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WHO: Jake Jensen
WHERE: Around the village
WHEN: Forward-dated to July 25
OPEN TO: OTA
WARNINGS: Grief, aborted panic attack

Cougar disappearing for a day or two isn't unusual. He's always been the lone-wolf type, prone to withdrawing into himself and doing whatever the hell he feels like despite what anyone else might say, and Jake is used to that. He's used to him climbing trees and staying there all day, to parking himself on the roof and refusing to come down, to skulking around the shadowed corners of rooms and refusing to speak in anything more than the occasional grunt.

His looming shadow, far-flung as it might occasionally be, has become a central point to Jake's life, the lodestone around which his consciousness revolves.

Cougar has been missing for nearly five days.

At first, he'd explained it away. Cougar was out hunting. Cougar was setting his traps. Cougar was exploring. Cougar was sulking. Cougar was lying somewhere in the canyon, injured so badly he couldn't come crawling home, slowly bleeding out into the pine-needle-covered forest floor, wondering why Jake hadn't come to rescue him.

He hasn't had a panic attack since before he joined the Army. He feels alarmingly close to one now.

Cougar isn't in the smithy, and he isn't in the store room, and he isn't down by the waterfront. He isn't in the mill, or the cellar of their house, or perched on top of the Inn. Jake is rapidly running out of places to look, and the panic that's been clawing at his throat has really started to get its claws into him, squeezing tighter and tighter. Cougar can't be gone. He can't. They didn't survive Afghanistan and Bolivia only to let this shit hole village to separate them. He's not allowed to leave.

Frantic, and hiding it very badly, he grabs the sleeve of the next person he passes, for the moment utterly oblivious and uncaring of the fact that he looks like a wild man and could very well frighten the next person he grabs.

"Tell me you've seen Cougar," he demands, eyes wide and bloodshot behind his glasses. "Do you know where he is?"

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Moana had been walking home when with Itiiti when Jake came bounding into view. It didn't take much effort to tell that something was wrong. She paused when he asked about Cougar, her eyes widening at his words. No. Cougar had been one of the first people she'd meet in the village. She didn't want to think that he was gone.

"I haven't..." The words fell flat, as if turning to ash before she could get them out.

She glanced down at Itiiti before looking back up at Jake. "You've looked everywhere?" She asked feeling the tension in her shoulders mount. Itiiti could sense the tension but didn't know it's source. He gently headbutted Moana's ankle and then Jake's as if to remind them both that he was there too.

"We can look for him... in the forest."

He feels bad, a little, somewhere in the part of his brain that is able to detach from the knowledge that Cougar is gone and can focus on other things. Moana is young, and she's sweet, and he likes her. He knows she likes Cougar too, and his whole wild-eyed maniac routine is probably upsetting her.

He can't bring himself to care enough to do anything about it, though.

"I've looked in the forest," he replies, eyes drifting off to glance towards the trees, ignoring her pig as he butts up against his ankles. "I've looked everywhere."

"What if he's at home now? Or looking for you? How long have you been looking?" The questions flew out of her mouth, one after the other.

He was upsetting Moana but there was nothing to be done about it. She didn't want to think that Cougar was gone or that Jake was manically searching for him. It felt like a physical constriction in her chest, making it hard to breath.

"He can't be gone." She said finally, her tone sounding defeated. Jake was the closest to Cougar, if he couldn't find him... could anyone?

"He's not." Amazingly, running into someone else has apparently convinced Jake that his deepest defeatist thoughts were true; he seems to deflate right in front of her and suddenly looks tired. "He wouldn't disappear like this, even if he was mad at me. He would tell me if he was going to be gone for long."

For all that they're supposedly highly-trained government soldiers, the Losers had become a little bit codependent, Jake and Cougar in particular.

Cougar wouldn't just fuck off like this. He's all Jake has. He wouldn't.

Would he?

"Have you seen Vee?" he asks abruptly, turning his head sharply to look back at her. "Sometimes she stays at Kira's, but I haven't seen her lately either..."

Moana wanted to reach out towards Jake, to assure him that it would be okay, but she couldn't. She didn't know him very well and she knew that the action might not be very comforting. First Jean, then Rory and now Cougar... how many people were going to disappear? Riza... Jyn... Moana bit her lower lip trying to make her focus on the pinch of her skin.

Jake's next question forced Moana out of her thoughts.

"Vee? I don't know who that is." Moana might have seen her around but she'd never met her and the name didn't make a face come to mind.

He might appreciate the comfort, really. It's hard to tell, with Jake. Sometimes he waffles wildly between clingy and standoffish, and without the settling influence of Cougar in his day to day life, he's feeling distinctly unmoored.

"Veronica, sorry," he explains, letting go of her and talking half a step back, running a hand through his hair, probably making it looks ten times worse and not realizing. "About so tall," he continues, holding his hand out at approximately Veronica's height, "dark hair, kind of surly. She lives with us. She spends a lot of time with Kira but I haven't seen her lately and I haven't run into him yet."

Moana shook her head. "I haven't seen her." Though she knew Kira. "I did see Kira yesterday." She didn't always talk to Kira but he was around the village from time to time. He was one of the handful of people who thoroughly confused Moana and made her realize that her world was very different from his.

"Is she gone too..." She was still going to look for Cougar, with or without Jake's assistance but Moana honestly didn't think that he was here anymore. Not if Jake couldn't find him. She knew how close they were.

