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Clay had been with Bravo long enough to understand how they moved, but not long enough to understand what he was allowed to ask from them.
That was the problem.
On the target, everything had been simple. He had his position, his sectors, his angles, his job. Bravo moved below him through the dark in disciplined bursts of speed and silence, Jason driving the tempo, Ray adjusting with that steady, unshakable calm of his, Sonny and Brock shifting where they were needed, Trent moving with the same efficient focus he brought to everything. Clay held the rooftop overwatch, cheek against the stock, breathing slow and controlled as he tracked the choke point that threatened Bravo’s exfil.
When the first hostile broke from cover, Clay dropped him before the man got two steps.
The second tried to drag the body into concealment. Clay dropped him too.
The third barely made it into the alley before Clay’s round caught him centre mass.
“Path is clear,” Clay said into comms, keeping his voice level.
“Copy,” Jason answered.
Below him, Bravo moved.
Clay stayed on the scope until the last of them passed through the danger zone. Only then did he break down his position, rising from the rough concrete with his rifle slung and his eyes still scanning.
He had just turned toward the access door when something slammed into his side.
The force of it staggered him half a step. Heat burst along his ribs, sharp and violent enough to blank his mind for a second. Then sensation rushed back all at once—the tearing burn, the shock of impact, the wet warmth spreading under his shirt.
Gunshot.
Not a direct hit. A graze, maybe. A round that had cut along his side instead of punching through.
Still bad enough.
Clay dropped behind the rooftop ledge and brought his rifle back up. Across the street, muzzle flash flared in a darkened window. He fired twice. The window went still.
“Six, status?” Jason’s voice came through at once.
Clay looked down. Even in the low light, he could see blood soaking through his shirt. Enough to need treatment. Not enough to threaten the mission.
That distinction mattered. It had mattered for years.
He pressed one hand hard against his side and keyed the mic. “Still with you.”
“You hit?”
Clay’s eyes flicked to the rooftop door, the alley below, the route to exfil. “Negative impact to mission. I’m moving.”
He cut the transmission before Jason could push.
Back in Team 3, that would have been the end of it.
If it wasn’t life-threatening, you don’t report it.
That had been the rule. Not written down anywhere official, but enforced all the same. Anything that didn’t put the mission at immediate risk got handled quietly. If the team leader found out you had gone to medical over something he considered manageable, he made sure everyone knew exactly what he thought of you. Public dressing-downs. Extra training. Threats against your file if it showed up in the AAR. The lesson came hard and early: if you wanted to belong, you stayed useful. If you wanted respect, you bled quietly.
Clay had learned. He had gotten good at learning.
By the time he made 2IC in Team 3, he could stitch his own skin with a steady hand, wrap a wound one-handed, improvise pressure dressings, judge blood loss at a glance. Sometimes the others went behind the team leader’s back and treated one another in barracks bathrooms or empty corners of the team room. Clay had done that too. For himself. For them.
So now, bleeding under his shirt on a rooftop in the middle of a spin-up, he did what experience had taught him to do.
He kept moving.
He made it to the stairwell before the second problem found him.
The first tango came at him from below, fast and close, knife flashing in the half-dark. Clay twisted on instinct, but not fast enough. The blade bit low into his back instead of his kidney, hot pain tearing across him as he slammed into the wall and fired at near-contact range.
The man dropped.
A second hostile came up the stairs behind him with a weapon half-raised. Clay turned on pure reflex and put him down too.
Then the stairwell went silent.
Clay braced one hand against the wall and stayed there for a second, breathing hard through the pain. His side throbbed. His back burned. Blood was running under his waistband now, warm and steady and wrong. He could feel it.
He stripped a field dressing from his kit with his teeth, shoved it under his shirt at his side, cinched it down one-handed, then did the same for his back as best he could by feel. It was a quick patch, ugly and incomplete, but it would hold. It had to hold.
By the time he reached the bird, his face felt cold despite the sweat on his skin.
