churbooseanon

Summary: Recovery is brought back from a job comatose, and as his friends stand vigil, they can’t help but think.

Keeping Vigil - (A Guns for Hire fanfic)

They are only mortal.

Honestly, in their line of work it shouldn’t be a thing that would need saying. The life of a mercenary wasn’t exactly one of safety. Every last mission could be their last. Any injury could take their lives. Any fire fight leave them bleeding out on the ground only as long as it took the enemy to stride up to them and put one last shot through the helmet.

Yet there is a quality that mercenaries must hold close to themselves. A confidence that must radiate out of them that they are invulnerable, invincible, infallible. Anything else meant being less attractive to a client. Meant looking less than capable of the jobs they were offered, the seemingly impossible odds they threw themselves at and came back victorious from. Mercenaries were the kind of people that could do what no other person could do, and when you were good you were a legend. Of course, you made that status quickly, and didn’t hold it long. Legends died with the mercenary. And mercenaries didn’t live to ripe old ages unless they got out before it got bad.

And it always got some degree of bad. Things never seemed to go smoothly.

But never before had they gotten so bad as they were now. Every last one of them had ways they expected to go out. How they expected each other to go.

None of them ever expected to be sitting watch over a comatose Washington.

* * * * * *

North

He takes the first shift. After everything is said and done, he has the best claim. It had been him and South that had been there, that had rushed in when the beacon had gone off. Abandoned their own job for the sake of recovering Recovery. After all, Wash never asked for help. He never needed it. There was never a solo mission for him that went wrong, and he even had a propensity for coming out of the shit he dragged everyone else out of smelling like roses, even when he was fucked up beyond compare. Wash always made it out, never asked for help, and was the one who saved them.

North sits at the side of his bed and wonders. No one knows what went wrong. All they know was that there had been the beacon, and that the Twins had gone in when there was nothing but a puncture wound in the back of Washington’s neck and an abandoned facility that everyone had known Wash had been hired to hit for some intel.

Wash is pale as death on the bed, and North resists the urge to reach up and tangle his fingers with the other man’s. He doesn’t want to feel how strangely cold those fingers are. Doesn’t want to think about how Wash’s eyes had been wide open and the color in his eyes almost lost to how widely his eyes are blown open. It’s a strange thing, the way that Wash seems both living and dead.

There is something about being around an injured comrade that makes a person think. Makes the mind wander to the area that it shouldn’t. It’s happened every last time North has seen someone hurt badly around here, whether it’s his sister or York, or even Wyoming. When he sees them hurt badly he can’t help but think…

All mercenaries think about how they’re going to go out. Make bets with themselves, struggle to achieve those specific ends. Because it’s easier to keep going when there is an expected end to be met. Something to give that push to survive. To reach an end that is more spectacular and fitting.

North always figured he’d go out because of South. Die giving his life up for her, facing trouble she had gotten them into. He’d throw himself in the way of a bullet to save her life, take a knife to the gut to protect her, give his own life up so she can live a few moments longer.

He’s never lied to himself and pretended that South would last long beyond him in that situation. But North had come into this world first. He was her big brother.

In a way, he was obligated to go out first.

* * * * * *

South

She finds North asleep at Recovery’s side almost four hours after she left her twin. Honestly, South doesn’t know whether to sigh in annoyance, or feel relieved. Sure, Recovery being comatose probably wasn’t good, but North had been awake for too long, and stressing himself to the point of breaking. Made sense, given how she knows her brother feels about the smaller man. About how many times over they owed Washington their lives, and each others’ lives.

As much as she should, South can’t bring herself to wake him. She should shake North awake, should take him to his room, make him actually lie down and rest. Get some food and fluids into him. Make sure that he doesn’t fall apart over this. The problem is she knows she wouldn’t want anyone taking North from her side if she was hurt, and she knows nothing would take her from North’s side if he was hurt.

