatly printed with his oldest sister’s address. There wasn’t much, his mother’s rosary, a will leaving his benefits and savings to his nieces and nephews, a good pair of cowboy boots, and a small collection of family pictures that he'd never touched but couldn’t bear to throw away.
It was all wrapped in packing paper and pale cardboard, addressed to a house he’d never seen in California. He’d had to look her address up online, but he was pretty sure it was right. The address came with a phone number in the white pages, and once after a long mission and a bottle of tequila he’d found himself dialing the ten digit number.
He’d recognize her voice anywhere, even if California seemed to have washed away the last of the Oklahoma in her accent. He’d hung up before she’d had a chance to ask who was calling, but he could still hear her voice sweet and tinged with laughter even over the static of the phone.
Now, standing in the empty house he’d never really gotten around to calling home, Cougar wondered what the hell he was doing here.
The furniture seemed alien and vaguely obscene—the overstuffed sofa bulging against its seams, the brown carpet lolling along the edges of the floor. Shadows shifted along the dirty walls in the afternoon sunlight and seemed weirdly alive—underwater shades drifting to some invisible current and rubbing against the paint with indolent ease.
He felt like a ghost as he walked through the room and into the kitchen on steady feet that didn’t seem to belong to him.
He ran his hands along the counter and thought about how he never meant to stand here again—how the sink with its persistent leak was something he thought he’d never have time to fix, the backdoor with the squeaky hinge that should have been forever quiet. The house was silent…uncanny.
He turned around and headed down the short hallway to the bedroom. The bed was made, military corners and pillows at precise angles. There were two boxes stacked neatly next to the closet.
He hadn’t even been gone long enough for dust to gather on the dresser.
He stood in the middle of another man’s room—a dead man’s room, and wondered again what he was doing there.
Still without answers, he laid down on top of the covers on the bed.
He watched the shadows on the ceiling until the sun went down and the room went dark. The world spun on outside his room, oblivious to the quiet inside the room, and the outline of the boxes slowly faded into the night.
Cougar laid on the bed, a not-dead man, trying to remember how to breathe again.
…
On every third rotation, the dryer in the Laundromat made its displeasure known with a god-awful shriek that set Cougar’s teeth on edge.
He’d been quick enough to pull his clothes out of the dumpster before the trash men showed up in the morning, but now he was stuck sitting in the all-night Laundromat a block away from his house, still wearing the camis he’d come home in. There was blood on the cuffs of his pants, and his boots were still shedding sand all over the floor, but there was something hypnotic about the flickering lights and the screech of the machines that made his insomnia seem somehow more appropriate.
It was 3 am, and place was empty. The dryer in front of him was a kaleidoscope of desert camo, black briefs, and once-white socks blurring into faded denim and the muddy shadow of washed out tee-shirts and long sleeves.
The rhythm of the dryer was like a drumbeat vibrating up through the soles of his boots and into his bones, the screeching machine creeping inside of him and shaking things loose.
He hadn’t eaten since before his morning stint with the headshrinkers at 0800, and he couldn’t tell if it was hunger that made his hands shake or if he was just that tired. Cougar felt himself slipping into that place that all snipers knew, one he thought he'd left behind him in the prison. It was made of a still calm and an odd weightlessness-- he'd learned it at his fathers side laying still in the cold grasses of Oklahoma, and in the sickly lights of the laundromat it lent him a quiet, cool grace and soothed his aching shoulder. He felt comfortable drifting inside his body, bleeding desert out of bloody cuffs all over the dirty floor, heartbeat rocking back and forth in time with the dryer.
The base psychologist required meetings once a week before he’d agree to clear Cougar for duty, and had requested that the armory refuse to issue a new gun and scope until he'd completed his evaluation. He wanted Cougar to be in a stable mindset, have a strong grasp on the events that led to his capture and subsequent flirtation with execution, to say nothing of his self-destructive tendencies and clear issues with authority. He'd talked about displacement, post-traumatic stress syndrome and dissociative disorder. He'd asked about Cougars mother and father-- talked about coping strategies and healthy ways of processing emotion. He’d had a great deal to say about Cougar’s refusal to say anything at all.
Cougar was of the opinion that, for a shrink, he sure talked a lot.
For the time, however, he was stuck with the shrink until base got bored with keeping their sniper in a cage and chose to set him free—most likely back to the Losers, though they may have decided to pass him around the corp again. Cougar would miss Clay and Roque bickering over supplies, Pooch crooning to his Humvee. Jensen... Jensen and his noise and life. Cougar wondered what he was like in the field, how his body moved with the crutches left behind, if his relentless energy translated in the long drives from nowhere to the AO. Did he sing to the rhythm of the road? He sang, Cougar just knew he did, though he wondered what he sounded like, gun ready and guarding his sector, voice high and light as they rushed off to war. He spent a moment contemplating what Jensen would consider to be a war song, an felt a smile creeping up his lips as he sang under his breath to the beat of the tumbling of the machine in front of him.
