sixthiterationlogs | 002; here's a fellow in blue jeans dancing with an older queen

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002; here's a fellow in blue jeans dancing with an older queen

WHO: Jake Jensen
WHERE: Edge of the woods/Jake's back yard
WHEN: August 8th, mid-afternoon
OPEN TO: OTA!
WARNINGS: Slightly off-key singing, but that's it
STATUS: Open

Waking up to find a small, yipping box on their front porch had definitely been outside the ordinary, but Jake had fallen head-over-heels in love with the little, wiggling puppy he found inside. He's always been a sucker for dogs. The first day had been spent mostly lying on the floor, playing with the little pup and letting it chew on his hands (he knows he shouldn't allow it to do that, but it's so cute), but then he had to braid it some kind of harness/leash get-up so he wouldn't run away. He may not have a name yet, but Jake would be absolutely devastated if he lost his smol dog son.

The sheet he'd wound up tearing into strips and braiding into a leash for the dog was a pale blue color, and Jake has to admire how it sets off the pale blue of the dog's eyes. His dog is so handsome! He'd taken him on a long walk around the village earlier in the morning to show him off, but then, unfortunately, duty calls. He'd promised Cougar earlier he'd start a wood pile, so despite the distraction of the puppy, he heads out to the forest to start hauling wood back to the house.

Using a rusty axe head that he'd managed to sharpen on a stone and fit with a new handle as the old one had all but rotted away, Jake manages to make it to the end of their little "yard" before the puppy's whining brought him back.

Which is how he finds himself with a dog leash in one hand and an axe in the other, singing to himself as he walks into the forest.

He's worked through most of Sam Cooke's greatest hits by the time he returns to the house, the dog leash tied around his waist so he can still hold the axe in one hand, the other being occupied with carrying the tree limbs he'd managed to hack down. There's a tree stump near the edge of what he considers the yard that will be perfect for splitting wood, and a scraggly looking bush he can tie the puppy to so he won't run away. It's as good a set up as he's going to ever get, so he sets himself to the task at hand, getting into a rhythm pretty quickly with the chopping.

He gets so into the swing of things that he actually starts swinging; his hips, that is. Dancing whilst chopping wood is a delicate maneuver, but he manages it, bopping along to his rendition of soul classics.

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"Cougar, just do it," he says, fighting the urge to roll his eyes. "I have all of this wood to finish, plus I really should go back and get more, considering how much of it we go through to heat the stove. You take on the dog, okay?"

The puppy is still wriggling in his hands, straining to get closer to Cougar. Earlier, he was giving him a good cuddle, and the dog is smart enough to want more of that.

He yips, seeming to agree with Jake. "C'mon."

"¿Por qué siempre me enamoro de hombres estúpidos," Cougar snaps at Jake as he reaches out to take the dog without as much gentle care as he had before, carrying him to where the leash is sitting so he can latch him back onto it, shaking his head. "Stupid," he says in English, with a pointed look at Jake as he goes inside to get morsels of food to use on the dog.

"Idiot," he lashes out again when he's outside, perching on the stoop as he starts to work hand signals with the dog, bristling at Jake's refusal to accept a gift as his.

"Be nice!" he chides when Cougar grabs at the dog.

Sensing the change in his owners' moods, the puppy starts to whine quietly, a noise that drowns out Cougar's bitterly mumbled Spanish and prompts Jake to frown sharply at him. "Ignore your papi, baby," he coos at the dog, leaning in to kiss its head again, shooting Cougar something of a glare as he straightens. "He's just being a jerk."

Cougar calling him names gets a complicated hand gesture in return that is most likely rude in some language or other, but Jake has returned to his wood pile, so he's too far away to hold a conversation.

Cougar goes still and frozen when Jake uses that word for him about the dog, which is possibly the last straw for him. He gives up on the dog and heads over to the wood pile to start grabbing split logs and hauling them inside, ridding his cap along the way so his hair starts to curl and frizz in the humidity.

When he's taken away every last one of them, the dog has managed to get close enough to stare at them with his head cocked, like a child about to see its parents fight. And maybe that isn't so far off what is about to happen. "Why are you always so willing to let me step in and take over?"

Jake is used to putting his foot in his mouth, but usually it's not where Cougar is concerned. He's always been more forgiving of Jake's Jakeness than the others, but Jake is honestly feeling so attacked right now and he doesn't know what he did wrong.

