Famous Last Words #9
Title: Famous Last Words
Author: jendavis
Fandom/ Pairing The Losers (comic 'verse, with some help from the movie), eventual Jensen/Cougar
Rating: R overall
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue, don't take this too seriously.
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
---
"Cougs?"
What the hell?
Jensen didn't allow him much time for rumination, he was already grabbing him, wrapping his arms around him fast before pulling back to glare at him. "The hell are you doing here?"
He nodded towards the door. "I followed Aisha from the airport. Underestimated how ready they'd be."
"Shit." Jensen stepped back, suddenly concerned as he examined him. "Exactly how ready are we talking, here?"
Cougar shrugged. Ready enough that you can see me. Shaking his head, he waved Jensen away, stepped back and concentrated. Nothing happened.
"You're still here," Jensen pointed out, disappointed, but not unhelpful, as his eyes turned towards the walls and the floor, the window and the door again. He muttered to himself as he slowly paced the room. He kept coming back to the door and the window, though, examining the door's metal slot that, of course, could only be opened from the outside, and the small holes that had been drilled into the glass at about shoulder height. It didn't seem unusual to Cougar, but Jensen was shaking his head now, ruefully, and turned back to the floor again. "…makes sense, too much interference for electronic communication, but…how they got it set up…shit…okay, so Jackass McTeague was right…"
"Who's McTeague?"
"My high school guidance counselor. Said I should go into engineering." Jensen knelt in the corner, his fingers sliding along the edge of the floor. "Course, he also suggested that I become a veterinarian, and I never did figure out why he thought I'd enjoy spending my life with my hands up the assess of other people's household pets. I mean, I had a dog growing up, and loved that thing, but there's some lines you just don't cross, you know?" Jensen turned to look at him, but instead of standing again, just got more comfortable on the floor as his own thoughts distracted him.
Cougar sat down next to him, giving him a few minutes, only looking over when he heard the snort. "Okay. Spitballing here." Jensen waved a handful of twitching fingers. "You're stuck here, right?"
"Yeah."
"And I'm tired as hell, I mean, I feel like I've gained 30 pounds since I got here, and while yeah, they gave me some food, but it wasn't that good. I mean. Better than that camp in Nyala, worse than that week outside Lima. Not good enough for my waistline to expand faster than the speed of light."
"You look fine," Cougar frowned, running his eyes over him again. Aside from the stubble and the frown etched deeply into the side of his mouth, he looked okay.
"Yes. But." He pulled a face. "At first I thought it was exhaustion, then I figured they'd put something in my food to knock me out, but now… Now I'm thinking it's the room itself. You hear that buzzing?" He lazily pointed towards the ceiling, where most of the low whining hum of electronics could be heard.
"Sí. They're doing something to us right now?"
Jensen shrugged. "I don't know. Radio signals, maybe, hell, artificial gravity would work. Keeps me down, keeps you here. Shit." Jensen ran a hand down his face and rested his head against the wall glancing at him out of the corner of his eye. "In case you're just tuning in, Cougs, you really shouldn't have come."
---
Jensen did what he could to fill Cougar in. Told him everything Stegler said and tried to do it without panicking. It had been easier when he'd been alone here, where there was still a chance that he'd make it to the end of his life without being the reason Cougar went down. Again.
They didn't have all that much time, however, to contemplate. After a few moments, there were three guards and one doctor waiting on the other side of the window as the posted guard opened the door. Next to him, Cougar tensed, and Jensen followed suit, out of instinct, but he made himself relax. He'd see the drawn guns soon enough.
---
"I hope you understand that this process is not, in and of itself, meant to harm you, only to understand. We have no wish to harm you, Alvarez," Dr. Harris said. "Though there are many who feel otherwise regarding Corporal Jensen, here."
Turning back to Cougar, Harris sighed. "And I am aware of both of your reputations, so I will tell you, flat out, that it will be a lot less painful, for both of you, if you both cooperate during this study.
"What do you need us to do?"
"You're our control. We need to monitor for safety." Turning his eyes to Cougar, Harris continued. "Unfortunately, some of them may induce a stress response, but we need to be certain you don't lose your focus. For one, these tests are expensive, we don't want to have to run them twice because of any brash reactions. We also expect that we'll have to, given your record, so it is to that end that Jensen here will not only be an environmental control, but an emotional one."
"You're going to kill me if he makes a break for it?"
"We hope it won't come down to that, but we are prepared to make it happen."
"Yeah, but once I'm dead, you're out a bargaining chip."
"True, but this is a phase one study. Not all our test subjects are expected to survive, and while we do try to avoid that, there is still much to be learned from a subject's post-mortem." Harris nodded to himself, and signaled the guards as the door was opened from outside. "We'll start in the morning. Please, do, try and get some rest."
As soon as they'd cleared the room, two other guards came in, carrying between them an inflated air mattress, which they set on the floor.
Jensen didn't stop giggling- couldn't stop- until Cougar punched him.
---
Cougar's on the table, fighting against his restraints as the doctor makes the first incision, then the second. He's breathing hard, but doesn't make a sound until they peel back the skin, but it's cut off, quick, and Jensen's own heart stops in sympathy.
"He's finally under," one of the masked doctors says, and the other nods, checking the monitors.
"At least he'll stop thrashing. Let's get on with it."
And then they're through the ribcage, digging through him, taking samples and digging ever deeper. There's an awful hesitation when they reach his spine, but soon enough, they're lifting fragments of what looks like bone into a dish.
And then they just keep going.
Jensen's not sure which cut did it, which one cut the skin, but bloods running out from under Cougar's back now, pooling on the table and dripping down the side in ever-increasing volume, splashing on the doctor's shoes. One irritated snort later, they've decided to move onto his brain.
