Kilroy

The first thing he notices when he claws his way back up into consciousness is that his entire body feels like one giant sunburn.

The second thing he notices is that the reason he woke up is because whatever’s in his stomach wants out, right now.

Jack hauls himself up, but hands are already on his shoulders to guide him toward a bucket on the floor next to the bed he’s in.  Only after he’s done gagging into the bucket does he realize it’s actually his bed, the one he shares with Brock, and the hands holding his shoulders are definitely not Brock’s.

“Hey, man,” Sam says, quiet and calm, “that’s good.  Get it out.  Better out than in.”

“Ain’t anything in to get out,” Jack rasps back and slumps against the bedspread, panting.

Raised voices drift through the house, muffled by the closed bedroom door.  Brock is shouting at someone, not actually proper yelling, but that steely, hear-him-everywhere tone that made anyone with a self-preservation instinct run for the hills during STRIKE selections.

Closing his eyes, Jack takes a few more breaths, then rubs his hands over his face.

“She knew where we live!  I thought your people were trying to protect him!”

Sam gives Jack a weary grimace.  Apparently Brock and his audience have been at it a while.

“We could protect him better if he’d agree to carry a firearm.”  Romanoff’s voice is flat, calm, and icy.

“You know he doesn’t want to be a part of that world anymore.”

“He needs training, Rum-”

“He had training, and then you went an’ fucked up that training with a goddamn TBI!”

Jack sighs heavily.  He’s still feeling shaky enough that it isn’t a good idea to get out of bed, otherwise he’d be on his feet and heading out to try to get everyone to stop fucking yelling.

There’s a dull thump, the sound of a hand hitting a table surface.  Then, low and harsh, “You wanna keep your pet psychopath on a leash, keep me doin’ your dirty work?  You do everything in your fuckin’ power to keep my husband alive and whole.  Now get out of my house.”

Sam’s eyebrows shoot all the way up his forehead and he whistles silently.  The front door opens and closes.

Rolling over onto his back, Jack weakly pulls his sleeves down his arms until his knuckles are covered.  Maybe if he doesn’t look at his tattoos, doesn’t expose them, doesn’t think about them, he won’t have to deal with the fact that he lit on fire for a little bit longer.  He closes his eyes and just tries to go through his body one inch at a time, processing and filing away the pain so that it’s not quite so overwhelming.

The bedroom door creaks quietly as it opens, then a few seconds later the mattress dips as someone sits next to Jack.

“Order through pain, huh?” Sam asks, low.  “Don’t tell me you actually believe that, now.”

Brock’s hand presses gently against Jack’s forehead.  “You tell me what you believe when you hear the most important thing to you in the world die over the radio.”

“I didn’t die, you melodramatic asshat,” Jack mutters, wrapping his hand around Brock’s wrist and stroking his thumb over the back of his hand.

Sighing sharply, Sam stands up and steps away.  “This might be more heartwarming if you both hadn’t tried to kill me.  Rollins, you’re good, we worked through that.  But you, Rumlow-”

“I had a bullet in my gun with Pierce’s name on it, okay?  He gave the orders that got Jack hurt.”

“That’s not what it sounded like when you were tryin’ to rearrange my face.”

Jack opens his eyes and looks up at Brock to see him sigh and shake his head.  “I was on live comms with Dispatch.  Had to sell it that I was still-”

“Still what?  Working for the bad guys?”

“Bad guys, good guys, it all depends what side of the moral compass you’re standing on, kid.  SHIELD, HYDRA, two sides of the same goddamn coin.  You think they wouldn’t have pivoted the EXO program you were in from pararescue to wetwork?  I made my choice, and I chose him.”

There’s a long silence where Jack just stares up at the ceiling with tired, aching eyes.

Sam walks to the door of the bedroom, then pauses.  “Rollins?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t die.  I don’t wanna see what happens the second time around.”  And with that, he leaves and closes the door behind him.  The front door to the house opens and closes a few seconds later.

After exhaling, slow and measured, Brock lays down next to Jack and rests a hand over his heart.

