Bang Bang

[thecatinahat]

WHO: Cougar Alvarez
WHERE: Near the Canyon
WHEN: July 11th - Later
OPEN TO: Jake Jensen
WARNINGS: n/a
STATUS: Closed

---

After establishing a place in a house (one that isn't as alone as he'd expect, thanks to Veronica), Cougar heads out again. There are things he needs to do to feel comfortable in his surroundings and one of them is a weapon. If he can't buy one, then he'll have to make one. He's able to find a few tools in the kitchen of the house. He just needs a knife to start, though an axe would do the job, too. Skirting the canyon walls, Cougar follows the river to look for downed tree branches that are dry, long enough to make the longbow he intends to equip himself with.

Not a rifle, but then, where would he get more ammunition?

He thinks he's alone until he starts to hit closer to town and footsteps send him running into the trees, gracefully ascending a low-hanging one with enough cover to hide in. Because, the thing is, after spending years in close quarters and on missions, you start to understand people's habits and sounds. That sound? Those breaths, those footsteps, they're familiar.

Cougar isn't sure he wants to let himself be hopeful.

The last time he allowed that, twenty-five children boarded a plane to the sound of his promises and then never got to see another day. They are with God now and Cougar is here, waiting until his time is up and he goes to the pit. Hope, hope is on his breath and he waits to see who comes past the path and whether he is actually that lucky or whether his mind is beginning to play tricks on him during the day, too.

Comments

[igotacrossbow]

Jake tests the mattress by flopping down on the bed, making a surprised and happy noise when it springs up beneath him, supporting his not inconsiderable weight with relative ease. It feels like there's actual springs in there, which has the potential for being very uncomfortable, but at the moment it's great. Way better than a bedroll on the hard, rocky ground.

"Of course you picked the room with the fireplace." He laughs, pushing himself up to his feet with a little hop, and goes to poke through the dresser. "Nobody listens to me when I say you're a secret hedonist, but you are. I can see right through you, Cougsy baby, I know you're a man who likes his creature comforts."

[thecatinahat]

He shrugs again. Around Jensen, his shrugs are practically a whole other language, but lucky that Jensen has made himself fluent in it a good deal of time ago. He does like nice things. Chocolate, scarves, clothes, and rooms. He knows how to live without them, but he likes them when he has them.

"So?" is his challenge, curious what Jensen will do if poked like this.

[igotacrossbow]

"So why do you think I hang around you so much?" he asks, looking up from the drawer he's peering into and smirking. "Your scintillating conversation? Nah, brah, it's your chocolate."

That's a lie. He hangs around Cougar because Cougar is the coolest, and Jake's been half in love with him for nearly a decade. Cougar is his best friend, and Jake would raze this whole town if something happened to him.

[thecatinahat]

"Soy un excelente conversador," he says with prideful dignity, sniffing at the insult. He also knows that Jensen hangs around him because Cougar saves his life on the regular with well-placed bullets when Jensen's plans and mouth run away from him. He taps Jensen's chest with a palm, right over his heart. "And you would be dead, if not for me."

[igotacrossbow]

Jake can't help himself, he laughs. "Sure you are, buddy," he chortles, abandoning the dresser to poke his head in the closet instead. Nothing of import there, but it was still a good idea to check out, as he found a few hangers, which might wind up being good for something. Hanging clothes, if nothing else.

When Cougar comes up to him and places his hand on Jake's chest, he lifts his own hand to cover it and press it more firmly against his chest. "I know," is his simple response, all the laughter gone, deadly serious in a way Jake hardly ever is. He doesn't ever want Cougar thinking he doesn't appreciate him or something. Jake is well aware he'd be dead a hundred times over without Cougar's eagle eye watching over him. "You're like my own personal guardian angel," he quips, his tone much lighter than before. "Always watching out for me."