Cougar’s meditation was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a small woman at the door of the Laundromat who wandered over and, upon seeing Cougars glassed eyes, bloody camis and the sling over his arm, cast a sign to prevent the evil eye and muttered at him in Russian. She walked over to a corner machine and began to load it slowly, never taking an eye off Cougar, muttering under her breath the whole time. Cougars smile faded at her obvious mistrust, and he put all thoughts of the Losers behind him.
It was a time for putting things into the past. This was the present now.
Cougar turned his attention back to the machine in front of him. Fifteen minutes and then the long walk home carrying laundry one handed.
The babushka muttered, the dryer spun on, and more sand fell to the floor as Cougar shifted in place.
He couldn't help but hum under his breath as the beat rolled on, and he thought, "Is this what it meant to be home?"
…
Three days later, Cougar woke from an uneasy sleep to a pounding on the door. He rolled out of bed, grabbing his gun off the nightstand to crouch between the mattress and the wall. This place was not safe. There was something moving just beyond the borders of this home.
Then a voice he barely recognized beyond the high falsetto it affected came calling from the front door.
"Mr. Cougar? Oh, Mr. Cougar are you home? Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey, it's time for all good little snipers to come creeping from their nest! " The persistent knocking continued.
Rolling out from behind the bed and holding the gun loosely in one hand, Cougar trotted out to open the door in nothing but his boxers, combat boots and an abused tank top. Jensen was standing there with an empty measuring cup, shark-tooth smile and pink lennon glasses, his military issue tee-shirt a strangely subdued compliment to his green board shorts.
"Howdy neighbor, I don't suppose you could spare a cup of sugar? Come on, man—give Uncle Jensen some sugar, sugar!” Arms spread wide, he leaned forward as if to hug Cougar, bouncing on his toes and looming in the door before pushing past Cougar and prowling around his spartan living space. Cougar couldn't help but stare and catalog the changes. Jensen had obviously lost the crutches at some point, but the brace on his leg left him with an obvious limp that didn't seem to slow him down as he explored his new territory. Cougar closed the door, turning to observe Jensen as he poked at the couch, tripped on the carpet and ran his hands along anything that held still long enough, chattering the whole time.
"Sleeping in your boots again, honey? You know you'll get foot rot that way and your feet will fall clean off... well, not really clean, but off at least... and speaking of off, there is something seriously fucked about your living situation here, my tiny Mexican friend. Jesus, open a window or something it's like a funeral in here."
Cougar could hear Jensen in the kitchen, dropping what had to be the measuring cup in the sink before opening and closing cabinet doors, poking around the fridge and running the taps. He couldn’t stop his snort of amusement, though-- Jensen pegging the place as a funeral was a bit too apropos for comfort, but it spoke of the hidden intelligence Cougar had sensed behind the tech’s loud mannerisms. He turned back to his bedroom as Jensen continued his exploration of the kitchen, putting his gun in the safe by the bed and grabbing his hat, and a pair of pants out of the dresser as Jensen’s voice drifted through the empty corners of the house.
"Seriously Cougs, if there is a body in the bathtub I won't mind but you just can't leave those things sitting around, dude. After a while they start to smell, and really if you're gonna move a body you should probably do it while rigor has set in because otherwise it gets all floppy and juicy and nobody wants to be hauling a juicy corpse around, Cougs, body. Get it? No BODY? Heh, and really Cougs, you... HOLY MARY MOTHER OF SCI-FI!! COUGAR!! COUGAR COME QUICKLY!!”
Jensen's sudden scream set Cougar tumbling, one leg in his pants and the other tangled half-way in. Pulling up his pants, Cougar stumbled over to the nightstand to reclaim the gun from the safe, before running into the living room, gun drawn and battle ready. He emerged from the hallway to find Jensen, horrified and with a hand pointing trembling to the empty wall opposite the couch, who then turned to Cougar and asked in a tremulous whisper...
"Cougar! Oh my god, Cougar! Someone stole your TV! How the fuck are we gonna watch Battlestar, brother?"
The room didn't seem so strange when Cougar chased Jensen around the overstuffed couch, hitting him with his hat as Jensen hid behind the dubious cover of a throw pillow. Cougar kept his bad arm tucked close to his chest, but there seemed to be a lightness growing in his chest as he watched Jensen collapse and sink, giggling and apologizing to an irate Cougar, into the couch, crying out for peace in exchange for pizza and Battlestar on Jensen's laptop.
Threats were made and toppings ordered, Cougar once again returning to his room to put away his weapons and pull out his belt, deciding at the last minute to remove his boots. He sat on the bed and undid his laces, Jensen's long monologue on the horrors of Hawaiian pizza bounding through the house, and with the full light of the afternoon sun cutting through the windows, across the floor and over his feet, Cougar couldn't help but think...
"This... maybe this is what it means to be home."