When one of the doctors moves to the side to reach for the saw, Jensen can see Cougar staring back at him, his eyes dead and glassy.
---
Jensen snapped his eyes open to find Cougar staring down at him, more irritated than worried, but his eyes slipped into something like sympathy soon enough. Bad Dreams?
"Yeah," Jensen said, and closed his eyes again, waiting for his heartbeat to stop trying to pound through his chest.
Cougar lay down again next to him, but Jensen wasn't sure that either of them slept.
---
In the morning, the mattress was taken away and food was brought in, but the things that were brought in afterwards kept Cougar's appetite to a minimum.
There was a gurney with locking wheels, and carts full of equipment. Only a small portion of what they were setting out looked at all medical, the rest were wires and monitors and metal boxes and clamps.
Jensen kept his eyes turned away, towards the window and the hallway outside, his food untouched.
---
It was amazing, the amount of crap they brought in to work on them. But it gave Jensen an idea. Because if they weren't doing this in the lab, which was probably more suited to this sort of thing, it meant that they had to do it in here.
Which meant the lockdown they had on Cougar didn't extend much past the walls or the window.
All Cougar would need to do to escape was make it out into the hallway. All he needed was a seven-foot head start. The only way to figure out how to get it, though, was to learn how the doctors and guards operated.
Which meant that when the time came, and the doctor, one they hadn't met before, instructed Cougar to come over, Jensen had to let him go.
---
The restraints seemed a little redundant, but so did the gun pointed at Jensen's head, so Cougar went with it. Something was wrapped around his finger and he could suddenly hear his heartbeat over the monitor.
"This one is easy," the doctor was explaining. "All we're going to do today is establish your baselines at different levels of gravity. I assume you've heard the warnings regarding your complete cooperation?"
Cougar nodded, glanced at the window in hopes of catching Jensen's reflection in the glass, but all he saw was the back of the guard, aiming his sidearm in Jensen's direction.
He nodded.
---
Sometimes, they could hear snatches of conversation and the sounds of chairs being scraped across the floor from the lab across the hallway. Scientists, mostly, and some of them were civilians. People who walked by this room, glanced sidelong as they hurried past, and never broke off their conversations about their meeting schedules and deadlines and time frames.
They were doing this for a goddamned paycheck.
Still, though, Jensen watched them all, even if they never met his eyes. Maybe, at some point, one of them would, and there'd be something there that wasn't looking back at him like he was anything more than a vaguely interesting fixture, or a germ on a slide. It never happened.
Which was still a lot better than having them all watching, rapt, as the first experiments began.
---
The room kept him in his body, and the restraints- strange, thick things of metal and wire- kept his body on the table. At least Cougar could move his head. He could turn, if he wanted to, and look at the guards standing over Jensen, eyes unmoving. If he craned his neck enough, he could see him, sitting against the wall, his cuffed hands out of sight, hidden behind his knees.
He couldn't bring himself to look any higher, couldn't risk looking him in the eye. He didn't want to see any more.
---
When the time came, he braced himself for the pain, but none came.
"Relax," the doctor said. "Let me know if it starts to hurt. It shouldn't, but we're trying to get a picture of the process of dispersal, understand what's happening to you at every step in the disembodiment process. This is nothing you haven't done before. This time, however, we will be the ones controlling it." Glancing up at the other doctors, he turned his head towards the window and raised his right hand.
Cougar didn't feel a thing, not for a while, but eventually, he began to feel looser, like he was sinking through the table.
"Okay, we're losing visual now," someone said, and he kept going, slowly. The monitor lost his heartbeat, but there were other readings coming off other monitors that didn't seem to be surprising any of the doctors, and he could see their faces now, behind their masks, he was beginning to wind himself through and around the equipment on the table. He could stretch himself out towards the door.
But only to a point. He was less than a foot away when the resistance was too much to fight.
He was washed out all over the room, behind the doctors and in the space between Jensen's lower back and the wall, and he stretched himself down, now, trying to work one of the centimeter-wide gaps between the floor and the wall.
He felt himself come up against something that burned, then, and his entire being flinched away.
It was getting harder to stay like this. He felt himself drifting back towards the table, pulled against his will bit by bit until he could feel the restraints around his arms and legs again. Until the only sight he had was coming through his eyes. So he noticed when the doctors were able to see him again, even before they called out visual contact.
"Four more times at different rates," the doctor explained. "And that will be it for the day. How do you feel?"
Cougar glared until he didn't have eyes any more, and the doctor raised his had again.
---
Jensen watched the table whenever there was anything to see there, but most of the time, there wasn't. After the first three cycles, Cougar was allowed a break and handed a robe, which he threw on before coming to sit next to Jensen again.
The doctors and guards filed out of the room, though one of them kept watch through the window, as if it mattered. As if the camera set up in the hallway wasn't still recording.
"How're you doing?" Jensen asked, and Cougar shrugged.
Not for the first time in his life, Jensen wished he was telepathic. Wasn't like Cougar could say much here, anyway.
---
Maybe Cougar had been hanging around Jensen too long, but he was beginning to wish he could read minds. He'd noticed the camera in the hallway, and the guard, too, and they were only alone for about five minutes before two trays of food and water were being brought in for them.
It was half an hour later when the doctors came back, and the tests started all over again.
---
The lights never went out, not completely, but they were lowered at what was probably the end of the day. The humming of the containment field never faded.
An hour or so after dinner - chicken and mashed potatoes and green beans that had mostly been cooked out of their shape, eaten with flimsy plastic cutlery- three guards came in to exchange their detritus for the air mattress again.