Jason looked at him as he climbed aboard. “You good?”
The answer came on instinct. “Yeah.”
Jason’s gaze lingered on him for a moment too long. Clay thought, for one bad second, that maybe he knew. But Bravo was still loading in, the clock was still ticking, and whatever Jason saw, he let it go.
“Sit down, then,” Jason said.
Clay did.
That should have been the end of it.
Instead, the C-17 gave him time.
Too much time. Enough for the adrenaline to burn off and leave the pain behind in full. Enough for his side to keep throbbing in deep, nauseating pulses and the knife wound in his back to settle into a hard, ugly ache every time he shifted. Enough to realize that what he had first hoped was leftover wetness from the initial blood loss was not that at all.
He was still bleeding.
The aircraft was loud and cold and dim. Bravo fell into the strange, exhausted quiet of men coming off a mission. Ray sat with his eyes closed, though Clay doubted he was asleep. Sonny slouched across the aisle, low on energy but still muttering occasionally at Brock, who listened in his usual still way with Cerberus stretched out at his boots. Trent had his med kit open, checking and repacking supplies. Jason was up toward the front, still half in mission mode.
Clay pressed his elbow tighter to his side and tried not to breathe too deeply.
It kept getting wetter.
He waited fifteen minutes, then twenty. At one point he checked under the edge of the dressing with his fingertips and pulled them back slick.
Not great.
He could probably stitch the side up once they landed. The wound in his back was the problem. He couldn’t reach it properly. Not well enough to trust it, anyway.
His head was starting to feel light.
Clay looked, one by one, at the men around him.
Ray still looked tired.
Sonny was Sonny, which meant there was always the possibility of volume even when he was trying to keep it down.
Brock was hard to read. Not unfriendly, exactly, but still enough that Clay could not always tell where he stood.
Jason was not an option. Jason was Jason. Jason was the team leader. Clay was absolutely not ready to stand in front of Bravo One, bleeding through his shirt, and risk being told he should have handled it better.
That left Trent.
Trent was calm. Trent had a face that made people think maybe the truth would be safe there. Trent was also a medic. A medic means “Do no harm” right?
Clay still waited another half hour.
By then the floor beneath his boots had started to sway in a way that had nothing to do with the aircraft. Sweat cooled on the back of his neck, then returned. The pain in his side sharpened and dulled and sharpened again, coming in waves that made it harder to think straight.
Finally, when Trent looked up from his kit, Clay caught his eye and jerked his chin toward the rear of the plane.
Trent blinked, looked faintly curious and amused, followed him.
They stopped near the back ramp, partially shielded by cargo netting and stacked cases. The engine noise was louder there, vibrating up through the metal deck. Clay braced one hand against the wall and tried to remember the careful version of this conversation he had built in his head.
He lost it the moment his side spasmed.
Trent’s expression sharpened immediately. “What’s wrong?”
Clay swallowed. “What’s the protocol here?”
Trent frowned. “For what?”
“For injuries.”
That brought all of Trent’s attention onto him at once.
Clay tugged his shirt up just enough to reveal the dressing at his side.
It was soaked through. Blood had spread beneath it, dark and still fresh.
For a beat, Trent just stared. Then he said, “Jesus, kid.”
He stepped in, already reaching for the bandage, and Clay shifted just enough that the movement tugged the wound in his back too.
Trent saw that as well, and his face changed completely.
“How long?” he demanded.
Clay looked away.
“Clay.”
“Since the roof.”
Trent went still. “You’ve been sitting on this since the roof?”
“It’s not that bad.”
Trent made a disbelieving sound. “What is wrong with—” He cut himself off, eyes narrowing as he looked more closely at Clay’s face, at the stiffness in his posture, at something in the set of his shoulders that had very little to do with pain and everything to do with expectation.
Clay asked the question then, voice lower now, almost careful.
“What’s the injuries policy on this team?”
Understanding hit Trent all at once.
