Famous Last Words
Title: Famous Last Words
Fandom/ Pairing The Losers (comic 'verse, with some help from the movie), eventual Jensen/Cougar
Rating: R overall
Summary: Cougar was bleeding all over the bomb in his lap, the last time Jensen saw him. But that was then.
Link to Master List & Previous Chapters
Jensen was still typing when Cougar came back, he hadn't even noticed that he'd gone. It was
just as well. Realization of fact- that he was in fucking love- didn't mean he wanted to fucking talk about it. No way in hell.
The dread fit just as well as it used to, like the feeling he used to get before the missions that inevitably followed his premonitions south. He could barely keep his body from dispersing into nothing all over again, just to get some relief from the tightness in his chest, the tension in his arms.
He'd come here looking for answers. Falling for his best friend hadn't been part of the fucking plan, just like detonating a bomb hadn't been part of the plan.
But you managed it just fine. Considered it the optimal damn solution. It was easy, at the end, to not even try hoping that the others would clear the blast radius. Just to get the voices to stop, to stop hurting, to just stop everything.
And now Jensen was sitting there, in front of the only source of light in the room, with his back to Cougar like he trusted him.
Cougar wanted to strangle him, stop the incessant humming- some pop tune that Cougar recognized but couldn't place- and stop this before it got any worse. Because that's what snipers did. One shot to kill the crisis.
No. Wait. Think.
If it weren't for the fact he'd be shooting his one chance of getting any answers straight through the heart, it would be easy to vanish so completely that Jensen would never find him again.
Just go. Leave. Now.
But then Jensen turned to squint at him through the darkness, still wearing that distracted grin, like the nearest thought of dying was a million miles away, like he was glad to see him.
Cougar couldn't move. He looked back at Jensen and took a breath, and wondered just how badly this was going to bite them both in the ass.
---
It wasn't until three in the morning that Jensen blinked up from the laptop to find that the screen had burned its imprint into his retinas. Rolling his neck, he turned around to peer past the light-spots to see if Cougar was still awake.
If he's still there, his brain insisted on adding, and Jensen was all too happy to give his brain the finger when it was proven wrong.
"You okay?" he asked, because not only was Cougar there, he was staring at him, with eyes that were a little haunted for a ghost, and wearing a frown that Jensen wished he didn't remember as clearly as he did.
"Sí," Cougar's gaze slid away, towards the far wall.
Jensen wanted to ask him if he still saw the kids, still smelled the fire from the helicopter coming down, even now. He wanted to tell him that he got it now, kind of, what it felt like to see lost faces, and that he wished that Cougar could've brought the kids back from the dead with him. Picked them up on his way back to life, or whatever.
He wanted to tell him everything was okay, but that was bullshit and bravado, and by the time Jensen opened his mouth again, Cougar'd found his poker face again, anyway. So Jensen did the next best thing. Because his research, what he'd found? It was actually kind of cool.
---
For a horrifying minute, Jensen was looking at him like he was able to read every thought he'd ever had, but then the grin came up, mischievous and on again, and he was waving vaguely in the direction of his computer.
"So it turns out, you didn't start any wars because you pretty much stopped three of them. Well. Okay. You caused more cease-fires, by accident, than an army of diplomats could've managed in a lifetime." Jensen scratched his head. "Course, they all started falling apart pretty quick, but there was a good month or two where the Middle East wasn't the most terrifying place on the entire planet. Everybody was too busy launching investigations to actually get battle plans in order, but still."
"Cool." Despite himself, he was grinning, and if Jensen figured it was because of the news, then so much the better.
"Funny thing is," Jensen leaned back, crossing his arms, because apparently it wasn't the humorous kind of funny. "Now that Goliath's been identified as the original source, everyone's smelling blood in the water. It's gonna get bad again, real fast."
Of course it is. Cougar's fingers twitched.
