A/N: Mike Makaze: this chapter title's for you, you glorious Trinity-reference-getter you

Red or any shade thereof was blissfully absent in the days that followed Jesse's meeting with Morrison.

He wasn't religious by any means, but he was thanking something for that.

The longer he went, the further along he got from the Falkland incident, the less it seemed to pull from him. The few times he startled, went for a gun that wasn't there, aimed to fire a rubber bullet that wouldn't kill, the need for eight, eight, eight became seven, seven.

Another day passed, and it became six.

He didn't know how it was happening, but somehow, someway, he was managing his Deadeye.

The second he realized it, he had a goal. He would stay away, far away from the shooting range, from a live-fire rifle, from anything that could so much as nudge Deadeye into action until he felt that urge creep past one, one, one into none. If he could lie, plead sickness, sign on for extra KP, do anything to get out of his Thursday session with Amari— without attracting Gabriel's attention— he might, just might win out against himself.

No, he wasn't religious.

But he sure as hell was starting to feel like he might have to be to make it through this.

"What did O'Deorain have to say?"

Jesse looked up from the communications terminal he'd been seated at for a little more than an hour now. Gabriel had been running him through the basics all afternoon— callsigns and morse and enough codes to make his head spin.

He'd ordered him to the Butcher's office two days ago. It was a surprise to hear him ask about the event now, to say the least— Jesse'd been expecting the question a lot sooner. On the bright side it meant he'd had plenty of time to come up with a proper answer.

But that didn't stop him from trying to dodge the topic altogether.

"Y'didn't ask her yourself?"

"Medical's offline," Gabriel said with an odd grimace. "Couldn't get in to the database to check for results."

The conversation he'd overheard between Winston and Angela on the seventh floor all those nights ago crept back to Jesse, and his forehead wrinkled as he wached the commander carefully.

"Yeah, but you could've asked her," Jesse said matter-of-factly."Y'know, in person."

Gabriel didn't look at him, choosing instead to scan the mock-message Jesse had been drafting up to relay to his mock-agents in the field. "She's a busy woman."

And just like that, something clicked.

Gabriel glanced away from the terminal at the prolonged silence to see Jesse staring at him with an open mouth. He frowned in return.

"What?"

"You're afraid of her."

Gabriel leveled him with his standard Unimpressed Look #3— the one with the weird thing he did with his chin. "Terrified," he said, the word completely flat.

Oooo-kay, then, nope. That wasn't it.

"Well, somethin' about her puts you off. Y'don't like talkin' to her face to face."

Gabriel looked pointedly back to the screen.

Huh. Guess that much was true, 'least.

"I haven't had the time to," he said bluntly. "And you didn't answer my question. What did she tell you?"

Jesse stretched his arms high overhead, groaning at the first movement he'd made in almost an hour. He was careful not to show it, but the realization that Gabriel wouldn't be talking to the doctor face to face anytime soon made it that much easier to lie to his face.

"Nothin' to it. Sensitive ears. Should be gone by tomorrow."

Egyptian silk had nothing on just how smoothly that little fib had been delivered. Gabriel was quiet as he stared at the terminal.

"Run this one again," he said, dropping the topic entirely. Jesse couldn't be sure who's benefit that was for as the commander jabbed a finger at the screen. "You're all over the place."

"Huh?" Jesse squinted at the coded message he'd painstakingly typed out over the course of the last fifteen minutes, his eyes drifting across the screen. "'s wrong with it?"

"You're supposed to be cueing your flanking team in on an unknown signal at their four o'clock."

"Yeah, I know. What'd I say?"

"You told your pilot to keep an eye on the others in case one of them sets themselves on fire."

Five, five, five…

" —not that they can't, right, it's more that they shouldn't. The newer models are terrible when it comes to punching out. I almost broke my neck on ejection, but I can see wh — Jesus, Mary, and Joseph."

"Huh," Jesse remarked blandly at Briggs' abrupt self-interruption. "Gang's all here."