He looked at Clay for one long beat, then raised his voice and shouted, “Jason! Need the kit. Now!”
Clay recoiled like he had been struck.
His back hit the wall with a metallic thud. The expression that flashed across his face was too quick and too naked to hide—shock, betrayal, something scared under both of them. It stopped Trent cold.
Not stubborn, then.
Not just proud.
Conditioned.
“Hey,” Trent said at once, lowering his voice. “Hey. Nobody’s mad.”
Footsteps were already coming.
Clay’s jaw locked. “I was handling it.”
“Not by yourself, you weren’t.”
Jason rounded the cargo stack first, broad and intent, Ray right behind him. Sonny followed with a look that sharpened the moment he saw blood. Brock came last, Cerberus at heel.
Jason’s gaze dropped to the wound at Clay’s side, then lifted to his face. “What happened?”
“It’s fine.”
Jason took in the soaked dressing, the blood seeping past it, the way Clay was standing too rigid and too pale, and his expression darkened. “Doesn’t look fine.”
Clay could feel all of them looking at him now, and shame came up hot under the pain. He hated that feeling almost as much as he hated the bleeding itself. Being seen after the fact. Being caught not handling it well enough.
“I said I was handling it.”
Jason stepped closer.
Clay stopped talking.
It was not fear of Jason. Not really. But he was still new enough to Bravo, and Jason’s command presence had a way of filling whatever space he entered. On low blood volume and old instincts, Clay’s body reacted before his mind could catch up. Brace. Endure. Wait for impact.
Ray saw it. Trent definitely saw it. Sonny’s expression shifted hard enough that he must have seen something too.
Jason did not miss much.
His voice changed, dropping lower. More controlled. More dangerous for the restraint in it.
“Kid,” he said, “who taught you to sit on this?”
Clay said nothing.
Sonny looked between them, then swore softly. “Oh, no.”
Ray folded his arms. “Clay.”
Still nothing.
Trent opened the med kit Jason had handed him and said, “I need him sitting before he drops.”
Brock was already moving. He pulled a hard case into place behind Clay and put a steady hand on his shoulder. “Sit down.”
Clay sat.
Cerberus moved closer at once and leaned warm, solid weight against his leg. Clay’s fingers twitched once toward the dog before settling on his own thigh.
Jason crouched in front of him. Ray stayed just off his shoulder. Sonny planted himself to one side, arms folded tight. Brock remained near, one hand resting lightly on Cerberus’s harness, the other close enough to steady Clay if he swayed.
Trent started cutting away the blood-soaked dressing. “This is gonna hurt.”
“It already does.”
“Yeah,” Trent said. “I know.”
Jason waited until Clay looked at him.
“Talk to me.”
Clay stared somewhere over Jason’s shoulder and said, flatly, “If it wasn’t life-threatening, you don’t report it.”
No one spoke.
The silence after it made it plain exactly how wrong the sentence sounded here.
Clay swallowed and kept going because now that he had started, the words seemed to drag each other out behind them. “If the team leader found out somebody went to medical and he thought they could’ve handled it themselves, he’d do a dressing down in front of everyone. Extra training after. Said if it made it into the AAR, you were making yourself a liability. Threatened files.”
Sonny’s head came up sharply. “He what?”
“Motivation method,” Clay said, the bitterness in the words too tired to hide.
“That’s not motivation,” Brock said, quiet and flat. “That’s bullshit.”
Clay looked at him.
Brock met his eyes without hesitation. “You don’t teach guys to hide injuries unless you want body bags.”
Ray exhaled slowly. “Your old team leader was wrong.”
Jason’s face had gone still in the way that meant his anger was real and tightly leashed. “No one on my team gets punished for reporting an injury.”
Trent peeled the old dressing fully back and swore under his breath. “Kid, this is still bleeding.”
Clay hissed as Trent pressed clean gauze into place.
“You should’ve told me the second it happened,” Trent said, not unkindly.
Clay laughed once without humour. “Didn’t know if that was how it worked here.”