"Oh god..." The hand he'd used to swipe through his hair wipes across his face, dislodging his glasses for a moment before he rights them. "Not Vee too." She'd always tolerated him more for Cougar's sake than his own, he'd known that, but she was only eighteen. He was supposed to look after her.

Had he failed her too?

Abruptly, he lets out a loud string of Cantonese, swearing up a storm as he turns and kicks at a rock to let out some of the energy buzzing under his skin. It doesn't work very well, serving only to startle Moana's pig, but at least it's something for him to do. "Fuck!" he yells, then kicks at the rock again. "Fuck. Oh, fuck. What if he's dead, Moana? What if he's...dead..." He blanches, trailing off, though the thought is not a new one to him. What if Cougar is dead? What then?

Itiiti squeals very loudly and then hides behind Moana's ankles, trembling. She looked down at the piglet and then up at Jake. She had sailed with Maui and after that she was used to temper tantrums of grown men.

"He's not dead." Her voice was very firm for someone as young as she is. "And neither is Vee." She didn't know the girl but it felt right using the shortened version of her name.

"What we do now is keep going and we'll find them. Maybe not here but I've gone home before and time doesn't always line up. There isn't anything stopping us from finding a way out to find them." Of course they didn't know how to do that but they couldn't do anything if they didn't keep moving forward.

Jake's eyes are dark when he looks down at Moana, appreciating, in some abstract way, that she's a brave and determined girl who's trying to make the best of a bad situation and he should be grateful for that. If Beth turns out like Moana, he will be very pleased. But it's hard to think of Beth right now, harder still to listen to the teenager in front of him with her determined optimism, when all he wants to do is fall to the ground.

Cougar's gone. He left. Maybe not of his own volition, but he left, and now Jake doesn't know what to do.

Clay would never separate the two of them, having learned his lesson on that front early on. Jake hasn't run a mission without Cougar's voice low and warm in his ear for nearly a decade. He's not sure he can start now.

"You don't know that," he replies finally.

"I don't." Moana agreed in a stubborn tone.

She didn't know anything. It was something that Maui had said to her prior to coming back to the village. That had been months ago now but his words hadn't left her. She had her determination, her belief, and she didn't want to stop trying but there was no way for Moana to know what was in their future. "I only know if that I gave up now, nothing would get better."

She might not be able to fix anything but at least she'd go down saying that she tried.

Moana thought of her Grandmother, of the Heart of Te Fiti and of her island. There were so many people depending on her and while she sounded strong now, bit by bit it was crushing her.

Neil's reaction is on automatic- his head's somewhere else, he's less aware of the world around him than he should be, so the hand on his arm has him reaching and grabbing and twisting, faster than his thought processes can kick in.

He drops Jake's hand once he realizes- it's a worried guy, it's not a threat. He's still breathing hard, though, the adrenaline pumping through his veins. "Jesus Christ, mate, don't just grab someone like that."

He will step back and give him some space. "What're you looking for? A cougar?"

It's lucky that the guy he grabbed lets go quickly; Jake's responses have been dulled by days of not sleeping and frantically combing through the forest, but he's still Spec Ops and surprisingly good at hand-to-hand, and it would probably have gone over very badly if he slammed this guy to the floor.

The fact he doesn't recognize him doesn't register. There are new people here all the time, and Jake has turned into something of a homebody over the past few months, letting Cougar be the one to go out and socialize and forge connections in this fucking shit hole of a village while he tries to keep the home fires burning without going insane.

"No, Cougar," he corrects, irritated. "Yea high, Mexican, wears a cowboy hat."

It wouldn't have been fun for either of them, that's for sure- Neil's got his own set of military skills. Fortunately, Neil's got a pretty good sense of what's a threat and what's not and he can tell Jake's just freaking out.

"Right. Seen him around- he's gone? Just... missing?" He knows people leave sometimes. Jyn did. But there are a lot of other options for what could have happened- this place has dangers. "When's the last time you saw him? And where?"

Amy hasn't exactly been feeling very sociable lately, what with the grief of having lost Rory still sitting with her poorly. She hasn't really brushed her hair so much and she doesn't remember washing her clothes in a while, but even she's with it enough to know that being accosted by a madman asking about animals isn't normal. She lets out an affront sound and smacks at his shoulder to get him to let go of her, drawn from her grief by good old anger.

"Oi," she snaps at him. "Hasn't anyone ever told you not to go around grabbing strangers? You're lucky I didn't kick you," she says, with a pointed look downwards towards his private areas. In fact, she shouldn't rule that out so quickly, should she? Best to leave options on the table.

Jake doesn't even notice that the readhead he accosts looks just as bad as he does, staring intently into her face. He does let her go, though, and takes half a step back, but he doesn't apologize.

"Have you seen Cougar?" he asks again, ignoring her scolding because it's not important in the grand scheme of things. She can be angry with him all she likes; he has to find out where the fuck Cougar is. "He left his hat at home. He takes it everywhere. I need to find him to give him his hat."

It's possible that the lack of sleep is starting to get to him.

Amy gives him a strange look, at first thinking that she's being attacked by a weird man who's way too into animals, but then she remembers that Moana had been talking about a man named Cougar who gave her a bunny, which means that it must be a person of some kind. Not that any of this makes it better or less weird, but at least she can make a slight connection and deal with it.

"I've never met your weird animal friend," Amy replies sharply, rubbing at her arm slightly, like it actually hurts. She eyes the hat, then the man, and softens slightly because she has a bad feeling she knows how this goes. "Are you sure he left it behind?" she asks, the grief from losing Rory still stuck in her throat.

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