The swear had pulled Jesse's attention away from the finniky strap he'd been fighting on his shoulder, and he glanced up for the first time since the two of them had started walking. They weren't running their group training exercises on the Field, as was their usual for Mondays— instead, Reyes had sent out a blast to each of the Blackwatch agents, relocating their practice session to meet on the massive empty lot of land just behind the building.

Frankly, he would have been more than happy to make the walk to their scheduled training on his own, but Briggs had cornered him in the mess at breakfast and invited himself to flop down at Jesse's empty table without preamble.

"You try the grits yet?" He'd said in lieu of a greeting, his plate clattering down across from Jesse's. Jesse had only raised an eyebrow in return as Briggs had stuck his fork into the pile of pale mush that the mess constituted as grits, the utensil sticking perfectly straight up into the air from the solid mass. "Good. Keep it that way."

It didn't take much more convincing than that for Jesse to very much so keep it that way.

After their last little encounter, he'd been on edge the entire meal. It was kind of hard not to be after being told you were on someone's shit list. But Briggs had simply gotten right down to talking, and until now, hadn't stopped. Jesse still wasn't sure what had brought them around to discussing the ejection protocols in the pilot's newest government-funded billion dollar toy, but he was more than happy to let that conversation go.

Briggs waved a hand to where the massive double doors had opened before them.

"Har-dee-har, wise guy. You not seeing this?"

To be fair, there wasn't much to see.

Better put, there was nothing to see.

Everything past the doorframe was white, harsh and gleaming in the sunlight that had managed to pierce through the waning layer of thin clouds overhead. It blazed from the mountains on the horizon, from where it had drifted against the door, from where Jesse knew there had been a treeline the day before—

Jesse'd seen snow before. But this was beyond snow.

Neither he nor Briggs made to move through the open doors, the cold beginning to seep through in earnest as they marveled at the sight before them. It felt a bit like staring into the sun itself as the clouds shifted and let the light shine in full, but Briggs didn't seem to have a problem with that.

Jesse made it a point to stare harder.

"First 'fall of the fall," Briggs said ironically, his hands moving to pop his collar against the chill. "They'd been calling for it any day now. Gets earlier every year, lucky us."

Jesse would have shot him a look if his eyes weren't glued to the gleam of the mountains. "This happened overnight?"

"Oh, great."

Jesse had heard Weston approach long before he'd heard her voice. She stood just behind them, her hands coming to rest on her hips as her eyes roamed slowly over the massive drifts of snow in clear disgust.

"Should've seen this coming a mile away," she said ruefully. "He never could wait past the first snow, could he?"

Briggs nodded in grave agreement, and with that one little exchange, Jesse knew he wasn't looking at just snow.

Or at least, he was looking at snow. Briggs and Weston were seeing something completely different.

Before Jesse could so much as open his mouth to ask, Siegel and Nguyen rounded the corner to join their little group. Siegel barely spared the blinding white a second glance, while Nguyen's face fell instantly.

"Aw, now this is cruel, even for him," he said with feeling. Briggs' nod made another appearance, joined by Weston's own take on it as well. Jesse watched their little bobblehead act before shaking his own.

"Bring me up t'speed here, what's cruel? It's just snow."

Whoever may have been willing to answer him never got the chance, as the next second saw Briggs getting a solid kick to the back of his body armor.

The pilot flopped face first into the massive drift just outside the door, a startled shout the only thing that left him before the upper half of his body completely disappeared beneath the snow. He was back out in an instant, looking more aggravated than hurt as he scowled at his assailant, powder falling from his hair as his breath formed visible puffs in the frigid air.

"Valdez, you son of a b-"

"Watch it, Wings," Valdez said as he lowered the leg he'd roundhoused the pilot with. Weston and Nguyen didn't bother masking their laughter, standing in stark contrast to the last four agents to join them. The rest of the Blackwatch team had apparently materialized alongside Valdez, and going by their faces, none of them were surprised by his exuberant greeting. "Might need another dunk to cool that hot head."

And with that, Valdez went flying.

His yell rivaled Briggs' as he soared, the kick he'd gotten sending him an easy ten feet into the snowy field. He had the presence of mind to flip as best he could to avoid the same faceplant treatment Briggs had received, and in a dramatic puff, the black of his uniform was swallowed entirely by white.