Jason leaned in slightly. “Then hear me now. You get hurt, you report it. Immediately.”
Clay did not mean to say the next part aloud. It slipped out because he was hurting and exhausted and losing ground against both. “I didn’t want to be inconvenient.”
Every face around him changed.
Sonny looked openly offended. Ray’s expression softened into something graver. Brock’s jaw tightened. Trent slowed his hands, gentling his touch another degree.
Jason waited until Clay had no choice but to meet his eyes.
“Inconvenient,” Jason said, with a kind of dangerous calm, “is Sonny losing gear because he left it someplace stupid.”
“That happened one time,” Sonny muttered.
Jason ignored him. “Inconvenient is paperwork. Inconvenient is delayed wheels-up. Inconvenient is not one of my guys bleeding through his shirt because he thought he had to stay quiet.”
Clay looked away.
Jason reached out and took hold of the back of his neck in one firm, steady hand.
Not rough. Not exactly gentle either. Just anchoring. A hold that left no room to drift.
Clay went still under it.
“You are not a problem to be managed quietly,” Jason said. “You understand me, kid?”
Clay’s throat worked. He could not seem to get a response out.
Ray picked up the thread, voice level and sure. “You do not apologize for getting hurt on mission. You do not apologize for needing treatment after. That’s part of the job. The team takes care of its own.”
“Yeah,” Sonny said at once, anger aimed firmly elsewhere. “We’re not mad at you. We’re mad at whoever taught you this was normal.”
Trent worked in focused silence for a moment, cleaning and redressing the side wound before shifting carefully to assess the injury in Clay’s back. “This one’s deeper than I like. You’re stable for now, but you need base medical as soon as we land.”
Clay tipped his head back against the cargo wall. His eyes stung unexpectedly.
“Sorry,” he said.
Jason’s hand tightened once at the back of his neck. “No.”
Clay blinked at him.
“No,” Jason repeated, rougher now. “Not for this.”
“I bled all over the plane.”
“So what.”
“I slowed everybody down.”
Jason’s stare never wavered. “You cleared our exfil route. You took the hit and still dropped two tangos before getting off that roof. You did your job and then some. You did not slow us down, kid. You got us out.”
Sonny pointed at him at once. “Pretty sure that’s a case of beer, by the way.”
Clay blinked, pale and confused. “What?”
“Case of beer for a first,” Sonny said, like that explained everything. “First time bleeding on Bravo’s bird? That counts.”
Ray’s mouth twitched. “That is, unfortunately, how the tradition works.”
Jason gave Clay a level look. “And none of the cheap crap.”
“Or imported,” Sonny added.
Brock shrugged once. “You bleed, you pay.”
It pulled a weak, startled laugh out of Clay before he could stop it, and somehow that made the tightness in the space ease.
Clay looked down before anyone could read too much in his face. Cerberus had his head pressed against Clay’s shin now, watchful and warm. Brock’s hand came down once on his shoulder in a firm squeeze.
“You ask sooner next time,” Brock said.
It was not a reprimand. It was something gentler than that. A rule of belonging.
Clay nodded once.
The rest of the flight passed in a tighter, quieter circle. Trent kept checking the dressings. Ray stayed close, a steady presence without crowding. Sonny muttered darkly inventive things about Clay’s former team leader under his breath. Brock remained nearby, saying little, but not drifting away either. Cerberus did not move from Clay’s side. Jason kept one hand on the back of Clay’s neck until the worst of the shaking had gone out of him.
When the plane finally landed and the ramp began to lower, Trent sat back on his heels and said, “Okay. We’re going straight to medical.”
Clay found enough strength for one weak protest. “I can get there myself.”
Sonny stared at him. “That really your plan?”
“It’s base, not a firefight.”
“That’s not the point,” Ray said.
“I don’t need an escort.”
Jason’s hand finally left Clay’s neck, only to settle on his shoulder as he waited for Clay to look at him.
“Yes,” Jason said, “you do.”