"It's weird, right?" Jensen stood up, closing the laptop. "Feel like we're supposed to be waiting for our orders, or something. The next mission from on high, and I mean, hell, with your new superpowers, and everything, you'd be pretty much unstoppable."
Cougar shrugged, glad for the sudden darkness. It meant Jensen couldn't read his face, couldn't see that he hadn't actually given it any thought, hadn't considered returning to the fight for even a second.
"What about you?" he asked instead, once Jensen was stretched out on the bed next to him.
"What about me?"
"You want back in?"
Jensen was quiet for a long while, and Cougar wasn't certain that he hadn't nodded off, but eventually, he answered.
"Dunno, really. I mean, it's not like I'm gonna sign back up with Stegler or anything, but. It's been a long year. Like, ten senior years rolled all into one. Just been fucking around, you know? Not saying I miss it, but. I guess I'm not saying I'm not. Entirely. Though you mention that to anyone and I'll deny the hell out of it. What about you?"
Right now, there was no way in hell he'd be able to answer that, not with Jensen lying there, right next to him, close enough that he could nearly feel the heat coming off of him, far enough away that he'd have to reach over to touch him, and the very fact that it occurred to him to even consider it was, well.
He had to focus, had to answer the question. "I'm tired."
The mattress shifted a little bit, Cougar could feel Jensen's nod. "Yeah, man. That's cool." Jensen yawned, misunderstanding him completely. "Think I could sleep for years."
---
The only proof Jensen had that Cougar had slept at all came when he was half-woken up by Cougar getting out of bed. The alarm clock on the nightstand read 4:37, and through the crack in the curtains, the sky was already beginning to lighten.
Inside, though, it was still mostly too dark to see, and his lids were still heavy, so Jensen listened with his eyes closed
He could hear Cougar's breathing- ragged, short- and then the bathroom door closing slowly. Afterwards came the sound of the faucet, the tap barely opened. Once it shut off, all was quiet.
It stayed that way for a long while. Squinting over at the clock again, it was just past five, and he was beginning to think that Cougar had vanished again when he heard the door being eased quietly open.
Jensen wondered if he was going to crash out again, but apparently he'd chosen the chair by the window instead, and this, Jensen remembered. It was a million middle-of-the-nights, Cougar waking up and trying not to wake the others when the nightmares got too bad. It was Jensen, pretending to still be sleeping so Cougar didn't have to worry about witnesses. And it was still ridiculous, not knowing who was protecting who from the nightmares, but the pattern had been set years ago, and Jensen didn't really know how to break it.
It sucked, though. Somehow, he'd assumed they would've gone away.
---
If Jensen didn't stop flipping through the channels at a hundred miles an hour, Cougar was going to kill him. His fingers itched for a trigger.
"So now what?" Jensen asked, out of nowhere. The guy could be like a dog with a bone, sometimes, but at least he was setting the remote aside. "What're you going to do with your life? I mean, I'm not, like, superstitious or anything, but it's got to feel like there's some grand reason for you to be here. Have you thought about fighting crime? You should fight crime. I mean, you've got the superpowers now, all you need is a cape. And hell, Cougar is a great superhero name, you'd be great. All you need is a training montage while you learn about your freaky mutant abilities."
And there was that awful fluttering in his stomach again. Most of the time, when Cougar kept silent, it was because there was no point in speaking, but sometimes, it was because he couldn't find the words. He forced an easy grin, thinking it should've been harder to maintain, and played along a little while longer.
"It's why I came here, isn't it? You read all those comics, I figured you were the expert."
Jensen was supposed to joke at that, but his face turned serious, monotone. "I have, you know. I've read a lot of them. And from what I've seen, it means that I'm just as easily the guy who will throw you in a lab and start running tests on you. Is that what you want? I could steal a lab. Get some, I don't know. Science things…"
Cougar rolled his eyes, and Jensen laughed, shrugging it off and intoning, "We have the technology…well, we will, anyway."
"You break into MIT again, Clay's not going to be around to bail your ass out."