As someone who'd been on the receiving end of Gabriel's kick before, Jesse figured that had hurt like hell.

"My message said to meet outside."

Gabriel was deceptively calm for having just rocketed a man into the stratosphere. He acknowledged the rapid salutes he received and waved them off with a drift of his hand, the other rising to tug the beanie further over his ears. Jesse threw a sloppy salute of his own, straightening just enough to not be slouching.

He didn't miss the way the commander's eye lingered a split second longer than usual on it.

Briggs sat up in his drift, his own salute fired off to Reyes before he craned his neck to see where his assailant had landed. The pilot stood, stiffening to attention as chunks of snow sloughed gracelessly from his shoulders.

"Permission to speak, sir," he said, voice sharp.

"Granted."

"I request an alteration in callsign."

Gabriel didn't so much as blink. "Do you now."

"Permission to retire from 'Wings' and reserve it for Agent Matías Valdez in honor of his newfound gift of flight, sir."

The commander marched out into the snow, passing Briggs with a deadpan, "Denied."

The rest of the agents trudged out behind him, a few deft smirks and chuckles already being smothered as they shoved their way into the banks. With no eyes to catch in disbelief, Jesse was left to simply follow.

A barked order for their usual twenty laps started them off, and in that instant, he knew exactly what was so 'cruel' about today.

Jesse felt his lungs burn with a vengeance after just five, massive puffs of clouded breath rising over the agents as they ran in close formation. Twenty was nothing on a sunny day, but with the slush stamping into his pant legs, the sun blazing off of the white surrounding them and forcing him to screw up his eyes, the freezing air stinging his throat— he may as well have already done forty. Somehow he was sweating and shivering all at the same time.

Ten laps passed and Jesse decided he'd be perfectly happy never seeing snow again.

At twenty one laps, Gabriel motioned for them to fall into line near Valdez's impact site. They stood stiffly, hands behind their backs as they stared straight ahead to their next activity. Jesse was the only one breathing heavily, but he didn't have the time to resent that fact as he recognized what lay around the corner of the building.

Running almost the full length of the massive spanse that was Headquarters was a course of ropes and wires, metal posts and platforms, walls and wood— all set up semi-permanently and looking like the world's worst jungle gym. It was a sight he was familiar with from his first days of impromptu bootcamp, but for the fact that it was now coated in a massive heap of snow. Whatever wasn't buried was iced over, the sunlight glinting off of it threateningly. All that frozen metal somehow managed to hurt just to look at, and there were patches of the course that looked ruddy and brown, mud mixed in with the slowly melting snow.

Jesse stared balefully at the frozen edge of the ten foot wall that started them off. His insulated, grip-assisting gloves, pristine and unused, sat in the back of his closet four floors overhead.

He made a mental note to check the weather on his handy dandy new phone every damn morning from here on out.

"You know the drill," Gabriel said, hardly looking fazed by the cold as he planted his hands on his hips. "I'm not assigning teams. You want to finish fast, you find someone to partner with. You think you can do it on your own, that's on you. First three to finish get the showers. The rest of you get to run it again."

Jesse had been the last to finish this same course more times than he cared to admit, and that had been when it wasn't looking like something straight out of A Wonderful Life. He caught Briggs and Weston exchanging a look out of the corner of his eye, but by the time he looked in earnest, they'd gone back to staring straight ahead. Jesse followed their lead begrudgingly— he was getting the feeling he wouldn't be feeling much by the time the morning was over. They'd only just warmed up and he already had to resist the urge to stamp his feet to fight the chill creeping back into his toes.

"Mark!"

Their lineup crouched as one, steadying themselves.

"Go, go, go!"

Slush sprayed in every direction as they took off like a shot, their feet hindered instantly by the sheer amount of snow. Jesse'd barely gotten his under him and two of their ten had already made it to the first obstacle.

Johnson leapt for the wall, his height working to his advantage as he latched onto the edge high above him. His hand slipped the second he connected, and he landed in a cold heap with a curse. Cook flew past him, making the same jump but sticking the landing with his gloved fingers. Once he'd hefted himself over, he lowered a hand, deftly catching Williams as she leapt— the two were over and out of sight by the time Jesse made it within fifteen feet of the wall.