There was no room in those words for pride.
Clay opened his mouth, but Brock spoke first.
“Nobody’s letting you wander off alone bleeding through a fresh dressing, kid.”
Trent added, “And you are absolutely not stitching your own back.”
Sonny snorted. “Not tonight, Houdini.”
Clay looked from one to the next and realized, with a strange exhausted helplessness, that this was not a fight he was going to win.
Something in him loosened.
Not all the way. Not enough to name. But enough.
When the plane touched down and the cargo bay shifted, Clay let Jason and Ray haul him to his feet without pretending he did not need the help. He swayed once. Trent was there immediately at one side. Brock moved in on the other with Cerberus close beside him. Sonny took point toward the ramp like the trip to base medical had become, in his mind, a tactical operation.
Cold air hit Clay’s face as they stepped out. The base lights were too bright after the dim hold of the aircraft. He blinked against them and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.
He had spent years training himself not to lean.
Now he had Jason at one side, Trent at the other, Ray just behind him, Sonny close enough to catch him if he slipped, Brock and Cerberus keeping pace beside them.
It should have felt humiliating.
Instead it felt like something dangerously close to relief.
Halfway down the ramp, Clay heard himself say, quietly, “I wasn’t trying to hide it from you.”
Jason looked over at him.
“I know,” Ray said.
Clay swallowed. “I just… didn’t know I was allowed.”
That stopped them all for one beat.
Then Jason turned toward him fully, expression fierce and tired and certain all at once.
“You are,” he said.
“More than allowed,” Sonny added.
“Required,” Trent corrected.
Brock’s mouth twitched. “Yeah.”
Clay’s chest tightened.
Jason squeezed his arm once. “You don’t have to earn staying on this team, kid.”
The words landed hard and deep.
“And you sure as hell don’t have to earn being taken care of.”
Clay could not answer.
His throat had closed too tightly around whatever response might have come, and maybe that was just as well, because Jason seemed to understand anyway. He gave Clay’s shoulder a small guiding push, and Bravo moved together toward medical.
No one complained about the detour. No one mentioned paperwork. No one treated the blood on Clay’s clothes like an inconvenience or the treatment like a favour.
They just took him in.
Straight through the doors, into antiseptic light and waiting corpsmen and questions Clay no longer had to answer alone. Jason did most of the talking. Trent filled in the clinical details. Ray smoothed the rest over with his usual calm authority. Sonny hovered at the edges, visibly furious on principle. Brock stayed in the hallway with Cerberus until they had to take the dog out, then lingered anyway.
By the time Clay was settled on an exam bed and the base medic started cutting away his ruined shirt, exhaustion had settled so deep into his bones it felt permanent.
Jason stayed.
Of course he did.
Ray did too, at first. Trent remained until he was satisfied the handoff had been done properly. Sonny argued with nobody in particular about “garbage leadership” and “rookie nonsense” and “self-stitching like that was ever a good idea.” Brock waited outside with Cerberus, a quiet shadow in the hall.
It was too much.
It was everything.
The medic cleaned the wounds, checked depth, called for sutures. Clay stared at the ceiling and tried hard not to let the exhaustion on his face turn into anything else.
Jason noticed anyway.
He had moved to the wall beside the bed, arms folded, posture loose only by comparison to what it usually was. His eyes stayed on Clay with that same steady attention as before, but something in it had shifted. Less command now. More refusal to leave.
“You did good tonight,” Jason said.
Clay blinked at him.
“Mission-wise,” Jason added.
A weak smile tugged at Clay’s mouth. “Except for the part where I nearly bled through military transport.”
Jason’s expression barely changed. “That part’s getting corrected.”
The smile faded.
Jason pushed off the wall and stepped closer, lowering his voice until it stayed between them even with the rest of Bravo nearby. “What they taught you before? That’s over.”
Clay looked at him for a long moment.
Jason held the gaze without blinking.