[thecatinahat]

"I have your six," is Cougar's response with a shrug, patting Jensen's chest one more time as he thinks of all the times he's covered the team and what that means for his own hands. The blood there, most recently, is the blood he can't forget. Because Roque is someone he went from protecting to killing and he still doesn't know how to reconcile that.

"You abuse it," he accuses. "Make stories. Fun."

[igotacrossbow]

"Well someone has to have fun around here," is Jake's justification for making up stories about Cougar. He likes to exaggerate and see how far he can push before either Cougar speaks up or someone else calls bullshit. Usually it takes a long time.

"So how long have you actually been here?"

[thecatinahat]

He's been keeping track of the time, of course. "Two weeks, maybe a day," he says, which is longer than he likes to be without his team. He's done it before in bad situations, places where he couldn't be with them and had to be in a sniper's nest alone, but that's not a choice. It's the job.

"There is fun," he says darkly, giving Jensen a warning look. "Then there is stupid. "Experimento de gobierno?"

[igotacrossbow]

He whistles lowly, shaking his head and rehung out to clap Cougar on the shoulder in sympathy. "Damn." He'd probably go stir-crazy, not being able to see his team, his family, anything. Cougar has always been more patient than him, but that still must have been difficult.

"And hey! The government experiment thing worked great, okay, you totally backed me up there and it was hilarious."

[thecatinahat]

The truth is that in Cougar's dark and twisted sense of humour, he does find Jensen's antics funny. He'd found it funnier watching the security guards go down one by one, but it did have the unfortunate side effect of boosting Jensen's ego, making him that much overconfident.

But, watching them crumple. Yes, worth it.

He doesn't push Jensen's hand away because it would just come back. "No stories here," he warns. Mainly because he has no weapon, yet.

[igotacrossbow]

Cougar finds him funny because Cougar is his best friend. They were meant to be. Every time he makes Cougar laugh (or at least smirk, since outright laughter is very unusual for him), Jake feels a swell of pride that honestly sometimes chokes him. Luckily, he's so used to an overwhelming swell of emotion where Cougar is concerned that he's able to keep it under wraps.

"Aww, Cougs, you never let me have any fun."

[thecatinahat]

There's no weapon that will defend Jensen when he starts running his mouth like an idiota, which he does as well as his shirts glare. The slingshot is fine for small things, but not for some of the people he's run into here. He can't even begin to imagine Frank going down because of a small arms.

He shakes his head vehemently. "Let you have too much fun," he says knowingly.

[igotacrossbow]

"There's no such thing as too much fun," Jake protests, shaking his head sadly at how much of a stick in the mud Cougar is. "You need to loosen up, buddy. Hey, are there cards here? We can teach your teenage ward to play poker and you can teach her to cheat shamelessly."

[thecatinahat]

Now that's an idea. Cougar pries himself away from Jensen to head back to the man's room and start picking through his pack like it's his, trying to find out what's in there and what differs. He makes a grunted noise of affront when he finds no cards or anything other than all the things that had turned up with him.

"No comms?"

[igotacrossbow]

Cougar helping himself to whatever there is to find in Jake's pack is pretty par for the course, and he doesn't even protest when Cougar starts rifling through it. "God, I wish. Not even a fucking Nokia, man, this place is some horrible backwater, I don't know if I'm gonna make it."

[thecatinahat]

Cougar heads back to his own room to dig out the things from his own that he either doesn't want or need (mainly the pairs of underwear that he hasn't shredded for cloth along with the longjohns) and brings them back to Jensen's room to give to him, stealing a pair of socks to make up for it, because his feet are chilled in this damp air.

He shoots Jensen a look while he does this to say that after the things they've seen and survived, this should be a cakewalk.

[igotacrossbow]

When Cougar comes back with a spare set of clothes, Jake grins and immediately starts to struggle out of his still-soaking clothes. They're drier now than they were when he originally tumbled out of the fountain, but they're still clinging uncomfortably and he's freezing.