He slowed his sprint, eyes scanning for the least amount of snow possible as he prepared for the jump he'd failed to make on three seperate occasions, dread already thick in his veins. Johnson scrambled to his feet and started his double-back run, gearing up to get enough momentum to try again. Weston had made it up, her hand lowered for Briggs to latch on to as Nguyen found his own handhold and vaulted himself over.

Jesse buckled down, bent his knees, gauged the distance, and jumped.

What he wouldn't give to know how he'd done it on the helo pad, as this leap barely got him high enough to brush the edge with the tips of his fingers. His swear rivaled Johnsons' (there was Ingles making it up and over in his periphery) and he braced himself to land and try again—

—just as two pairs of hands closed like vices around his wrists.

Snapping his head up, Jesse stared into the pinched faces of Briggs and Weston. Weston didn't seem to have broken a sweat, but Briggs was grimacing against the weight.

"Get moving, Trinity, Ingles puts us at fifth!"

Jesse snapped out of his shock and scrabbled for purchase with his feet, the two above hefting him up easily. He expected to be let go of once he'd reached the top, but their hands remained where they were, and before he knew it he was being tossed off the other side. A yell left him on its own accord, ending abruptly in a grunt as he landed heavily in the snow below.

His improvised team had landed deftly beside him by the time he'd scrambled to his feet, his hand instinctively going for the hat he'd left in his room. They were shoving him into a run before he knew what was happening, and within moments they drew even with where Williams had managed to skid on a patch of ice before passing her entirely.

Cook, Nguyen, and Ingles had already begun hefting themselves across the suspended ropes that lay next, their legs swinging in tight control beneath them as they moved hand over hand, the drop below doing little to faze them as they flew forward. Weston followed suit, her running leap causing the ropes to bounce wildly on impact. Briggs drew up short with a glance to the ice layering the thick rope, a scowl on his face as he looked down at his own gloveless hands.

Jesse was ripping off his bandana before he could think twice about it.

"Here," he said, shoving it urgently into the pilot's palm before he tugged the sleeves of his raggedy shirt over his own hands. He leapt for the rope and snagged it just as Weston had before him, and it bounced lightly as Briggs followed suit.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven of them landed in quick succession, each sending a freezing blast of snow up their pant legs and into their shoes as they got back to sprinting. The cold rattled once again in Jesse's lungs, and he faltered despite himself, wheezing a visible cloud of breath as he took a split second to double over in his run. Briggs smacked his back as he sprinted past maybe a second later, the bandana shoved into Jesse's collar in one deft move.

"Smokes'll do that to you!" He shouted over his shoulder, his run amping up a notch as Johnson appeared out of nowhere and made to match his pace.

Jesse ripped the bandana from his collar before sucking in a frigid breath and powering back into a full sprint. Weston was waiting for them to catch up at the next obstacle, calm urgency in her eyes as she knelt to boost Briggs up the massive net they would need to climb. Both glanced back to keep tabs on where Jesse was.

It was colder than hell frozen over, but for some reason, he felt warmer than he could remember feeling in a long, long time.

Apparently, finishing in third wasn't enough to get him out of his last round of KP.

He wouldn't have minded so much if the Amari girl hadn't been propped high on Reinhardt's shoulder in the mess when he went down to report.

Jesse had to pass them to get to the kitchen (how many potatoes did one army even need, honestly), so he pointedly stared straight ahead and crossed the room, keeping his strides long. Word travelled fast, and he knew for a fact his helo stunt had been passing around in whispered rumors for days now. Nobody had confronted him to confirm it yet, of course.

But he hadn't seen hide nor hair of the kid since he'd gotten back from Falkland, and he knew she'd be on him in a second with questions if she noticed him.

And yet, despite his best efforts to do otherwise, he still managed to meet her eye.

She watched him for a split second, her face morphing into something he wasn't sure he liked. She always looked like she was planning something, waiting on something, getting ready to say whatever was on her mind in that one calculated moment. But this was something almost...troubled?

Before he had the chance to identify the look, she gave him a small wave.