“So,” Jack starts, putting his hand over Brock’s and lacing their fingers together, “last night?”

“I heard shouting.”  Brock’s quieter, now that the anger’s drained out of him.  He looks almost haunted as he stares off into the space on the other side of Jack.  “Mercer had you on the ground.  I ran out there right as you threw her off, took her out.  Cap and his team are dealing with cleanup and reassuring the neighbors.”

Nodding, Jack twirls the fingers of his free hand in a go on motion.

“You weren’t responding and your gifts were starting to make an appearance in a way you couldn’t control.  I had to sedate you.”

“Mm.  Why’d you have sedatives?”

Brock’s quiet for a bit, then he admits, “It happened the same way the first time around.  Your mutations made shit start going haywire while you didn’t know how to use ‘em.  We went through that process three, four times a day for a few weeks.”

“When?”  Jack’s throat is starting to get sore in a way it hasn’t for a while, closing up on the stress, clamping down on his words.

“SERE training.”

And that makes sense, in a way.  Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training is what turns soldiers into operators, giving them the skills to stay alive and unbroken in environments most personnel would never encounter.  It’s intense enough in the military proper, but STRIKE takes it to a whole new level.  Jack’s pieced enough fragments together to know he supervised it on several occasions, doing what he did to the STRIKE candidates as he told himself it would make them stronger, more resilient, deadlier.  STRIKE’s program exposed its candidates to psychics, gifted agents who could get into a head and rip a soldier apart from the inside out better than anything they could do externally.  They absolutely did use the more conventional methods, but by the time a candidate got to STRIKE, they’d usually been around the block a few times.  Learning their limits required more extreme methods than what they’d been exposed to before.

Jack supposes that if a latent mutations were to show up, SERE would be the place for it to happen.  Better that it comes to light in a closed, controlled environment than in the field where casualties are harder to limit.

“I covered it up,” Brock continues.  “Made it look like a gas leak.  I managed to convince Pierce to let me work on you myself, since you resisted everything we’d thrown at you by that point.  Took you to the Retreat with D’Ambrosio as a medic, locked it to any external communications, and spent three weeks there with you, helping you learn what you’d become.”

Taking a breath, Jack mulls this over.  Everything he knows about Brock, every single trait and quirk he’s cataloged and filed over the past twenty years, points to a man that’s fiercely loyal and utterly ruthless.  While he would protect and value the men under his command, they were valued and cared for the way one might care for delicate, expensive, vital equipment. Jack knows that Brock’s connections with the people around him end at professional respect.  Empathy isn’t something Brock could afford to have crippling his judgment, with his position in the command structure.

Turning to look at Brock, or rather, the fluffy mess of black hair currently resting on his shoulder, Jack gives Brock’s hand a squeeze.  “Why?”

It takes long enough for Brock to respond that Jack’s not sure he will.  But finally, he sighs, shifts around so he’s propped up on one elbow, and looks Jack in the eye.  “Because you were the first person to look at me like a person, not a tool, a means to an end.  And you were the first one to treat me like I had the potential to one day, maybe, become a good man.”  He leans down to press his lips to the back of Jack’s hand for a moment.  “And I got addicted to that, that feeling of… something.  Didn’t know what it was, at first.  Found out later it’s what it feels like to be loved.”

Jack’s lips twitch into a smile, and he cups his free hand around Brock’s jaw.  “I love you too, you beautiful monster.”

“It also helped that you were really good in bed,” Brock says with a shark-like grin.  “Gotta admit, I wasn’t expecting you to corner me and kiss me as soon as you got your feet back under you at the Retreat.”

-hands him a bottle of something that looks like bleach and smells like death.  “Drink up, kid.”  A hand smacks Jack’s shoulder, then reaches out to twist off the cap.  “The only way you’re gonna stop being scared of yourself is if you take control of-”

Laughing awkwardly, Jack rolls his eyes.  “You’re lucky that was after I sobered up.”

Brock’s eyes go soft and he leans into Jack’s hand.  “You remember?”