Cougar dumps the dog on the ground and stalks off towards Jake's wood pile, hauling it all inside and leaving Jake staring at him like he's grown a second head.

"Well fuck you too, Cougar," he grumbles, trying to sound annoyed but being too confused to really sell it. Cougar snaps at him when he's finished, and Jake crosses his arms over his chest defensively. "Because that's what you do?" he offers, not knowing what Cougar wants him to say. As the newest member of the Losers, as a lowly Corporal, Jake tends to let the others step in and take charge of things, following their suggestions (it's not quite right to call them orders) when they make sense and ignoring them when they don't. "Why are you so mad at me?"

Cougar hauls the leash and the dog over closer to Jake, so it can't slip away, retying it closer to the stump. Once he's there, he points at Jake, thinking the heaviness of that gesture will show. "Because you get all excited about the dog. Then, as soon as I talk about if he will help me, you deflate."

Around them, the dog is starting to prance and twist, the leash starting to wrap around Cougar's ankles without him realizing because he's poking a finger against Jake's bare chest. "He's your dog. He will help me, yes, but he's yours. And you act like he should be mine."

"You're upset," he says. "And it's me that..." He'd go on, but when he steps in to try and push at Jake again, he realizes that the dog has wound the leash up so tightly around his ankles that he's tripping, about to smack his chin on the ground any second.

"I did not!" he protests, even though that's exactly what he did. He feels he can't be blamed, though. "And I never said he should be yours." Just that he would like him better. There's a slight difference, there. As someone who likes Cougar better than most other people (most of the time), Jake feels he can relate to the puppy in this instance.

The dog is picking up on their distress, wiggling around between them on the ground, whining quietly and just generally being cute but also concerned. Jake relates to that too.

"No, Cougar—" he starts, only to have Cougar attempt to take a step closer and immediately lose his footing, pitching forward, his arms windmilling. It takes no thought at all to lunge closer and reach out to halt his fall, big hands closing on Cougar's waist to hold him steady, his body angled to support his friend's should he need it. "Whoah, careful."

There are things that can break through the deep mire of denial and the line that Cougar's vowed never to cross. When Jake presses his hands to his waist, he has the good grace to think that at least he's not the one who's shirtless, because Jake's big thumbs on his sweaty, bare skin might be a step too far.

As it is, his brain stutters and stalls a little, his ankles still bound together by the leash and his lower height tipping him into Jake's arms so he has to look up. Swallowing back something in his throat, he's not sure what he should say.

"Creo que podríamos necesitar para hablar."

Necesitar and hablar are words Jake knows, but together they never really had very good connotations. Still, he shrugs gamely, shifting to slide Cougar back onto his feet and then dropping down to his knees to start to untangle the puppy from around his ankles.

"What do you want to talk about?" he asks, still kneeling on the ground, looking up over the rims of his glasses.

As much as Cougar is trying to keep his breathing even, it gets a little sharper when Jake descends to his knees to start untangling the leash, glistening and showing off all that skin. He wants to demand whether Jake understands what he's doing to him, but anything he'll say will be rough and helpless.

Every night, they lie there curled up together with barely a hint of space between them. And somehow, it's this that's pushing him over the edge. "Sabes lo que estás haciendo a mí?" he manages hoarsely.

And if he doesn't, then it's just Cougar who feels like this. He reddens a little, embarrassed at the idea that it's only his feelings that go that way. Still, he reaches out and his fingers glide over Jake's neck as they settle for a firm hand on his shoulder.

"Don't," is all he says quietly. "Not kind to tease me."

Cougar is acting very strange today. Granted, Cougar's barometer for strange is way off everyone else's, but Jake knows him well enough to know when something's up. He just doesn't know what.

Cougar's looking at him like he's done something, but Jake honestly doesn't know what that might be. The dog thing is brand new, and mostly worked out already, and he can't think of anything else he's done today to upset him. He washed some laundry and hung it up to dry, and he got more firewood like he promised he would. What else has he done?

Sabes means 'know' (he thinks), and me is obvious, but the middle bit is kind of a blur. "Know what?" he asks gently, not wanting to upset Cougar further but needing clarification.

The hand on his shoulder makes him still, a firm touch all he needs to calm for a moment. What Cougar says makes him feel somewhat less than calm, though. "I'm...not?" he tries, confused. "Cougs, what—what do you mean?" Surely not... No. He can't. Can he? No way. Not Cougar.