His pace slowed, just enough that only he would truly have noticed. The kitchen doors were mere feet away.

Jesse shot a half-hearted, two-fingered salute back at her.

He didn't duck into the kitchen fast enough to miss the way she positively beamed in return.

Four, four, four…

"What does it mean?"

Captain Amari had a way of inclining her head that always made it seem like she'd been waiting for you to speak. Now was no exception.

They were the only two people left in the rec room, and had been for some time now. Early nights among the lower ranks seemed the norm around here, and while Jesse could fully understand why with such early morning wake-up-calls, he couldn't find it in himself to drop off to sleep voluntarily any earlier than 2100 hours on the days when he hadn't been run ragged from training. Even that was pushing it at times.

That simple change from when he'd first started out with Blackwatch didn't slip his notice.

The less-than healthy habit of bumming around the rec room on the upper floors had developed as he'd taken to wandering the quiet halls in lieu of getting right in bed, letting the day's aches and pains dissipate some with the comforting knowledge that he would be one of very few people roaming about.

Just as most of the things Jesse had found around base, the discovery of the recreation room had been a happy accident. He'd stumbled on it one afternoon in his early days weeks before, and had been happy to find it mostly empty. It was by no means well stocked, but the couches were comfortable and there was a card table with decks and chips stashed inside. He'd noted early on that the flatscreen monitor mounted over the table never played anything other than world news.

He still hadn't found the remote for it and had a sneaking suspicion the others had given up searching entirely.

Tonight, he'd finally given in to something he'd avoided when he'd first found the room— he'd hustled a couple of trash-talking cadets from Morrison's squadron. They hadn't appeared to mind who they were playing against, and the extra weight of the not-exactly-legally-won cash in his pocket lifted his spirits immensely.

A bone-headedlysimple round of seven card stud and they'd still had the audacity to ask him if he needed a rundown on how the game worked before they began. They'd quite literally asked for the ass-kicking they'd received by the end of it all.

His opponents had left with their pockets significantly lighter some thirty-odd minutes ago it seemed, and he'd been content flipping the cards over in his hands, an impromptu round of solitaire making its way onto the table as he watched the banners of the news scroll by the muted television overhead. The EU was encroaching on some mighty thin ice over a debacle regarding what was left of the Australian omnium again.

Seemed that it was always Australia these days. Detroit and Nigeria's own omniums' hands in the crisis had lost their luster a long time ago, and Russia had enough of its own problems to own an entire channel for itself.

Jesse watched the wanton destruction on the screen for a long time, his hands stilling on their respective cards. Sometimes it was easy to forget just how far into hell the world had crashed when he was no longer out in the thick of it.

By the time Jesse had torn his eyes away, the room had practically emptied, the only sound coming from the flop of the cards against the table as he resumed his round. All but the captain and himself remained.

She had not moved, seated as she was on one of the couches across the small room with that familiar mug steaming lightly in her hand. Her own eyes were on the screen as well, the corners pinched as she scanned the updates wearily.

The longer he'd spent glancing in her direction from the corner of his eye, the more his curiosity had grown. That and the realization that the silence was bordering on stifling, as she hadn't made it unclear that she knew he'd seen her.

"What," she said quietly, "does what mean?"

The way she threw his own words back at him made him backtrack instantly. Right, didn't actually voice that very well…

"The-" Jesse drew a quick circle in the air around his eye as words failed him.

Understanding dawned gently on her face, her eyes drifting away from the screen to meet his. "Udjat. The Eye of Horus."

"Who now?"

She looked mildly surprised, her mug shifting from one hand to the other as she tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. "Mm. How much do you know of Egypt's history?"

"Deadlock ain't exactly a boardin' school, ma'am. If it ain't affectin' the world now and I didn't learn it by the time I dropped outta the system, I don't know it."

The hum she gave in return held no judgement. He was grateful for that much.

"Horus was one of many gods worshipped in ancient Egypt," she elaborated, "and the mark of his eye is meant to protect. Among other things."

"Other…?"