Jensen's grin faded at that, and he shrugged. "Okay, so I won't. But only if you come down to the beach and let me throw rocks at you."
Cougar blinked. "Why?"
"Come on," Jensen jumped to his feet, clapping his hands together as he began to search for his shoes. "Me. You. Beach. Research montage."
Only Jensen could make a stoning sound like a date, and since Cougar was used to dooming himself, he said yes.
---
Jensen wouldn't stop singing about the eye of the Cougar until they'd made it past the last phalanx of sunbathing tourists.
When Cougar sidled away, trying to get some distance between his eardrums and the caterwauling, Jensen only yelled louder.
"Let he who has a handful of rocks cast the first stone," was all the warning Jensen gave when they arrived, but Cougar had vanished by the time he'd finished his wind-up.
"Good response time," Jensen nodded, reaching into his bag for a tattered shirt. "You want to try it blindfolded?"
---
The family with the shrieking kids had forced them to move down the beach and out of sight, but it was just as well. With Cougar leading the way, he couldn't see Jensen reaching into his bag.
Jensen was pretty sure the irate glare reappeared first, followed by Cougar's face and arms, and he wasn't entirely sure that the legs were there before the air-horn was ripped from his hands and thrown into the ocean.
---
"Dunno, man. I would've thought if you were going to be- what, I don't know- reincarnated. Or whatever. With superpowers, you would've come back as, like, a werewolf or something. A werecat."
Cougar frowned at the sudden conversational shift. "Why? That's stupid."
"So is turning into a freaking invisible cloud whenever you get startled. Your superpowers suck," Jensen tried to scowl, but it didn't quite work. Any second now, the corner of his mouth would break free, up into a wild grin that was already showing in his eyes.
Mi vida.
Falling in deeper, Cougar hoped Jensen couldn't hear the manic edge to his laugh.
"Estás celoso," he accused, before something worse could come out. Anything, to just move past this.
"Damned right I'm jealous," Jensen said, his attention finally returning to his computer. "Doesn't mean it's not still completely fucking ridiculous."
---
Jensen had to admit being a little more impressed when Cougar proved he could take things with him when he vanished, but he still checked over his laptop when it was returned.
"Quit looking so smug, man. I swear, man, if the hard drive's fried, I will end you."
---
The tide was going out when Jensen called Cougar back from the water line.
"Okay!" he adjusted the screen of his laptop. "What I want you to do now is see how far you can cast yourself out when you're invisible. When you pull yourself in, tell me what you see.."
Cougar nodded, closing his eyes and stretching himself out. Over the beach, first, and was reading the screen, shifting around all the grains of sand as the wind pushed him up, over and through the trees. Over the boardwalk and through the first row of buildings, then the second.
His mind began to wander as he dispersed. A thousand people, more, and the projection room of the theater. Heavier traffic, now, while blocks away a man was frying eggs in his apartment. Kids were playing soccer while on the other side of the block, a man was bleeding to death. A trio of forty-something women, on the other side of the island, were flirting with the waiter as they ordered their drinks, and the wind was trying to move him faster, now.
The hospital was amazing and horrific all at once, and the meditation class in the park to the south was just wrapping things up. He could hear both ends of at least thirty cell phone conversations, and they weren't as varied as he would've thought.
He was spanned halfway across the island, now, and it was too much at once, every part of himself being aware of everything else. The overload was becoming unbearable, and he couldn't feel pain like this, not really, but he didn't know what else to call it.
He began pulling himself back together, and when the wind changed, dragging him sideways, he noticed something new. There.
Gun in the waistband. Eyes out, searching.
Hijo de puta.
---
Jensen was pulling up the mapping program when he noticed Cougar suddenly there, staring back at the boardwalk. A stunned frown slashed across his face. and apparently instincts didn't die, they just went dormant. Jensen froze, swiveled his head, trying to follow.
"What is it?"
Still searching out the threat, Cougar tipped his head in his direction, his eyes landing, briefly, on Jensen.
"Aisha's here."