"This is great guys, really, but would it kill you to give us chairs?" Jensen asked as the mattress fell to the floor at his feet. "A beanbag or something?"
"Lack of sleep could skew the results. That's the only reason you're getting this much," the one guarding the door said, but at least nobody kicked Jensen in the head over it, though Cougar was considering it.
"He's not very affable, is he?" Jensen turned to him when the doors closed, ignoring the glares coming through the glass as the guards moved on.
Cougar was too tired for conversation, so he just dragged the mattress over to the corner and fell down onto it. A moment later, Jensen followed, lying on his stomach and facing away from the window, he turned slightly to regard Cougar.
"How're you doing?"
"Cansado. Bien."
"Good. That's… yeah." Jensen hung his head. "So how'd they find you?"
"Followed Aisha when I saw her at the airport. Don't know how she knew I was there."
"Think she could've been playing the odds, or did she know you were coming?"
Cougar shrugged. "I was at O'Hare, watching the news when your signal didn't come. They were talking about their offices in Saint Paul, so I came."
"Still, it's a bit of a coincidence."
"Not if she was looking for me." Not if she didn't have prior knowledge, Cougar didn't say. Not unless she heard something you let slip to Stegler.
"You think she got tipped off?" Jensen was scowling at the wall. "I mean, we knew she was looking for you, and now we know Stegler's crooked as fuck, but we don't know who else they've got working with them."
There wasn't much Cougar could say to that, so he changed the subject. "How'd they find you?"
"I was an idiot. I knew about Stegler, but I didn't know that he knew I knew. Got me coming out of London, brought me here, about three days ago now, I think. Don't know, it's all jetlag and time differences and no windows in this place, but that's what it feels like. Thought it was all about the dirty laundry I'd aired all over the world up until you got here. Didn't think they knew enough to use me as bait, but Stegler's known you're still alive and kicking for a while now… so what do you think they're actually doing?"
"No sé."
"Supersoldiers. I'll bet it's supersoldiers. They're going to clone you." It made as much sense as anything did, so Cougar nodded. "Either that or they're going to force you to make babies with some lady supersoldier. Like Aisha. That's her game. Fuck, she's gone baby crazy, I've seen it happen. Ordinarily sane women becoming these hell beasts on the rampage for sperm donors. This is the natural outcome of a woman being neither ordinary nor sane."
Privately, Cougar figured that she probably would've had an easier time just getting him drunk, rather than stalking him, killing his family, and kidnapping, but Jensen seemed to be convincing himself.
It would've been almost funny, if it hadn't actually been a possibility.
Cougar looked at him, rolling his eyes, and Jensen nodded.
"Yeah. I know. Less worrying about the insane woman, more figuring out how we're going to get out of here. You have any ideas?" At Cougar's snort, he smirked. "Me neither. Glad we've got that sorted out."
---
The experiments began again the next morning, with another doctor leading the tests this time. His bedside manner wasn't any better than Harris's had been, but it wouldn't have mattered if he'd come along and shot Cougar full of every drug imaginable before they started. It didn't change a thing.
One minute, Cougar was squinting against the harsh light from the ceiling, trying to prepare for whatever was coming next, and then the pain crashed through him.
---
He's got about two minutes before the plane meets the first landing strip on American soil that Carlos has seen in sixteen months.
It's been a long, brutal, deployment, Kandahar and Kabul and back to Lahore, but it's finally over. He's not sure, exactly, when discharge hearing came to mean vacation, but the difference only seems to matter to everyone else.
Like Reynolds, sitting next to him and sweating like a pig. Reynolds, who's getting sent up right along with him, and who's been freaking the fuck out ever since the word came down.
As if some hearing is going to be worse than the fifteen shitstorms they've been through in the past two months.
"You've got to get a haircut, man," Reynolds mutters, as they make their way down the aisle to deplane. "They're going to nail you on that alone. Do you even know where you left your uniform?"
Carlos shrugs, mutters something about Reynolds's mom's bedpost, and reaches down under the seat to grab the hat won off a drunk airman in Jalalabad. He's ready to just go, already, but between him and the plane's are too many sluggishly moving people filing out of their seats, each wrestling with a stunning amount of carryon luggage.
He grins at the thought of leaning over the seat to where their escorts are sitting asking to swing by a barbershop on the way to the hearing, and Reynolds totally misunderstands it. Grabs his arm and tries to shake it, whispering angrily.
"They're going to nail both our asses to the wall, here, man, it's a fucking conspiracy!"
Reynolds was a great guy, but right now, he's being a fucking idiot, talking like that, and really, it's been a long goddamned flight.
"Conspiracies involve people knowing things. You meet anyone over the past four months that knew their ass from a hole in the ground? We had bad intel. We moved on it. It happens."
Finally, they're off the plane and heading into the terminal, where the escorts separate them. Reynolds is led off towards a group of three servicemen over by the coffee shop, and he's surprised when his own escort stops in front of two men in civilian gear.
One of them, the one not wearing the suit, is looking far too amused to see him, and Carlos decides immediately that the guy's a complete asshole, and his impression doesn't improve when he speaks.
"You didn't need to go stealing John Cougar Mellencamp's wardrobe, the brass is plenty pissed off with you as it is."
Carlos rolls his eyes and the suit extends his hand. "LC Franklin Clay. This is Corporal Jake Jensen. Nice to meet you. We've got to talk."
---
Cougar was laid out on the table like an insubstantial trick of the light. Like a ghost being ripped apart slowly by masked doctors.
It wasn't vivisection if there wasn't a body there, if the particles weren't already split further apart than the width of a scalpel, but it was no easier to watch them dissecting empty air in the space where Cougar should've been, sending electrical impulses through empty space.