Instead she moves to an empty cot and pulls the thin blanket off of it, and returns to slowly drape it over her brother. North’s a light sleeper, almost insanely so, and yet she manages to get him wrapped up without him moving so much as a hair. It’s a sign of just how weary he is, and she hates him for letting himself get this messed up over someone that isn’t her. Still, she can’t leave his side, not like this, and with a sigh South pulls up a chair and sits down to take the next watch. This time over both her brother and his lover.

Truth is she hates to see him destroyed like this, and hates even more that it’s just North’s style. He always puts himself before other people. It’s going to get him killed someday… and South knows it will be her fault. Someday on a mission she’s going to bite off more than she can chew, she’s going to push too far, she’s going to get herself in a situation so bad that North is going to do something stupid. He’s not going to save himself, not even going to try. Sure, he’ll try to get them out of it alive, but South knows, she knows he’s going to die for her.

The only consolation she has is that she knows she isn’t going to have to figure out how to live without her brother. Because when North goes down she’s following him, in a blaze of motherfucking glory.

* * * * * *

Maine

It’s been six hours since they brought Washington back to the base. Five hours since everyone agreed to empty out of the infirmary and give him a chance to recover, because hovering was getting them no where. That’s how long, Maine discovers, he can keep away from Recovery’s beside. How long he can tell himself that it isn’t even remotely his fault that Wash is comatose, that without him telling Carolina that he wanted this kid in their numbers he wouldn’t have been in that facility, wouldn’t have found those files, and wouldn’t have whoever it was sneak up behind him and inject them with who knew what. With whatever it was CT was so frantically studying down in the make-shift lab.

Six hours before he finds himself walking into the quiet infirmary and taking in the sight of the twins in identical chairs, curled up identically under identical blankets and both oriented toward the other and the single point of contact between them: their barely interlaced fingers hanging between the chairs. He knows enough about the twins to find that endearing, especially knowing that South isn’t very prone toward overt displays of affection toward North, and that North had been radiating intense concern when the pair had brought Washington in.

That doesn’t stop Maine from moving to North’s side and nudging him gently in the shoulder. Then a bit harder because North sleeps through the first touch. Then he was all out shaking the man and finally North was awake, fumbling for a gun that wasn’t there, and Maine forgave him the impulse because who among them wouldn’t come awake by immediately going for a weapon? There are still bags under the man’s eyes, still fear and concern as said eyes dart around and take in where they are, and that moment of realization as to why almost physically hurts even Maine.

“I fell asleep,” North says uselessly, and Maine just nods in response. When North moves toward the bed Maine puts himself in the way, looks down at him with as much hardness to his eyes as he can muster, and he knows it’s no small amount.

He stays there, between the Twins and Recovery as North slowly gets to his feet. Stays there while North gently wakes his sister and coaxes her to her feet. Stays there and watches as the pair shuffle out of the infirmary, leaning on each other as they go to find their beds. Lingers even a moment longer until they are out of sight before sighing and taking up the seat North had vacated and turning his attention to Washington.

Recovery isn’t like the rest of them. Maine had decided that months back, the first time the smaller man had just appeared in front of him in the middle of a battle. A flash of gray and gold that hadn’t seemed to rest in a single place, and always seemed to know when Maine was about to fire into the thick of things. Recovery was a force to be reckoned with, and that was coming from Maine, a man who excelled at turning around the impossible, taking the jobs that couldn’t be done by a single man, and doing them.

Wash wasn’t supposed to go out like this. None of them were supposed to go out like this. Maine himself knew how he would die. Broken and bloody, riddled with bullet holes and utterly alone on a muddy plain and he will have taken hundreds of men with him. The only reason he hadn’t had that happen yet was because Recovery had been there the last job, when it had been too close for comfort. When there had been three bullets through his shoulder, and another in the meat of his thigh.

Wash was like him. They were men who weren’t supposed to go quietly into that good night.