---
Chapter 4
Fandom/ Pairing The Losers (comic 'verse, with some help from the movie), eventual Jensen/Cougar
Rating: R overall
Summary: Cougar was bleeding all over the bomb in his lap, the last time Jensen saw him. But that was then.
Link to Master List & Previous Chapters
Jensen was still typing when Cougar came back, he hadn't even noticed that he'd gone. It was
just as well. Realization of fact- that he was in fucking love- didn't mean he wanted to fucking talk about it. No way in hell.
The dread fit just as well as it used to, like the feeling he used to get before the missions that inevitably followed his premonitions south. He could barely keep his body from dispersing into nothing all over again, just to get some relief from the tightness in his chest, the tension in his arms.
He'd come here looking for answers. Falling for his best friend hadn't been part of the fucking plan, just like detonating a bomb hadn't been part of the plan.
But you managed it just fine. Considered it the optimal damn solution. It was easy, at the end, to not even try hoping that the others would clear the blast radius. Just to get the voices to stop, to stop hurting, to just stop everything.
And now Jensen was sitting there, in front of the only source of light in the room, with his back to Cougar like he trusted him.
Cougar wanted to strangle him, stop the incessant humming- some pop tune that Cougar recognized but couldn't place- and stop this before it got any worse. Because that's what snipers did. One shot to kill the crisis.
No. Wait. Think.
If it weren't for the fact he'd be shooting his one chance of getting any answers straight through the heart, it would be easy to vanish so completely that Jensen would never find him again.
Just go. Leave. Now.
But then Jensen turned to squint at him through the darkness, still wearing that distracted grin, like the nearest thought of dying was a million miles away, like he was glad to see him.
Cougar couldn't move. He looked back at Jensen and took a breath, and wondered just how badly this was going to bite them both in the ass.
---
It wasn't until three in the morning that Jensen blinked up from the laptop to find that the screen had burned its imprint into his retinas. Rolling his neck, he turned around to peer past the light-spots to see if Cougar was still awake.
If he's still there, his brain insisted on adding, and Jensen was all too happy to give his brain the finger when it was proven wrong.
"You okay?" he asked, because not only was Cougar there, he was staring at him, with eyes that were a little haunted for a ghost, and wearing a frown that Jensen wished he didn't remember as clearly as he did.
"Sí," Cougar's gaze slid away, towards the far wall.
Jensen wanted to ask him if he still saw the kids, still smelled the fire from the helicopter coming down, even now. He wanted to tell him that he got it now, kind of, what it felt like to see lost faces, and that he wished that Cougar could've brought the kids back from the dead with him. Picked them up on his way back to life, or whatever.
He wanted to tell him everything was okay, but that was bullshit and bravado, and by the time Jensen opened his mouth again, Cougar'd found his poker face again, anyway. So Jensen did the next best thing. Because his research, what he'd found? It was actually kind of cool.
---
For a horrifying minute, Jensen was looking at him like he was able to read every thought he'd ever had, but then the grin came up, mischievous and on again, and he was waving vaguely in the direction of his computer.
"So it turns out, you didn't start any wars because you pretty much stopped three of them. Well. Okay. You caused more cease-fires, by accident, than an army of diplomats could've managed in a lifetime." Jensen scratched his head. "Course, they all started falling apart pretty quick, but there was a good month or two where the Middle East wasn't the most terrifying place on the entire planet. Everybody was too busy launching investigations to actually get battle plans in order, but still."
"Cool." Despite himself, he was grinning, and if Jensen figured it was because of the news, then so much the better.
"Funny thing is," Jensen leaned back, crossing his arms, because apparently it wasn't the humorous kind of funny. "Now that Goliath's been identified as the original source, everyone's smelling blood in the water. It's gonna get bad again, real fast."
Of course it is. Cougar's fingers twitched.
"It's weird, right?" Jensen stood up, closing the laptop. "Feel like we're supposed to be waiting for our orders, or something. The next mission from on high, and I mean, hell, with your new superpowers, and everything, you'd be pretty much unstoppable."