They brought Cougar's ghost back into existence, bit by bit, and they did it all again and again.
By the time Cougar was anything more than the vague impression of a man, his ghost was jerking under the knife, trying to escape, rise up off the table when the shocks came. It was obvious that he felt pain like this, but it wasn't until he was nearly all there, until there was just the vaguest hint of blurred edges, that he had enough of a voice to cry out.
In his head, Jensen knew it would be impractical for them to cause too much harm- not that these Goliath wonks seemed to be too concerned with proper conditions for human testing- but every time they brought Cougar back, whole again, Jensen was surprised.
He's a little more surprised at how fucking boneless Cougar was when they were done. He had to be helped from the table, back into the sweats they've swapped out for his clothes, and the doctors half-carried him across the room to Jensen.
The guns were finally lowered, then, and Jensen hates that he's so damned transparent. That they knew he'd sooner help Cougar than attack them.
Part of him wondered if they're actually right, or if they're all just playing the odds. He'd been sitting here, unmoving, for hours, now, and it wasn't as if he was able to do much more than stop Cougar from collapsing in a heap and concussing himself on the motherfucking floor.
"...swear to god, I'm gonna...fuck...okay, easy now... hey. Shit, Cougs..." It wasn't until Cougar rolled onto his side and deliberately smacked his arm that Jensen realized he'd even been talking.
---
Cougar didn't know how long they were there, how many tests he'd survived, or how many were still coming.
Sometimes- most of the time- they hurt. They were draining and exhausting and left him feeling like he'd just been washed to shore after a storm at sea.
Sometimes, they'd seem to go on forever, agony upon agony, and he'd get the impression that he'd passed out partway through one, only to wake when another was being completed.
Sometimes, they were quick and merely uncomfortable, and sometimes, the doctors wouldn't return for hours, maybe a day, afterwards.
Those were the hardest to deal with. They left him with too much time to wait, too tired to do anything more than listen as Jensen, lying on the mattress next to him, spun out plan after plan after plan. All the things they'd do once they were out of there. How they'd get there in the first place.
Cougar didn't have the heart to remind him that it wasn't likely they'd survive.
Still, though, most of the time when they were lying there, especially when the lights were off and they were too tired of worrying about what any surveillance might find, Jensen would curl himself around him.
Once, probably when Jensen thought he'd passed out again in the cold room, he thought he heard Jensen muttering into his hair as he shifted closer. It was his breath moving against his hair, more than anything, that he felt. "Can't protect you from anything but the cold, man. Sorry."
His voice sounded fucking broken. Cougar didn't want to turn to look at him, didn't want Jensen to know that he knew. He waited a few minutes until it could've been construed as shifting in his sleep, caught Jensen's hand where it rested on his chest, and stared at the wall, wondering what it would feel like if he had to watch Jensen being strapped down to a table and tortured. Day after day after day.
---
The doctors and guards walked around like Jensen wasn't even there, anymore, and he kept his eyes down to ensure it. It worked. After the first few days, he'd begun compiling all the things he learned through stolen snatches of conversation.
Jensen had learned a lot more than they would've expected him to know, like where the controls for the containment field were set up.
Just inside the doorway to the laboratory.
Or that he knew how to turn it off.
Hold the button for three seconds, and then flip the switch.
Or that, upstairs, Goliath was starting to close up shop.
That redheaded scientist doesn't know how she's going to get everything organized for her move to the Baltimore office, but Dr. Kenyatta assures her that the facilities there are much nicer than here.
Or that, day after tomorrow, the radiation experiments would begin. But it wasn't until he heard three voices in the hallway outside, in the middle of the night, that he remembered how to panic.
---
"So we're all ready, then?" It was Stegler talking, Jensen didn't need to open his eyes to confirm.
"Yes. Once this series of tests has been completed, after the final experiment, we've got the go-ahead to begin production." Dr. Harris was speaking, his voice a little tense, and it was easy enough to understand why when the next person spoke.
"You said they'd be in the arsenal in ten months," Aisha sounded irritated. "So far, all I see is that you haven't even moved past phase one."
"As you can see, the subject has been cooperating fully, and there are only three more tests in the series before we can move onwards. As long as these final tests operate in accordance with the models, which they will, we've got nine months before we're ready for shipping. It will, however, probably be a year before deployment, but that, you see, is out of our hands."
Stegler's voice cut in, a little more loudly, all tense enthusiasm. "Wonderful. Glad I retained the stock when the market went under, yeah?"
"Agreed," Harris laughed. "Now if you'd like to follow me back upstairs, we should be all set for the conference call with Korea. Are you planning on staying to observe the fireworks?"
---
Cougar had woken up when Jensen's grip on his side tightened suddenly, and once the footsteps drifted off down the hallway, he rolled over to look at him.
Jensen allowed it when his hand touched Jensen's face, a gesture that had been meant as a warning to keep silent when it began, and turned into something else when he could feel the stubble under his fingers.
"It's bad," Jensen sounded hopeless. He was trying to hide it, but his hand curled into Cougar's shirt as he tried to grin. "You down for a jack move?"
Cougar wasn't ready for much more than never moving, ever again, but one of them had to be, and Jensen wasn't holding it together any better than he himself was. Cougar nodded, and Jensen whispered a hopefully-not-suicidal plan against the palm of his hand.
---
It was almost funny, lying there in the dark with Cougar curled against him, hand resting against his neck, how much better the plan sounded with Cougar listening. How much more likely survival seemed when he nodded as it came together.
How he suddenly knew it was the greatest idea ever conceived of by man in the moment Cougar, after a moment's consideration, finally grinned.
How he forgot it even existed when Cougar's fingers stroked along his jaw, regarding him in the low light, and how all that remained was the kiss.