Maine resolved to sit at his side drive death off if that grim specter showed its face.

* * * * * *

Carolina

She hovers, but never quite sits by his bedside. Finds reasons to walk past the infirmary. Finds excuses to end up in the infirmary to do inventory checks. Knows Maine shakes his head every time he notices her over the course of the six hours he’s sitting there, silent, because they both know what she’s doing here. That she feels just as guilty as he does. She, after all, had been the one to give him the go ahead on the nomination, who let him go to Wash to suggest the partnership after he’d faced the other merc on opposite sides of a contract.

He’s lying on the infirmary bed, unmoving, and she shouldn’t have let him take the job.

“You’re hovering,” Maine finally says at the start of hour seven and the third time Carolina is running inventory and lamenting the surprisingly low stocks of painkillers of a variety of means.

“Says the man who is going on hour seven,” Carolina counters with a chuckle that doesn’t actually contain a hint of amusement so much as pain.

“He took the job on his own, ran it on his own, and managed to get the beacon operable before they did whatever they did to him,” Maine points out.

“That doesn’t make this any better,” Carolina snaps. “Look at him, Maine!”

Of course the shout makes her look at Washington, and she cringes. She doesn’t know who pulled Washington’s helmet off, but she wishes they hadn’t. Wishes he still had his coat and shirt on. Wishes she couldn’t see how pale he was, how lacking he was in bruises, how there is absolutely nothing about him explains the fact that he’s not moving except for his eyes rapidly darting around behind his eyelids, his body covered in a cold sweat, and still they had no answers.

“He deserves better than this,” Carolina continues weakly. “Everyone deserves better than this.”

“And yet it’s where we are. This is where he is. This is where you could have been if he hadn’t taken the job out from under your nose.”

He puts the reason for her guilt right out there before them. Holds it up despite the fact that she had been hiding from it. Washington is hurt because she had been distracted. Because she had let the whole team down by focusing elsewhere, focusing on the fallout from what she had seen when they’d gone into that facility and seen the damage the serum CT thought was pumping through Wash’s veins had done to people she cared about. She’d let herself fall apart, let the clients send her requests and leave them behind.

When Wash had offered to pick up the slack she’d let him. Hadn’t even thought to review the clients or the jobs or even to ask CT to look into anything. She’d left Wash on his own and this was what had happened.

“I wouldn’t have ended up like this,” Carolina insists, still not looking at Maine.

“You can’t honestly believe…”

“I can believe, Maine,” she insists, cutting him off. “I can believe it because I have to. The only way I get through this, the way I get through every last job no matter how hard, no matter how close it gets me to the edge, is by believing it.”

“Carolina…”

“I’m not going to die out there, Maine,” she continues, voice low and fierce. “I’m going to live, going to survive everything that is thrown at me. I’m going to retire some day, live a comfortable life far away from guns and blades and people throwing money at me to do morally questionable and highly illegal things. I know it, I believe it, I need to believe it. Because that’s how I get through the day.”

She doesn’t storm out, but it’s a near thing.

* * * * * *

York

To be honest, he doesn’t show up until the second day. It’s not that he meant to avoid the sight of Wash there, sweating on an infirmary bed, but…

He got back from the job he was working with Tex almost twenty hours after Wash’s emergency beacon had gone off. They had been too far away to help, too entangled in their own work, and even York had known it was pointless to try and go help. Tex hadn’t had to dissuade him, hadn’t had to point out that even if they had moved immediately, they wouldn’t have made it in time to do anything, that there were others closer, that…

The first thing he had done when they had gotten back had been to run to ask after Wash. Honestly, he’d expected to be told that the other man was already up and joking about how things had gone. He’d expected North and Wash sitting at the kitchen table sharing a drink and making tasteless jokes about some new scar Wash was always going to wear. Expected to be there with them, laughing and joking and basking in the relief.