The corner of her mouth lifted. "Perfection. Sacrifice. Power, depending on the depiction. The eye itself was believed to have brought Horus' father back from the dead." She raised her mug to her lips before she paused, lowering it without taking a sip. "But the stories have had a long time to be interpreted."

She lifted a hand to brush against the hooked insignia once again as her eyes grew distant, signifying the abrupt end to the short conversation.

Back from the dead.

He watched her for a long time after that, not bothering to be discreet. The words burned on his tongue, prickling at his throat with a whiskey-strong heat. How badly he wanted to say it. To see what she would say.

To see if she knew, if she would parrot the lines Reyes had been feeding him. Back from the dead.

There are things that will lead you down roads you don't want to go down here.

Jesse looked back down at the table and flipped his last card. It was the second round he'd lost to himself.

Three, three, three…

It would be close, but he trusted his judgement this time.

"Fifteen feet."

"Fift- get your eyes checked, that's maybe nine."

Cook's challenge hung in the air, his disbelief thick as Jesse exchanged a glance with Ingles. She sat beside him in the booth high above the Field, her own set of controls demanding most of her attention as she led Williams and Nguyen through their own gauntlet far below. Her face was impassive as ever, and she shrugged at Jesse's exasperation as she turned back to leading her charges. Jesse shook his head before doing the same.

The simulation was a simple one- a series of corridors and uneven platforms, corners and hidden alcoves rigged with motion activated, beanbag-bullet turrets at the ready. It would have been easy enough to traverse had it not been plunged in complete darkness.

The tech-treated glass of the booth allowed for Ingles and Jesse to see the obstacles plain as day, walls and turrets alike clear to them and only them. As for their teammates on the ground-

"He called fifteen, play it as fifteen," Johnson said shortly, his voice buzzing over the booth's speaker. He was a few feet behind Cook, squinting considerably against the pitch black. Cook shot a narrow eyed glance over his shoulder.

"Sorry, are you the one who's gonna get shot if he's wrong like he was last time?"

"Nah. Nah, that'd be you."

"My point stands-"

"Two minutes left," Jesse interrupted, letting his frustration bleed into his voice. "Trust me or don't, but get a move on. Fifteen feet."

There was a split second of hesitation from Cook before he relented and eased forward, his stride mimicked silently by Johnson. Four feet passed. Five feet. Six, seven, eight-

His pace faltered for a split second at nine feet.

And continued briskly at ten.

"Looked like nine," Cook grumbled under his breath as he pulled up short of the turret at fifteen feet. Johnson got to quick work disarming the machine from the relative safety of their cover as Jesse sat back in his chair, kicking his feet lazily up onto the control panel.

"Y'know, normally folks look smarter with the lights off, but good on you for bein' a rebel," he drawled, thumbing his hat further back on his head.

Cook raised his hand pointedly to the booth, flipping the bird in one smooth motion as Johnson snorted into his gear. Ingles' mouth twitched from the corner of Jesse's eye.

He ran back over the remaining ground his team needed to cover, each tiny detail silently filing away. The last turret was twenty feet ahead and around a corner on their left. "Johnson, twenty feet. Hook a right but stay close to the wall."

Johnson peered into the darkness with some confusion as the turret beside him powered down. "You mean Cook?" He asked, clearly bemused that Jesse had the exercise-designated engineer suddenly taking point.

"Nah. Gonna need to split up 'fore you can get to the next turret." Jesse ran a finger over the glass, tapping lightly on the turret directly to the left of the corridor they'd be traversing. "Cook, twenty feet ahead, hook a left."

Twenty feet passed in silence.

Johnson took his right, staying low and keeping his rifle at the ready. Cook swung around to take his left.

Later that night, Johnson would clap Jesse over the shoulder in the mess, a cigarette stealthily tucked into his hatband without a word.

Cook, on the other hand, had a right hook like a freight train.

Three, four, three, four, three, three, three-

The light on Jesse's door greeted him with a gentle yellow.

"Athena," he said suspiciously, "not that I don't like what you've done to the place, but ain't yellow a bit last season?"

"Good evening, Agent McCree," Athena replied smoothly, sounding amused despite herself. "Yellow is a silent alarm. Your room was accessed within the past hour by non-personnel."