---
Chapter 10
Author: jendavis
Fandom/ Pairing The Losers (comic 'verse, with some help from the movie), eventual Jensen/Cougar
Rating: R overall
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue, don't take this too seriously.
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
---
"Cougs?"
What the hell?
Jensen didn't allow him much time for rumination, he was already grabbing him, wrapping his arms around him fast before pulling back to glare at him. "The hell are you doing here?"
He nodded towards the door. "I followed Aisha from the airport. Underestimated how ready they'd be."
"Shit." Jensen stepped back, suddenly concerned as he examined him. "Exactly how ready are we talking, here?"
Cougar shrugged. Ready enough that you can see me. Shaking his head, he waved Jensen away, stepped back and concentrated. Nothing happened.
"You're still here," Jensen pointed out, disappointed, but not unhelpful, as his eyes turned towards the walls and the floor, the window and the door again. He muttered to himself as he slowly paced the room. He kept coming back to the door and the window, though, examining the door's metal slot that, of course, could only be opened from the outside, and the small holes that had been drilled into the glass at about shoulder height. It didn't seem unusual to Cougar, but Jensen was shaking his head now, ruefully, and turned back to the floor again. "…makes sense, too much interference for electronic communication, but…how they got it set up…shit…okay, so Jackass McTeague was right…"
"Who's McTeague?"
"My high school guidance counselor. Said I should go into engineering." Jensen knelt in the corner, his fingers sliding along the edge of the floor. "Course, he also suggested that I become a veterinarian, and I never did figure out why he thought I'd enjoy spending my life with my hands up the assess of other people's household pets. I mean, I had a dog growing up, and loved that thing, but there's some lines you just don't cross, you know?" Jensen turned to look at him, but instead of standing again, just got more comfortable on the floor as his own thoughts distracted him.
Cougar sat down next to him, giving him a few minutes, only looking over when he heard the snort. "Okay. Spitballing here." Jensen waved a handful of twitching fingers. "You're stuck here, right?"
"Yeah."
"And I'm tired as hell, I mean, I feel like I've gained 30 pounds since I got here, and while yeah, they gave me some food, but it wasn't that good. I mean. Better than that camp in Nyala, worse than that week outside Lima. Not good enough for my waistline to expand faster than the speed of light."
"You look fine," Cougar frowned, running his eyes over him again. Aside from the stubble and the frown etched deeply into the side of his mouth, he looked okay.
"Yes. But." He pulled a face. "At first I thought it was exhaustion, then I figured they'd put something in my food to knock me out, but now… Now I'm thinking it's the room itself. You hear that buzzing?" He lazily pointed towards the ceiling, where most of the low whining hum of electronics could be heard.
"Sí. They're doing something to us right now?"
Jensen shrugged. "I don't know. Radio signals, maybe, hell, artificial gravity would work. Keeps me down, keeps you here. Shit." Jensen ran a hand down his face and rested his head against the wall glancing at him out of the corner of his eye. "In case you're just tuning in, Cougs, you really shouldn't have come."
---
Jensen did what he could to fill Cougar in. Told him everything Stegler said and tried to do it without panicking. It had been easier when he'd been alone here, where there was still a chance that he'd make it to the end of his life without being the reason Cougar went down. Again.
They didn't have all that much time, however, to contemplate. After a few moments, there were three guards and one doctor waiting on the other side of the window as the posted guard opened the door. Next to him, Cougar tensed, and Jensen followed suit, out of instinct, but he made himself relax. He'd see the drawn guns soon enough.
---
"I hope you understand that this process is not, in and of itself, meant to harm you, only to understand. We have no wish to harm you, Alvarez," Dr. Harris said. "Though there are many who feel otherwise regarding Corporal Jensen, here."
Turning back to Cougar, Harris sighed. "And I am aware of both of your reputations, so I will tell you, flat out, that it will be a lot less painful, for both of you, if you both cooperate during this study.
"What do you need us to do?"
"You're our control. We need to monitor for safety." Turning his eyes to Cougar, Harris continued. "Unfortunately, some of them may induce a stress response, but we need to be certain you don't lose your focus. For one, these tests are expensive, we don't want to have to run them twice because of any brash reactions. We also expect that we'll have to, given your record, so it is to that end that Jensen here will not only be an environmental control, but an emotional one."
"You're going to kill me if he makes a break for it?"
"We hope it won't come down to that, but we are prepared to make it happen."
"Yeah, but once I'm dead, you're out a bargaining chip."
"True, but this is a phase one study. Not all our test subjects are expected to survive, and while we do try to avoid that, there is still much to be learned from a subject's post-mortem." Harris nodded to himself, and signaled the guards as the door was opened from outside. "We'll start in the morning. Please, do, try and get some rest."
As soon as they'd cleared the room, two other guards came in, carrying between them an inflated air mattress, which they set on the floor.
Jensen didn't stop giggling- couldn't stop- until Cougar punched him.
---
Cougar's on the table, fighting against his restraints as the doctor makes the first incision, then the second. He's breathing hard, but doesn't make a sound until they peel back the skin, but it's cut off, quick, and Jensen's own heart stops in sympathy.
"He's finally under," one of the masked doctors says, and the other nods, checking the monitors.
"At least he'll stop thrashing. Let's get on with it."
And then they're through the ribcage, digging through him, taking samples and digging ever deeper. There's an awful hesitation when they reach his spine, but soon enough, they're lifting fragments of what looks like bone into a dish.
And then they just keep going.
Jensen's not sure which cut did it, which one cut the skin, but bloods running out from under Cougar's back now, pooling on the table and dripping down the side in ever-increasing volume, splashing on the doctor's shoes. One irritated snort later, they've decided to move onto his brain.