Instead he had nervously approached the infirmary and frozen when he heard the shouting. North calling for help and South cursing violently and Carolina talking calmly while he listened to the sound of thrashing. He had meant to go in there, but instead he’d run, fled back to his room and locked the door and forced himself to go to sleep by sheer force of will alone.

He’s here now, though. Here hours late and probably a dollar short or however the saying goes. Here and the second he enters the room Maine is standing, nodding to him, walking toward the door. North is there, leaning against a wall, South at his side. She moves to go, moves to pull North with her. North waves her off and in a moment it’s the two of them together, York standing beside Wash’s bed, and North’s hand resting comfortingly on his shoulder.

It isn’t comforting.

“What happened?” he asks at last. “You were the one to find him, right?”

“He was collapsed in front of a computer bank on the job he had taken,” North explains quietly. “CT found a needle mark in the back of his neck. We think… We think they used a serum. It’s the only think that explains how he’s been.”

York nods his understanding. He’d seen first hand just what those things could to people, and the way it was running through Wash… He shrugs North’s hand off of his shoulder and shakes his head.

“How the fuck are we supposed to deal with shit like this?” York demands, pacing beside the bed. “It’s like the whole fucking world has gone insane while we weren’t looking. How is that even possible? How is any of this even possible? That stuff is just…”

“York…”

“Dammit this isn’t right!” he shouts, half hoping the noise would wake Wash, even though he knows it isn’t going to happen. “This isn’t right!”

“There’s nothing we can do about it.”

York tears away from the bed, from the arm North had just put around his shoulders, and paces. No, he doesn’t pace, he winds up at the nearest wall and slams his fist into it. Repeatedly. Does it until North is at his side, pulling him away from the wall, clutching York’s hand between his own. York just stares down at the mess of his knuckles, bleeding and go the pain in his arm is insane but he deserves it. Deserves it for not being there for Wash. Not being there to help him, not being there to protect him.

Not being there to bite the bullet for Wash.

“York…”

“This isn’t right,” he repeats, shaking his head. “It’s not supposed to be Wash, not like this.”

“We all know the risk when we go out there,” North insists, and York just pushes him away.

“No. You don’t get it. Yeah, he’s Recovery, yeah he’s damn good at what he does, yeah he took this job for Carolina, but that isn’t it. I’ve been working with him for well over a year. And the first time I’m not there on a job where he’s not being asked to cover someone’s ass, he’s fucked up like this.”

“Marcus,” North tries, voice quieter, and York refuses to let his name stop him.

“I’m supposed to be there, North. When he’s not saving someone else. I’m supposed to be there.”

“How would that have helped?”

“When I comes down to it, I’m supposed to be there, North. I’m supposed to stay behind to give him time to get away when a job goes wrong because of me. I’m supposed to be there to give him time to get away. I’m supposed to not slow him down. But this? This?! He doesn’t deserve this!”

North is silent for a while, a long while. Then York finds himself in North’s arms, being held tightly and there is comfort there.

It doesn’t make any of it hurt any less.

* * * * * *

Florida

“This is such a touching moment.”

Florida resists the urge to laugh at how quickly York jerks out of North’s arms, at how red the thief’s face goes, and at the dark look North shoots him. Instead he shrugs it off and moves to Washington’s beside. Stares down into the pale, sweat soaked face, and bites his lip at the sight. Not because he feels bad, even though he does feel a bit bad about it, but because at the beautiful potential for these serums that he’s only heard of in passing.

“What are you doing here?” York snaps, and Florida lets himself sigh before turning to look at the other two mercenaries in the room.

“Aren’t we supposed to care about our teammates?” Florida asks, his eyes darting quickly to the younger men and giving them his best disarming smile. “I haven’t had a chance to look in on him because of the job I was helping Wyoming with.”