Cougar shrugged, glad for the sudden darkness. It meant Jensen couldn't read his face, couldn't see that he hadn't actually given it any thought, hadn't considered returning to the fight for even a second.
"What about you?" he asked instead, once Jensen was stretched out on the bed next to him.
"What about me?"
"You want back in?"
Jensen was quiet for a long while, and Cougar wasn't certain that he hadn't nodded off, but eventually, he answered.
"Dunno, really. I mean, it's not like I'm gonna sign back up with Stegler or anything, but. It's been a long year. Like, ten senior years rolled all into one. Just been fucking around, you know? Not saying I miss it, but. I guess I'm not saying I'm not. Entirely. Though you mention that to anyone and I'll deny the hell out of it. What about you?"
Right now, there was no way in hell he'd be able to answer that, not with Jensen lying there, right next to him, close enough that he could nearly feel the heat coming off of him, far enough away that he'd have to reach over to touch him, and the very fact that it occurred to him to even consider it was, well.
He had to focus, had to answer the question. "I'm tired."
The mattress shifted a little bit, Cougar could feel Jensen's nod. "Yeah, man. That's cool." Jensen yawned, misunderstanding him completely. "Think I could sleep for years."
---
The only proof Jensen had that Cougar had slept at all came when he was half-woken up by Cougar getting out of bed. The alarm clock on the nightstand read 4:37, and through the crack in the curtains, the sky was already beginning to lighten.
Inside, though, it was still mostly too dark to see, and his lids were still heavy, so Jensen listened with his eyes closed
He could hear Cougar's breathing- ragged, short- and then the bathroom door closing slowly. Afterwards came the sound of the faucet, the tap barely opened. Once it shut off, all was quiet.
It stayed that way for a long while. Squinting over at the clock again, it was just past five, and he was beginning to think that Cougar had vanished again when he heard the door being eased quietly open.
Jensen wondered if he was going to crash out again, but apparently he'd chosen the chair by the window instead, and this, Jensen remembered. It was a million middle-of-the-nights, Cougar waking up and trying not to wake the others when the nightmares got too bad. It was Jensen, pretending to still be sleeping so Cougar didn't have to worry about witnesses. And it was still ridiculous, not knowing who was protecting who from the nightmares, but the pattern had been set years ago, and Jensen didn't really know how to break it.
It sucked, though. Somehow, he'd assumed they would've gone away.
---
If Jensen didn't stop flipping through the channels at a hundred miles an hour, Cougar was going to kill him. His fingers itched for a trigger.
"So now what?" Jensen asked, out of nowhere. The guy could be like a dog with a bone, sometimes, but at least he was setting the remote aside. "What're you going to do with your life? I mean, I'm not, like, superstitious or anything, but it's got to feel like there's some grand reason for you to be here. Have you thought about fighting crime? You should fight crime. I mean, you've got the superpowers now, all you need is a cape. And hell, Cougar is a great superhero name, you'd be great. All you need is a training montage while you learn about your freaky mutant abilities."
And there was that awful fluttering in his stomach again. Most of the time, when Cougar kept silent, it was because there was no point in speaking, but sometimes, it was because he couldn't find the words. He forced an easy grin, thinking it should've been harder to maintain, and played along a little while longer.
"It's why I came here, isn't it? You read all those comics, I figured you were the expert."
Jensen was supposed to joke at that, but his face turned serious, monotone. "I have, you know. I've read a lot of them. And from what I've seen, it means that I'm just as easily the guy who will throw you in a lab and start running tests on you. Is that what you want? I could steal a lab. Get some, I don't know. Science things…"
Cougar rolled his eyes, and Jensen laughed, shrugging it off and intoning, "We have the technology…well, we will, anyway."
"You break into MIT again, Clay's not going to be around to bail your ass out."
Jensen's grin faded at that, and he shrugged. "Okay, so I won't. But only if you come down to the beach and let me throw rocks at you."