When one of the doctors moves to the side to reach for the saw, Jensen can see Cougar staring back at him, his eyes dead and glassy.
---
Jensen snapped his eyes open to find Cougar staring down at him, more irritated than worried, but his eyes slipped into something like sympathy soon enough. Bad Dreams?
"Yeah," Jensen said, and closed his eyes again, waiting for his heartbeat to stop trying to pound through his chest.
Cougar lay down again next to him, but Jensen wasn't sure that either of them slept.
---
In the morning, the mattress was taken away and food was brought in, but the things that were brought in afterwards kept Cougar's appetite to a minimum.
There was a gurney with locking wheels, and carts full of equipment. Only a small portion of what they were setting out looked at all medical, the rest were wires and monitors and metal boxes and clamps.
Jensen kept his eyes turned away, towards the window and the hallway outside, his food untouched.
---
It was amazing, the amount of crap they brought in to work on them. But it gave Jensen an idea. Because if they weren't doing this in the lab, which was probably more suited to this sort of thing, it meant that they had to do it in here.
Which meant the lockdown they had on Cougar didn't extend much past the walls or the window.
All Cougar would need to do to escape was make it out into the hallway. All he needed was a seven-foot head start. The only way to figure out how to get it, though, was to learn how the doctors and guards operated.
Which meant that when the time came, and the doctor, one they hadn't met before, instructed Cougar to come over, Jensen had to let him go.
---
The restraints seemed a little redundant, but so did the gun pointed at Jensen's head, so Cougar went with it. Something was wrapped around his finger and he could suddenly hear his heartbeat over the monitor.
"This one is easy," the doctor was explaining. "All we're going to do today is establish your baselines at different levels of gravity. I assume you've heard the warnings regarding your complete cooperation?"
Cougar nodded, glanced at the window in hopes of catching Jensen's reflection in the glass, but all he saw was the back of the guard, aiming his sidearm in Jensen's direction.
He nodded.
---
Sometimes, they could hear snatches of conversation and the sounds of chairs being scraped across the floor from the lab across the hallway. Scientists, mostly, and some of them were civilians. People who walked by this room, glanced sidelong as they hurried past, and never broke off their conversations about their meeting schedules and deadlines and time frames.
They were doing this for a goddamned paycheck.
Still, though, Jensen watched them all, even if they never met his eyes. Maybe, at some point, one of them would, and there'd be something there that wasn't looking back at him like he was anything more than a vaguely interesting fixture, or a germ on a slide. It never happened.
Which was still a lot better than having them all watching, rapt, as the first experiments began.
---
The room kept him in his body, and the restraints- strange, thick things of metal and wire- kept his body on the table. At least Cougar could move his head. He could turn, if he wanted to, and look at the guards standing over Jensen, eyes unmoving. If he craned his neck enough, he could see him, sitting against the wall, his cuffed hands out of sight, hidden behind his knees.
He couldn't bring himself to look any higher, couldn't risk looking him in the eye. He didn't want to see any more.
---
When the time came, he braced himself for the pain, but none came.
"Relax," the doctor said. "Let me know if it starts to hurt. It shouldn't, but we're trying to get a picture of the process of dispersal, understand what's happening to you at every step in the disembodiment process. This is nothing you haven't done before. This time, however, we will be the ones controlling it." Glancing up at the other doctors, he turned his head towards the window and raised his right hand.
Cougar didn't feel a thing, not for a while, but eventually, he began to feel looser, like he was sinking through the table.
"Okay, we're losing visual now," someone said, and he kept going, slowly. The monitor lost his heartbeat, but there were other readings coming off other monitors that didn't seem to be surprising any of the doctors, and he could see their faces now, behind their masks, he was beginning to wind himself through and around the equipment on the table. He could stretch himself out towards the door.
But only to a point. He was less than a foot away when the resistance was too much to fight.
He was washed out all over the room, behind the doctors and in the space between Jensen's lower back and the wall, and he stretched himself down, now, trying to work one of the centimeter-wide gaps between the floor and the wall.
He felt himself come up against something that burned, then, and his entire being flinched away.
It was getting harder to stay like this. He felt himself drifting back towards the table, pulled against his will bit by bit until he could feel the restraints around his arms and legs again. Until the only sight he had was coming through his eyes. So he noticed when the doctors were able to see him again, even before they called out visual contact.
"Four more times at different rates," the doctor explained. "And that will be it for the day. How do you feel?"
Cougar glared until he didn't have eyes any more, and the doctor raised his had again.
---
Jensen watched the table whenever there was anything to see there, but most of the time, there wasn't. After the first three cycles, Cougar was allowed a break and handed a robe, which he threw on before coming to sit next to Jensen again.
The doctors and guards filed out of the room, though one of them kept watch through the window, as if it mattered. As if the camera set up in the hallway wasn't still recording.
"How're you doing?" Jensen asked, and Cougar shrugged.
Not for the first time in his life, Jensen wished he was telepathic. Wasn't like Cougar could say much here, anyway.
---
Maybe Cougar had been hanging around Jensen too long, but he was beginning to wish he could read minds. He'd noticed the camera in the hallway, and the guard, too, and they were only alone for about five minutes before two trays of food and water were being brought in for them.
It was half an hour later when the doctors came back, and the tests started all over again.
---
The lights never went out, not completely, but they were lowered at what was probably the end of the day. The humming of the containment field never faded.
An hour or so after dinner - chicken and mashed potatoes and green beans that had mostly been cooked out of their shape, eaten with flimsy plastic cutlery- three guards came in to exchange their detritus for the air mattress again.
"This is great guys, really, but would it kill you to give us chairs?" Jensen asked as the mattress fell to the floor at his feet. "A beanbag or something?"