He doesn’t quiet smile at the way York cringes, instead puts his attention on North who seems unaffected by the implication of assassination. York had always been a bit more sensitive about references to wet jobs, perhaps because his skill set didn’t really suit assassinations. Still, North meets his gaze levelly, and he’s got to give the young man that.

“He’s been out for how long now?”

“We’re on day two,” North provides, voice quiet. “Except for an episode earlier, he hasn’t so much as moved.”

“I see,” Florida answers, looking down at Wash. His fingers brush over the unconscious man’s arm. Sure enough Washington doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t even react.

“It’s a poor way to go.”

He catches the vicious snarl that flashes across York’s face, and doesn’t flinch when North starts to move toward him. Still, he’s thankful for the way York catches the taller man’s arm and holds him back.

“He’s not dying!” North insists, pain in his voice. “Something like this isn’t going to take Recovery down!”

Florida smiles, sits in the seat next to the bed, and just crosses his legs and folds his hands in his lap. “Oh, but the thing is that we all go in the least expected ways. Yes, I know how mercenaries operate. How we all sit back some nights and contemplate our mortality. It’s just human nature. But this…” He gestures toward Wash but keeps his eyes on North, “this is something none of us would expect. It’s the sort of thing we shouldn’t allow to happen to ourselves.”

“He didn’t allow this,” York growls. “None of us would have seen this coming.”

“We’ve seen how this plays out. Who knows if he’s going to be the same man when the serum has burned out,” Florida continues as if York hadn’t spoken. “It would be a favor to put him down.”

“Shut up,” North hisses, and Florida smiles.

“Honestly, in is position, with the number of people he’s pissed off, I would have expected a more sensible route from him. After all, who recovers Recovery?” Florida continues, keeping his voice pitched into genuine concern. “Clearly this time it was North, but in the future? Well, he knows more about the work the rest of us do here than anyone other than CT and myself. Knows far more than that. Really, he should take precautions.”

“Precautions?” York demands angrily, and Florida doesn’t flinch at the way the man releases North and his hands clench at his sides. Florida’s seen York in action, and he’s pretty sure he can take the other man in a fair fight. Knows he can in an unfair one. “What kind of precations?”

Florida gives them both another smile, a toothy one this time, and opens his mouth to tap a molar near the back of his jaw. “Cyanide capsule in a false tooth.” Of course he doesn’t take the correct tooth, that would be giving away too much. “Some people shouldn’t be let to fall into enemy hands.”

“This isn’t a war, Florida,” North reminds him, and Florida pushes himself out of his seat, tilts his head to the side as if in confusion, and lets himself grin.

“Really, North? I’ve been in this business longer than you’ve been alive, and I can assure you that it is a war. One you’ve chosen sides on already. It just takes time to recognize that. I hope it doesn’t come to you in a situation where you find yourself wishing you had taken the same precautions I do.”

He leaves them there, staring at him in shock, and he doesn’t laugh. If he did he knows it would have been bitter.

They’re children here, every last one of them. And they don’t realize what they’re up against.

He hopes they’ll never have to learn.

* * * * * *

Wyoming

He just finished cleaning his rifle and just started brewing water for tea in his electric kettle—how barbaric not to use a proper one, but the kitchen is filled with various worried mercenaries—when the knock comes at his door. Wyoming doesn’t need to ask to know it’s Florida, and doesn’t need to speak up for Florida to know that he’s not only there, but refusing company. He does have to wait nearly two minutes and another few rounds of knocking before the older man seems to take the silent dismissal to heart, though.

Over the first cup of tea he resolves that he won’t see Washington out until he’s conscious again. During the second he decides that he probably won’t actively seek the other mercenary out at that juncture. The third finds him certain that he couldn’t care less whether Washington ever wakes or not. The fourth, consumed almost three hours after the first, is when he almost gets up to go see the poor sod laid out flat in the infirmary. Where he almost breaks his own rule and shows affection for his teammate. Where he almost breaks.

Over the fifth he reminds himself that people go out of this world the way they come into it: ultimately alone.