Cougar blinked. "Why?"
"Come on," Jensen jumped to his feet, clapping his hands together as he began to search for his shoes. "Me. You. Beach. Research montage."
Only Jensen could make a stoning sound like a date, and since Cougar was used to dooming himself, he said yes.
---
Jensen wouldn't stop singing about the eye of the Cougar until they'd made it past the last phalanx of sunbathing tourists.
When Cougar sidled away, trying to get some distance between his eardrums and the caterwauling, Jensen only yelled louder.
"Let he who has a handful of rocks cast the first stone," was all the warning Jensen gave when they arrived, but Cougar had vanished by the time he'd finished his wind-up.
"Good response time," Jensen nodded, reaching into his bag for a tattered shirt. "You want to try it blindfolded?"
---
The family with the shrieking kids had forced them to move down the beach and out of sight, but it was just as well. With Cougar leading the way, he couldn't see Jensen reaching into his bag.
Jensen was pretty sure the irate glare reappeared first, followed by Cougar's face and arms, and he wasn't entirely sure that the legs were there before the air-horn was ripped from his hands and thrown into the ocean.
---
"Dunno, man. I would've thought if you were going to be- what, I don't know- reincarnated. Or whatever. With superpowers, you would've come back as, like, a werewolf or something. A werecat."
Cougar frowned at the sudden conversational shift. "Why? That's stupid."
"So is turning into a freaking invisible cloud whenever you get startled. Your superpowers suck," Jensen tried to scowl, but it didn't quite work. Any second now, the corner of his mouth would break free, up into a wild grin that was already showing in his eyes.
Mi vida.
Falling in deeper, Cougar hoped Jensen couldn't hear the manic edge to his laugh.
"Estás celoso," he accused, before something worse could come out. Anything, to just move past this.
"Damned right I'm jealous," Jensen said, his attention finally returning to his computer. "Doesn't mean it's not still completely fucking ridiculous."
---
Jensen had to admit being a little more impressed when Cougar proved he could take things with him when he vanished, but he still checked over his laptop when it was returned.
"Quit looking so smug, man. I swear, man, if the hard drive's fried, I will end you."
---
The tide was going out when Jensen called Cougar back from the water line.
"Okay!" he adjusted the screen of his laptop. "What I want you to do now is see how far you can cast yourself out when you're invisible. When you pull yourself in, tell me what you see.."
Cougar nodded, closing his eyes and stretching himself out. Over the beach, first, and was reading the screen, shifting around all the grains of sand as the wind pushed him up, over and through the trees. Over the boardwalk and through the first row of buildings, then the second.
His mind began to wander as he dispersed. A thousand people, more, and the projection room of the theater. Heavier traffic, now, while blocks away a man was frying eggs in his apartment. Kids were playing soccer while on the other side of the block, a man was bleeding to death. A trio of forty-something women, on the other side of the island, were flirting with the waiter as they ordered their drinks, and the wind was trying to move him faster, now.
The hospital was amazing and horrific all at once, and the meditation class in the park to the south was just wrapping things up. He could hear both ends of at least thirty cell phone conversations, and they weren't as varied as he would've thought.
He was spanned halfway across the island, now, and it was too much at once, every part of himself being aware of everything else. The overload was becoming unbearable, and he couldn't feel pain like this, not really, but he didn't know what else to call it.
He began pulling himself back together, and when the wind changed, dragging him sideways, he noticed something new. There.
Gun in the waistband. Eyes out, searching.
Hijo de puta.
---
Jensen was pulling up the mapping program when he noticed Cougar suddenly there, staring back at the boardwalk. A stunned frown slashed across his face. and apparently instincts didn't die, they just went dormant. Jensen froze, swiveled his head, trying to follow.
"What is it?"
Still searching out the threat, Cougar tipped his head in his direction, his eyes landing, briefly, on Jensen.
"Aisha's here."
---
Chapter 4