"What?"

"Accessing the surveillance database from 1900 hours to 2000 hours shows it was Miss Fareeha Amari."

Jesse dragged a hand down his face. "How did she get my code?"

"I do not know. Would you like me to open an investigation?"

"Nah, just…" He punched in his number with more force than necessary, the door unlocking with its telltale click. "Just give her a warnin' for me, y'got that? Tell her to keep her nose outta my busin-"

There was a book on his pillow.

Physical books were a rarity these days, and it took Jesse a long moment to fully realize what he was looking at. He squinted at it critically before picking it up, turning it over in his hands.

It looked a dime a dozen and was beat up around the edges, well-loved or forgotten in a backroom once or a bit of both. The front cover was a faded photo of a silhouetted cowboy, his stallion mid-gallop and enormous, blocky lettering encroaching most of the small space — The Hell Bent Kid.

"I'm sorry, Agent McCree, I did not catch your full request. What would you like the message to say?"

Jesse dropped the book back on his pillow.

He picked it back up a second later and placed it in the drawer beside the bed.

"Forget it."

Two, two, two…

Wednesday arrived, which wouldn't have meant much more than physical training and another round of communications. Communications that promptly told him he should be calling that same physical training 'PT'.

But as it turned out, this particularWednesday was a lot stranger than anyone could've guessed it would be.

He'd never seen so many people crammed in the hallway before. Voices echoed around him as he turned the corner, following the rippling hubbub out of habit and some small degree of curiosity. Officers of every rank— cadets, engineers, even some of the medical staff by the looks of it— all of them were clamoring about, their focus pulled to something at the other end of the corridor.

Jesse strained onto his toes to no avail, craning his neck to see over the sea of people. There were raised voices at the end of the hallway, commands to clear out and so on echoing above the noise. Some listened, but a surprising number stayed.

One of the soldiers with better self-preservation instincts made to pass Jesse, but he grabbed the man's bicep, pulling him to a stop.

"Hold up now," he said, quick to let go of the others' arm at the surprised glance he received. "What's goin' on here?"

The soldier jerked a thumb over his shoulder towards the front of crowd, his brow furrowed. "Updates on the Slipstream pilot program from last week."

"Pilot program?" Jesse vaguely remembered the crowd he'd had to fight through to get to Captain Amari's lesson, but she hadn't gone into any details then. "Ain't they done decidin' on all that?"

He got a bemused look at that. "Well, yeah," the soldier said. "But the plane's gone."

Jesse's brows raised. "What, like stolen?"

The confusion on the soldier's face turned into downright disbelief.

"It's a teleporting fighter jet. And the pilot they grabbed to test it last week just disappeared right along with it."

Cadet Lena Oxton was reported missing basewide by that afternoon.

One, one, one, one, one, one—

It turned out that Jesse didn't need an excuse to get out of Thursday's marksmanship. The missing pilot provided that well enough for him. Captain Amari called him first on Wednesday evening, canceling their lesson and promising to make it up to him when she returned from her investigations the next week.

"Time is not our friend right now," she'd said cryptically, a ghost of a joke somewhere in there. Jesse had been too relieved to hear it to think too hard about it.

Thursday arrived without fanfare, and he was steady on his feet.

Steady.

Solid stance. Arms up, eyes open. Lean left, watch the left, block the right, strafe right, but mind the le-

Shit!

Jesse snapped his arms tight over his torso, barely catching Gabriel's haymaker with his forearms as it caught him from the left. The force of it made him stagger back a step, and as per usual, that was all it took for Gabriel to take him to the mat.

He groaned as the commander stepped back, his arms flopping down to rest at his sides as he stared up at the ceiling. "How many's that?" He asked when his brain stopped rattling in his skull.

Gabriel wiped his hands on a towel before tossing it aside. "Sixteen."

"Really? Hurts like twenty."

"Better not let it reach seventeen, then. I hear twenty one's a killer."

Jesse dragged himself to his feet, his shoulders aching something fierce as he fell back into his stance. Gabriel circled him as he had before every round, not yet in his own fighting stance. The commander tapped Jesse's foot here, nudged his elbow closer to his chest there, corrected the little errors Jesse hadn't ever considered to be mistakes.