“Some.  It’s coming back.”  Jack’s throat clicks as he swallows, and Brock immediately pushes himself up and reaches across to the nightstand for a glass of water.  He helps Jack sit up, then steadies his hands until he’s got a good grip on the glass.

“We do need to get you back up to speed on this, sweetheart,” Brock says, running his fingers over the markings on Jack’s arm.  Amber and gold flickers follow the touch.  “But I don’t think we have three weeks and the luxury of going dark the whole time to do that.”

“Midterms soon, yeah.”

“I meant more along the lines of, not if we want to make sure we don’t have a repeat of last night.  We don’t know who else is out there, or whether Mercer was working alone.”

Jack nods and takes another sip of water.  “What’s the plan?”

Moving to sit cross-legged, Brock rests his elbows on his knees.  “First things first, we get a good meal into the both of us.  Then we’ll start by trying to trigger memories to return.  And if that doesn’t work, well…”  He shrugs and gives Jack a wry smile.  “Guess we’re gonna trial-and-error it, and see how well I can coach you through it.”

Jack sets the water glass down once it’s empty, and looks at his hands.  Little pulses of barely-visible light flow through the markings with every heartbeat, and they glow with something like a resonance when Brock runs his fingertips over them.

“So, aside from being a human glowstick…”

Chuckling, Brock traces his fingers back and forth just to watch the flickers follow them.  “You’re an Alpha Class empath who can manifest energy into elemental forces.  Shorthand: elemental empath.  Basically, you can channel your emotions into fire, ice, electricity, shit like that.  And you can influence the emotions of those around you.  It’s… kind of terrifying.  And beautiful, at the same time.  Pure, raw, energy.”

He turns Jack’s hands so the palms are facing up.  “Try thinking of a time you’ve been blindingly angry.  Or protective.  Something that taps into the lizard brain and makes you pick up a weapon and stand up.”

“I’ll burn you,” Jack murmurs.

“I’ve had worse.”

He gives Brock an exasperated look, then shakes his head slightly and closes his eyes.

It’s not hard to pull up a suitable memory, not anymore.

No one’s able to get a hold of Louis, and the reference librarian is getting worried.  He’s never late, not like this.  Jack goes looking as soon as he gets permission.

It takes him about twenty minutes to find Louis on the roof, huddled up in a small alcove out of the wind.  One quick look tells Jack there’s no danger of jumping; the kid just needed to be alone for a bit.  He walks over, scuffs his boots as he moves so that the kid hears him coming, then sits down next to him with a groan.

Louis has bruises on his wrists and a large red welt on his cheekbone, some scrapes on his jaw.  One eye looks like it might become a shiner pretty soon.

“What do you want?” Louis asks irritably, and pulls the hood of his sweatshirt up.

Shrugging, Jack pulls out his notebook and his pencil.  “Name and description.  Maybe the dorm room number if you’re feeling adventurous.”

The kid stares at him blankly for several seconds.

“Not gonna hurt anyone, just gonna have a few words.  Promise.”

That evening, Jack slips into a dorm behind another student; it’s embarrassingly easy given how much the campus prides themselves on security.  He glances at his notebook, then the elevator, and walks right past the stainless steel doors to take the stairs.

Fourth floor, Hall A, room 457.

Jack knocks, then puts his notebook away.  The door opens.  “Geoff?”  When the boy nods, confused, Jack gives him a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.  “Little bird told me you roughed up a friend of mine.  You wanna tell me what that was about?”

A sharp intake of breath pulls Jack back to the present.

When he opens his eyes, white flames cover his hands, licking over Brock’s fingers without burning him.  Brock’s grin is as sharp as a knife.

Fear, Brock says, and Jack flash-freezes a watermelon so quickly that it shatters when he touches it.

Pain has him sparking and crackling like a bolt of lightning.

Happiness raises the ambient temperature in their backyard to balmy summer levels, and blood-red chrysanthemums sprout up in the lawn around Jack’s feet.

Love makes time stand still as Brock’s head tips back and his eyes fall closed, raw sensations flooding through him.