Cougar knows that he's been bad at signals in the past. For all that he might prevent women (and the occasional man) from getting close to Jensen, whether it's with tranq guns or taking them himself, he's also never acted on it. Instead, he's just stepped in. He'd not brave enough to do much more than prevent Jensen from getting close to someone else. Still, he thinks he had a good reason before.

They were a team. They had a mission. For a long while, they were in the army and there were rules about this sort of thing.

His smile is a touch sad as he steps out of the leash and dusts himself off, even though he'd never hit the ground. It's not like Jake's the only one quick to get his clothes off, but for some reason, between the manhandling and the place on his knees, it's reminding him that they're not army anymore. They hadn't been, not even after LA. "You're always so friendly and charming," he says, not accusatory. "Such a good man." He presses a hand to his chest, in apology. "I read too much into it, I think."

"Cougs, I..." Jake flounders, at a loss for words. Which, as anyone who knows him knows, is a rarity.

He scrambles to his feet when Cougar backs away, feeling like he can't let this moment slip through his grasp but not knowing what to do about it. Cougar, famous for being non-communicative at best, has shockingly not given him much to work with. And what he has said could, technically, be taken strictly platonically. Jake could be reading too much into all of this, his idle wishful fantasies, quickly suppressed, bubbling up to the surface to fuck up his best and closest friendship.

The emotional whiplash between Cougar being pissy a minute ago and the way Cougar is smiling at him now is also disorienting.

"W-what did you read?" he asks, shuffling a little bit closer seemingly without realizing it, his hands flexing at his sides like he wants to reach out but is too afraid.

He has to do this right. Cougar is very bad at English at the best of times because he's never needed to learn the language. He's thinking that now, that needs to change. He must focus and get these words across right, or Jake will read into them wrong and he thinks they might not get this chance again. Maybe it's the isolation of not having anyone else here because it means there is no expectations on him.

There are many pretty women here, but without the army or Max, Cougar's instincts gravitate towards wanting someone who understands and is there with him. Jake has been curling up with him at night to soothe away his terrors, and he thinks that maybe, maybe he is just reading too much.

He reaches out to take Jake's hand into his, holding it level. "I think maybe, we do not talk enough about important things."

Jake has a bad habit of leaping to conclusions and assuming the worst, so perhaps it's a good thing that Cougar is trying so hard to choose the right words. On the other hand, the long pauses aren't doing anything for the nerves that have suddenly tied his stomach in knots, so it's more of a 'six of one, half a dozen of the other' kind of situation.

This is important, though. He bites his tongue to keep himself from blurting out anything stupid, and watches as Cougar searches for the words to speak his mind.

"We talk," he protests, his eyes wide behind his lenses as Cougar lifts his hand. "Well, I talk and you grunt, but it's the same thing."

"If you do not know how highly I think about you, then we don't talk enough," Cougar replies pointedly, because he still thinks that Jake is teasing him a little. He moves the pad of his thumb slowly over Jake's knuckles and taps twice against his palm. "Look," he says, sliding into the big stuff.

"I'm bad at showing this, yes. Before, I couldn't. We could not tell, if asked. And so I just made sure you would not find permanency with anyone else." He shrugs, all the apology Jake will get. Releasing his hand, he knows that it's not the most honourable of actions. "I'm not sure I deserve to ask for a chance."

It's not Cougar's fault that Jake has a very deeply internalized sense of low self esteem. Well, it sort of is his fault, as practically every time Jake has tried to score with anyone, anywhere, he's struck out because Cougar manages to turn on his nonverbal charm the moment he's making headway and whoever he's talking to immediately turns their attentions to his teammate.

Once, memorably, he'd managed to take a girl home, only to wake up in the middle of the night to find her trying to sneak into Cougar's room.

He never spoke about it again.

But this... Well, it's something of a vindication to hear that Cougar was doing it deliberately (maybe not with Megan, though), but that doesn't stop him from being irritated about it. What the fuck, Cougar. You don't do that to your bro, man, that's not cool. He'll yell at him about it later, though, right now he's busy.

"But Cougs, you're...you're straight..."

He raises his brow and shrugs, like he's not talking about a very serious topic. "Disowned at eighteen, wasn't for kissing a girl," is his even reply, not wanting to talk much of Jésus because he thinks the last thing Jake wants to know about right now is Cougar's ex-boyfriend. "Army," he reminds Jake pointedly, seeing as he wasn't about to get himself kicked out of somewhere twice for his proclivities.