And that it goes double for snipers.

* * * * * *

Connecticut

“Sample seventeen, negative,” she sighs into the microphone, setting the vial aside and Connie can’t help but raise her fingers to her eyes and rub at them.

She hasn’t slept since the Twins had come in, Washington held up between them. Every moment had been spent straining for an answer. She had drawn blood the second they’d gotten him on the bed and noticed the puncture wound. Started testing based on the limited samples they had on record within minutes, and she was still here, so many hours later that she wasn’t sure if it had been a day or a week, only that the job isn’t done yet.

More than anything, she wishes she didn’t have to be the one here, sitting, working, waiting for results. That’s the hardest part, Connie decides as she pipes another sample of blood onto a slide, followed by a new serum variation, and sets a cover on the whole thing. There’s a small voice in the back of her mind that says maybe she should have gone into medicine, but frankly, she ignores it. There’s no one else here remotely qualified to deal with this, and so it came down to her to try and get Wash out of this without the maddening solution of simply waiting.

Strange that, for all of her patience, Connie had never really gotten used to the idea of waiting. That wasn’t what her job normally entailed. She was an information specialist. She broke in, she prowled, she hacked, she processed. There had never really been the concept of down time in her line of work; it was always get up, go, retrieve, process, start all over again. The idea of sitting here like this, waiting for samples to process, slowly working through combinations, hoping to find the magic bullet as it were…

She was going crazy. It was like her own personal form of mental torture.

The very concept in her mind makes Connie freeze. Here she was complaining about something as harmless as having to wait, while Wash was in the infirmary, actually suffering. From what she’d heard of the serum he was injected with the man was trapped inside his own worst memories. Forced to live them over and over, never being freed from them, screaming in vain in his own mind while he broke down, little by little.

And yet she still couldn’t shake the terror that set in over her, the miasma of fear that suddenly permeated the room. Torture. That was what Wash was living through, paralyzed by, would have to live with for the rest of his life if he came out of this. And Connie was sure she was one of the few here who wouldn’t trade places with him for even a second.

She knows it. She’s always known it. It comes with being an information broker. If she’s ever caught she isn’t going to get the simple release of a bullet through her head. Or the slow, sleepy death that came with bleeding out. No slit through to make it quick, no body riddled with bullets, no hope of it lasting only seconds or minutes or even hours.

When she goes it’s going to take days. It’s going to be after her nails are pulled out of their beds, and her fingers are cut off and her body is broken and beaten and bloody and her skin seared and frozen and…

And when she goes out it’s going to be because she was broken down. Because someone took the time to work her over. Because someone gives her the knife after days of being tortured, physically and mentally.

She deals in secrets. And people like her don’t get to go easily.

They don’t get to go until every last drop is wrung from them.

* * * * * *

Texas

She watches them all fall apart. They do it in their own ways, they do it silently and mostly alone—in pairs at the very most—and she wants to roll her eyes as she watches them.

One man in a bed, unable to move, unable to think, unable to process, and they all fell apart.

Tex would like nothing more than to slam their heads together, sit them down in the common room or the infirmary, and make them deal with this together. Whether they knew it or not most of them were a family now. She could see that when she looked at them, in the ways they move around each other, and the ways they watch over Washington, and the ways they pointedly don’t talk about what everyone is thinking.

They’re all thinking about death. They’re all fearing what could happen to them. They’re falling into whatever habits they set for themselves when faced with mortality.

They are killing themselves like this. Death by a thousand emotional cuts.

She wishes it was at least physical ones. A thousand different pains, bruises, cuts, bullet wounds. Wishes it was a fight.

At least in a fight she would have been able to lash out at what was hurting her.

“He’s awake!”

Tex smiles as he hears York shout. Pushes off the kitchen wall and retreats to her room. Because at least this time the thousand cuts won’t be the end of her.

This time she’ll keep going on.