"Lack of sleep could skew the results. That's the only reason you're getting this much," the one guarding the door said, but at least nobody kicked Jensen in the head over it, though Cougar was considering it.
"He's not very affable, is he?" Jensen turned to him when the doors closed, ignoring the glares coming through the glass as the guards moved on.
Cougar was too tired for conversation, so he just dragged the mattress over to the corner and fell down onto it. A moment later, Jensen followed, lying on his stomach and facing away from the window, he turned slightly to regard Cougar.
"How're you doing?"
"Cansado. Bien."
"Good. That's… yeah." Jensen hung his head. "So how'd they find you?"
"Followed Aisha when I saw her at the airport. Don't know how she knew I was there."
"Think she could've been playing the odds, or did she know you were coming?"
Cougar shrugged. "I was at O'Hare, watching the news when your signal didn't come. They were talking about their offices in Saint Paul, so I came."
"Still, it's a bit of a coincidence."
"Not if she was looking for me." Not if she didn't have prior knowledge, Cougar didn't say. Not unless she heard something you let slip to Stegler.
"You think she got tipped off?" Jensen was scowling at the wall. "I mean, we knew she was looking for you, and now we know Stegler's crooked as fuck, but we don't know who else they've got working with them."
There wasn't much Cougar could say to that, so he changed the subject. "How'd they find you?"
"I was an idiot. I knew about Stegler, but I didn't know that he knew I knew. Got me coming out of London, brought me here, about three days ago now, I think. Don't know, it's all jetlag and time differences and no windows in this place, but that's what it feels like. Thought it was all about the dirty laundry I'd aired all over the world up until you got here. Didn't think they knew enough to use me as bait, but Stegler's known you're still alive and kicking for a while now… so what do you think they're actually doing?"
"No sé."
"Supersoldiers. I'll bet it's supersoldiers. They're going to clone you." It made as much sense as anything did, so Cougar nodded. "Either that or they're going to force you to make babies with some lady supersoldier. Like Aisha. That's her game. Fuck, she's gone baby crazy, I've seen it happen. Ordinarily sane women becoming these hell beasts on the rampage for sperm donors. This is the natural outcome of a woman being neither ordinary nor sane."
Privately, Cougar figured that she probably would've had an easier time just getting him drunk, rather than stalking him, killing his family, and kidnapping, but Jensen seemed to be convincing himself.
It would've been almost funny, if it hadn't actually been a possibility.
Cougar looked at him, rolling his eyes, and Jensen nodded.
"Yeah. I know. Less worrying about the insane woman, more figuring out how we're going to get out of here. You have any ideas?" At Cougar's snort, he smirked. "Me neither. Glad we've got that sorted out."
---
The experiments began again the next morning, with another doctor leading the tests this time. His bedside manner wasn't any better than Harris's had been, but it wouldn't have mattered if he'd come along and shot Cougar full of every drug imaginable before they started. It didn't change a thing.
One minute, Cougar was squinting against the harsh light from the ceiling, trying to prepare for whatever was coming next, and then the pain crashed through him.
---
He's got about two minutes before the plane meets the first landing strip on American soil that Carlos has seen in sixteen months.
It's been a long, brutal, deployment, Kandahar and Kabul and back to Lahore, but it's finally over. He's not sure, exactly, when discharge hearing came to mean vacation, but the difference only seems to matter to everyone else.
Like Reynolds, sitting next to him and sweating like a pig. Reynolds, who's getting sent up right along with him, and who's been freaking the fuck out ever since the word came down.
As if some hearing is going to be worse than the fifteen shitstorms they've been through in the past two months.
"You've got to get a haircut, man," Reynolds mutters, as they make their way down the aisle to deplane. "They're going to nail you on that alone. Do you even know where you left your uniform?"
Carlos shrugs, mutters something about Reynolds's mom's bedpost, and reaches down under the seat to grab the hat won off a drunk airman in Jalalabad. He's ready to just go, already, but between him and the plane's are too many sluggishly moving people filing out of their seats, each wrestling with a stunning amount of carryon luggage.
He grins at the thought of leaning over the seat to where their escorts are sitting asking to swing by a barbershop on the way to the hearing, and Reynolds totally misunderstands it. Grabs his arm and tries to shake it, whispering angrily.
"They're going to nail both our asses to the wall, here, man, it's a fucking conspiracy!"
Reynolds was a great guy, but right now, he's being a fucking idiot, talking like that, and really, it's been a long goddamned flight.
"Conspiracies involve people knowing things. You meet anyone over the past four months that knew their ass from a hole in the ground? We had bad intel. We moved on it. It happens."
Finally, they're off the plane and heading into the terminal, where the escorts separate them. Reynolds is led off towards a group of three servicemen over by the coffee shop, and he's surprised when his own escort stops in front of two men in civilian gear.
One of them, the one not wearing the suit, is looking far too amused to see him, and Carlos decides immediately that the guy's a complete asshole, and his impression doesn't improve when he speaks.
"You didn't need to go stealing John Cougar Mellencamp's wardrobe, the brass is plenty pissed off with you as it is."
Carlos rolls his eyes and the suit extends his hand. "LC Franklin Clay. This is Corporal Jake Jensen. Nice to meet you. We've got to talk."
---
Cougar was laid out on the table like an insubstantial trick of the light. Like a ghost being ripped apart slowly by masked doctors.
It wasn't vivisection if there wasn't a body there, if the particles weren't already split further apart than the width of a scalpel, but it was no easier to watch them dissecting empty air in the space where Cougar should've been, sending electrical impulses through empty space.
They brought Cougar's ghost back into existence, bit by bit, and they did it all again and again.