"Don't get me wrong, I like women very much," he promises. "Not that narrow minded, is all."

"Oh," he breathes, more than a little stunned. "You never said," he continues after a moment, his eyes flicking back up to meet Cougar's after they'd drifted down while he was turning this new information over in his head. "You never even searched for gay porn or anything!" he accuses, his voice picking up a little more steam as the knowledge that Cougar likes guys too settles in. "I've seen all of your search history, even the deleted stuff — and trust me, you do not want to know the stuff Clay googles on his down time — and there was nothing!"

Not that it should matter, anyway. Cougar liking men too doesn't change anything, except in all the ways that it does.

The puppy, hearing Jake raise his voice, joins in with little yipping barks that Jake ignores for the moment.

"I wouldn't have told anyone. You could have told me."

It's because it's his personal life. If Jake had noticed, Cougar searched for very little outside of hat suppliers, weather, and the occasional check in to see what his sisters are up to (despite the fact that his parents would never let him contact them). He leans down to dig his fingers into the dog's fur, hushing him with a soothing, "Calmate", though he never takes his eyes off Jake.

"It wasn't important to the team," is his heated reply. "Why should I have told you?"

Cougar's reply makes him feel even more distressed than before. "Because I thought we were more than just teammates!" he exclaims, looking hurt. "I thought we were friends."

Yes, he's aware he's being a little hypocritical right now. He also hasn't told Cougar anything about the way his own eyes linger sometimes, but he's never done anything about those urges. Never. Not before the Army, not after. He'd never had much opportunity to do anything about it, even if he wanted, and he'd always been too scared to risk getting put in hospital by one of his fellow soldiers for being a fag.

It's hard to imagine Cougar being scared of anything, though, so it doesn't quite register that maybe he had those same fears.

"And what?" Cougar challenges. "You would have come out with me when I snuck away from the team to dingy, seedy bars when I needed something specific? Kept it from the team when Clay asked a question just close enough to be dangerous? Not flinched when I started to look at you too long where Roque would have seen and you knew why?"

He heaves in a sharp breath, having spoken too much.

"I'm telling you now," he says calmly. "As your friend."

"I would have gone with you," Jake insists quietly, his jaw clenched belligerently. "Or covered for you if you wanted to be alone. I—" his voice dies in his throat as he tries to explain that he wouldn't have minded going to those bars with Cougar for more than one reason, and none of them are because he's such a good friend.

"I would have wanted to go," he finally makes himself say, ducking down to pick up the dog so he can fuss with it and not make eye contact. "With you. To those bars."

Still mostly ducked over the wriggling puppy, he chances a glance up to see Cougar's face, knowing that he needs to see his expression to know what he's thinking. Cougar and plain words have never been close friends.

Cougar has his teeth on his inner cheek, absently chewing as if it's not flesh, but something else. He's clever enough and able to read between the lines enough to know what Jake is saying. The thing is, part of him has always known that. Where his doubt lies is more in the place where he'd never thought it geared towards him. "Pink shirt," he reminds him. "I knew."

He exhales and lets his gaze slide over Jake, his smile as filled with grief as it ever is when he thinks about something like this. "Maybe," he starts, roughly, "I need to stop being so selfish. I keep you from people you could be with, but I am not a good boyfriend." It hurts to say, but he thinks he needs to. "It's no good, though, thinking of you serious, with someone else."

"Straight guys wear pink!" Jake protests, forgetting his nerves for a moment in the rush of indignation at such strict gender roles. "And it was Beth's team!" He'd wear pretty much anything on a t-shirt to support his niece, a hot pink shirt with a big flower on the front is small change.

Jake Jensen has been called both a genius and a complete moron, but he doesn't have to be either to figure out what Cougar is saying right now.

Yes, this is all coming as a surprise, and part of him wants to wander off somewhere to process this, but he knows Cougar well enough to know that if he leaves, Cougar is going to dig himself into a giant pit of Catholic guilt and self-recrimination that will be next to impossible to haul him out of later. So. No running away to process. Time to process on the fly.

"You aren't a boyfriend at all," he points out, a little dazed. "I had no idea you even liked men in general, let alone liked me." Which is still fucking crazy to think about. He sighs, cradling the puppy up to his chest, letting it lick at his chin and wriggle even more in his arms. "So you want me, huh?" He likes to think he's handling this well, all things considered.

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