"Thanks, bro," he says, muffled by the wet shirt he's trying to yank off his head. It falls with a sad-sounding plop onto the floor, and then he's immediately shimmying out of his wet bottoms too. He's been naked around Cougar enough not to be really self-conscious about nudity, and he's too cold to care.

Cougar's pants are too short for him by a few inches, but they're warm and dry, and he reaches for a tank instead of the other scrub top option so he won't burst any seams.

[thecatinahat]

Cougar intends to keep the socks, as he intends to let Jensen keep the things he's brought into this room. Then again, he's not sure Jensen will even use the underpants, given his habit of going free, as well. Easier to deal with, really. "Hungry?" he asks, not sure when the last time Jensen ate was.

Besides, if Jensen wants anything but the nuts and berries he's foraged, they have to go hunting.

[igotacrossbow]

It doesn't occur to him that they won't share clothes when they have to; for all that they're built differently and have always had different senses of style (Jake's is under appreciated as usual), it has never seemed weird for him to bundle Cougar's laundry in with his when laundry is something that can actually be done, and so that's resulted in a few mix-ups of shirts and socks and even underwear sometimes.

He pauses, adjusting the waistband of Cougar's pants low on his hips, and seems to actually think about this. Jake is usually hungry all the time, his high metabolism making him always want to be grazing.

"Eh, kinda." He makes a see-saw motion with his hand. "I'm okay, though."

[thecatinahat]

Cougar gives a quiet noise in the back of his throat that translates to 'good, because I don't want to go hunting right now without a weapon'. Or, it translates to that if you're Jensen. He perches on the edge of Jensen's bed, prying off his cap to run his hands through his hair, and then sizes Jensen up.

"Who did you meet?"

He must have encountered someone other than Cougar, on his way out of the fountain.

[igotacrossbow]

Jake flops himself down onto the bed beside Cougar, lying back against the mattress and folding his hands over his belly.

"I met Jo," he says, idly scratching himself through his shirt, "and Peggy. She seemed pretty cool, do you know her?" Peggy made something of an impression on Jake. He likes dark hair and sharp eyes, and Peggy definitely fit his type. "I think I might have met your teenager, too, I ran into a young girl near the tree line."

[teen_angst_bullshit]

"Cougar!" Veronica calls as she shoulders open the front door. Catching the faint sounds of movement in the bedroom, she steps hastily through the front room, bag bumping heavily against her back.

"Another person totally just came out of the fountain," she's saying as she steps through the open door. "I went out to look for firewood, and there's this guy dripping wet just right there in the street—"

Pausing in slinging the bag from her shoulder, she falters, blinking.

"Oh," she says. "You found him."

Her face goes slightly pinched with the knowledge that she's maybe interrupted something that apparently happened incredibly fast, which seems a little weird, but it's not like she knows Cougar all that well. The guy is cute and it's not like she's Mother Theresa herself, so she just takes a slow backward step, lifting a palm.

"I'm just... going to go put this stuff away."

[thecatinahat]

Cougar's aware that if Jensen were a stranger, this might look bad. Him perched on the bed, Jensen sprawled out beside him. He gives Veronica a patient look, a touch amused by the notion that he could work that fast (which, he can, but that's not his prerogative). "Jake Jensen," he says to her, with a gesture.

"From home," is added, the corners of his lips going up a little. He gives Jensen a warning look, to be nice and not scare the poor girl.

[igotacrossbow]

"Hi!" Jake chirps, even more cheerful now that he's not wet, and props himself up on his elbows so he can wave at the girl who must be Veronica.

"Thanks for looking after my buddy," he continues, leaning into Cougar's space and bumping against him to send him rocking because he knows he'll get away with it and that's the reason for half the things he does around Cougar. "I know he can be a bit of a handful."

[teen_angst_bullshit]

"Ah," Veronica says with a slow nod, but her expression of comprehension is quickly replaced by a pinched look of confusion.

"Hi. Again," she absently says, and then flicks a look between the two of them. "Does that not strike you as a little odd? Is there anybody else here from the same place?"