By the time Cougar was anything more than the vague impression of a man, his ghost was jerking under the knife, trying to escape, rise up off the table when the shocks came. It was obvious that he felt pain like this, but it wasn't until he was nearly all there, until there was just the vaguest hint of blurred edges, that he had enough of a voice to cry out.
In his head, Jensen knew it would be impractical for them to cause too much harm- not that these Goliath wonks seemed to be too concerned with proper conditions for human testing- but every time they brought Cougar back, whole again, Jensen was surprised.
He's a little more surprised at how fucking boneless Cougar was when they were done. He had to be helped from the table, back into the sweats they've swapped out for his clothes, and the doctors half-carried him across the room to Jensen.
The guns were finally lowered, then, and Jensen hates that he's so damned transparent. That they knew he'd sooner help Cougar than attack them.
Part of him wondered if they're actually right, or if they're all just playing the odds. He'd been sitting here, unmoving, for hours, now, and it wasn't as if he was able to do much more than stop Cougar from collapsing in a heap and concussing himself on the motherfucking floor.
"...swear to god, I'm gonna...fuck...okay, easy now... hey. Shit, Cougs..." It wasn't until Cougar rolled onto his side and deliberately smacked his arm that Jensen realized he'd even been talking.
---
Cougar didn't know how long they were there, how many tests he'd survived, or how many were still coming.
Sometimes- most of the time- they hurt. They were draining and exhausting and left him feeling like he'd just been washed to shore after a storm at sea.
Sometimes, they'd seem to go on forever, agony upon agony, and he'd get the impression that he'd passed out partway through one, only to wake when another was being completed.
Sometimes, they were quick and merely uncomfortable, and sometimes, the doctors wouldn't return for hours, maybe a day, afterwards.
Those were the hardest to deal with. They left him with too much time to wait, too tired to do anything more than listen as Jensen, lying on the mattress next to him, spun out plan after plan after plan. All the things they'd do once they were out of there. How they'd get there in the first place.
Cougar didn't have the heart to remind him that it wasn't likely they'd survive.
Still, though, most of the time when they were lying there, especially when the lights were off and they were too tired of worrying about what any surveillance might find, Jensen would curl himself around him.
Once, probably when Jensen thought he'd passed out again in the cold room, he thought he heard Jensen muttering into his hair as he shifted closer. It was his breath moving against his hair, more than anything, that he felt. "Can't protect you from anything but the cold, man. Sorry."
His voice sounded fucking broken. Cougar didn't want to turn to look at him, didn't want Jensen to know that he knew. He waited a few minutes until it could've been construed as shifting in his sleep, caught Jensen's hand where it rested on his chest, and stared at the wall, wondering what it would feel like if he had to watch Jensen being strapped down to a table and tortured. Day after day after day.
---
The doctors and guards walked around like Jensen wasn't even there, anymore, and he kept his eyes down to ensure it. It worked. After the first few days, he'd begun compiling all the things he learned through stolen snatches of conversation.
Jensen had learned a lot more than they would've expected him to know, like where the controls for the containment field were set up.
Just inside the doorway to the laboratory.
Or that he knew how to turn it off.
Hold the button for three seconds, and then flip the switch.
Or that, upstairs, Goliath was starting to close up shop.
That redheaded scientist doesn't know how she's going to get everything organized for her move to the Baltimore office, but Dr. Kenyatta assures her that the facilities there are much nicer than here.
Or that, day after tomorrow, the radiation experiments would begin. But it wasn't until he heard three voices in the hallway outside, in the middle of the night, that he remembered how to panic.
---
"So we're all ready, then?" It was Stegler talking, Jensen didn't need to open his eyes to confirm.
"Yes. Once this series of tests has been completed, after the final experiment, we've got the go-ahead to begin production." Dr. Harris was speaking, his voice a little tense, and it was easy enough to understand why when the next person spoke.
"You said they'd be in the arsenal in ten months," Aisha sounded irritated. "So far, all I see is that you haven't even moved past phase one."
"As you can see, the subject has been cooperating fully, and there are only three more tests in the series before we can move onwards. As long as these final tests operate in accordance with the models, which they will, we've got nine months before we're ready for shipping. It will, however, probably be a year before deployment, but that, you see, is out of our hands."
Stegler's voice cut in, a little more loudly, all tense enthusiasm. "Wonderful. Glad I retained the stock when the market went under, yeah?"
"Agreed," Harris laughed. "Now if you'd like to follow me back upstairs, we should be all set for the conference call with Korea. Are you planning on staying to observe the fireworks?"
---
Cougar had woken up when Jensen's grip on his side tightened suddenly, and once the footsteps drifted off down the hallway, he rolled over to look at him.
Jensen allowed it when his hand touched Jensen's face, a gesture that had been meant as a warning to keep silent when it began, and turned into something else when he could feel the stubble under his fingers.
"It's bad," Jensen sounded hopeless. He was trying to hide it, but his hand curled into Cougar's shirt as he tried to grin. "You down for a jack move?"
Cougar wasn't ready for much more than never moving, ever again, but one of them had to be, and Jensen wasn't holding it together any better than he himself was. Cougar nodded, and Jensen whispered a hopefully-not-suicidal plan against the palm of his hand.
---
It was almost funny, lying there in the dark with Cougar curled against him, hand resting against his neck, how much better the plan sounded with Cougar listening. How much more likely survival seemed when he nodded as it came together.
How he suddenly knew it was the greatest idea ever conceived of by man in the moment Cougar, after a moment's consideration, finally grinned.
How he forgot it even existed when Cougar's fingers stroked along his jaw, regarding him in the low light, and how all that remained was the kiss.
---
Chapter 10