“If you’re hurt, you come to us. You come to me. Doesn’t matter when, doesn’t matter how bad you think it is, doesn’t matter if you’re pretty sure you can patch yourself up. You say something.”
Clay nodded once.
“Use your words this time,” Sonny called from the doorway.
That got a tired huff out of Ray and a quiet, warning “Sonny,” from Trent.
But Jason did not look away from Clay. He was waiting.
“Yes, sir,” Clay said at last, voice rough.
Jason’s face eased by a fraction. “Good.”
The medic came back with supplies then, and the moment should have ended there.
It did not.
Because when Ray finally started steering Sonny out of the room before he picked a fight with the medical staff, and Trent stepped back to let the stitching begin, Brock looked in from the hallway with Cerberus sitting at his side and said, in that same low steady voice he had used on the plane, “Next time sooner, kid.”
Clay looked at him and, maybe because he was too tired now to protect himself from the truth, answered honestly.
“Yeah.”
Cerberus thumped his tail once against the floor.
Brock nodded like that settled it and disappeared again.
Then it was just the medic working, the low murmur of the room, and Jason still there by the bedside.
Clay watched the ceiling while the stitches started, jaw tight against the pull and sting. It hurt, but it was a cleaner kind of hurt now. Managed. Witnessed. No longer his alone.
He turned his head slightly.
Jason was still there.
Not looking at his watch. Not halfway out the door. Just there.
The realization hit with strange force. Not because Jason had done anything dramatic. Because he had not. Because he had simply stayed, as if there had never been any question of doing otherwise.
Clay looked down at his hands, at the dried blood caught in the lines of his knuckles, and then back up.
“Jason.”
“Yeah?”
Clay hesitated. The words felt awkward in his mouth. Too small for what they needed to carry.
“Thank you.”
Jason’s expression shifted in a way that was almost impossible to name. Something weary. Something warm. Something carefully contained.
“Get stitched up, kid,” he said. “Then you can thank me by not pulling this crap again.”
It was as close to tenderness as Jason Hayes usually came in public.
Clay understood it for what it was. He nodded.
Jason stayed until the medic finally shooed him out.
And later, after the stitches were done and the wounds were dressed properly and the room had gone quieter, after Ray had come back long enough to make sure Clay had his discharge instructions and Trent had double-checked them anyway, after Sonny had stuck his head back in just to say, “You scare us like that again, I’m charging you,” and Brock had sent Cerberus in for thirty precious seconds of warm fur and steady presence before they were both ushered back out, Clay found himself alone for the first time since the plane.
The room was still. The pain meds had taken the sharpest edges off everything. The ceiling hummed softly overhead.
On the chair beside the bed sat a bottle of water, a packet of crackers, and Clay’s phone.
He frowned, reaching awkwardly for it with his uninjured side.
There was a note tucked under the bottle. Not really a note. Just a torn strip from some form or wrapper, with three words written on it in blocky penmanship he recognized at once.
Report it next time.
No name.
No need.
Beneath the words, someone had added a crude little drawing of a dog paw.
Clay stared at it for a second, then laughed once under his breath, the sound catching badly in his chest.
His eyes stung.
He sat there in the quiet medical room, stitches pulling at his side and back, Bravo’s voices gone distant down the hall, and held that scrap of paper like it was something far more fragile than it was.
For years, care had come with a price. Humiliation. Debt. Weakness. The unspoken warning that needing anything made you easier to leave behind.
Bravo had done none of that.
They had just come when Trent called.
They had closed ranks around him on the plane and walked him into medical and stayed until he was settled, as if there had never been any question that this was where they would be. As if his hurt belonged to the team the same way his skill did. As if he did.
Clay let his head sink back against the pillow and closed his eyes around the sting there.
For the first time since joining Bravo, he let himself believe that maybe they meant it.
That maybe with this team, he did not have to earn care by surviving without it.
Maybe he already had it.
Maybe that was what belonging felt like.
Maybe, somewhere, Brian would have been glad to know Clay had finally found his team..