"You know the definition of insanity, McCree?" Gabriel sprung it on him from nowhere as he lowered Jesse's elbow, placing his fist just below his chin.

"They let you become a commander without knowing the definition of insanity?"

He fully expected the light cuff he received to the back of the head for that one.

"It's doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting a different result," Gabriel went on, a hint of a warning in his voice. "You can't expect to get better if you won't change how you're doing what you're doing first."

When Gabriel was certain Jesse was in the perfect position, he took up his own stance again. "There's an opening you haven't taken once. Don't let it slip this time."

With that, he waved Jesse forward. Jesse inched along to his left, letting his weight lead his sway as he watched Gabriel's eyes. The commander followed his dance, his hands loose in front of him as he bobbed right along with him.

A flicker in his eye was all the warning Jesse got before they began.

But a flicker was all he'd needed the last few rounds.

Jesse ducked the jab he'd learned to expect from that look on Gabriel's face, and he followed it up with a short, sharp strike of his own to the commander's ribs. It was blocked instantly, turned against him as Gabriel used the momentum to spin Jesse to his side, striking out behind himself with his heel in a single fluid motion.

He'd done this on attempt nine, and Jesse saw it coming this time.

He dropped like a stone, avoiding the strike entirely and rolling back to his feet behind Gabriel. He stayed low, using the crouch to throw extra force into an upwards, open-palmed strike. The hit conneted with Gabriel's shoulderblade, and the commander took a single step forward at the contact. For Gabriel, that was as close to a stagger as Jesse would likely ever get.

"Better," Gabriel said, spinning on the spot and bearing down on Jesse once again. He raised a knee, jabbing aside Jesse's followup strike before throwing one of his own. He'd done that on attempt thirteen, and Jesse inhaled sharply before throwing his forearms across it in an X, a move Gabriel had taught him not quite an hour ago now. He caught the wrist in the crux of his own—

—but faltered as he realized he had no idea what to do next.

Gabriel took full advantage of the pause and threw his full weight forward, letting his arm slide straight through Jesse's hold to connect smartly with his chin, the strike forcing him to take a step back.

It ended the way all of his staggers did, but this time, a stroke of inspiration hit him just before the mat did.

An openin' I never take-

His back connected with the ground, and as Gabriel began to back away, Jesse flung his legs skywards, latching his ankles over the commander's neck and pulling.

Gabriel was forced to flip over Jesse as he flung the commander to the ground, his ankle popping unhappily from the messy roll he used to get himself up off the mat. His calves were still around Gabriel's neck, and he quickly shifted them to place the man in a chokehold, his knees protesting the odd angle.

Gabriel could have easily broken the hold and had him on his back again in an instant. But for the first time since they'd started training the week before, he tapped Jesse's leg three times.

Jesse released him with a heavy exhale, the sweat dripping into his eyes as Gabriel sat up with an approving look in his direction.

"There it is."

Jesse gave a lackluster thumbs up in reply as he snagged the towel from the edge of the mat, swiping it over his face as he panted. Gabriel raised an eyebrow.

"Hurt like twenty one?"

"Hell naw," Jesse said breathlessly. "You're not countin' that as seventeen, you tapped out."

Gabriel sat back, his hand finding the mat behind him as his eyes glimmered with something Jesse knew he'd seen before but couldn't fully place. "I did. After you hit the mat first."

"The hell kinda ruling is that? You tapped out!"

And with that, Jesse recognized the look on Gabriel's face. He was 100% busting his chops, that glimmer the same look of amusement he'd seen back on that first flight to Switzerland. Fought a bear once—

"Respect your commanding officer, McCree."

"Now that sounds like the actual definition of insanity to me."

He probably should've expected the chokehold he found himself in not two seconds later.

And almost without him noticing, one, one, one faded into nothing.

He swatted at the commander's arm futilely as Gabriel grumbled something half-hearted about insubordination, but even stuck in the lock, he felt giddier than he had in weeks as something that had been needling in his head went blissfully numb.

For the first time in his life, he'd fixed something.

For the first time ever, he had control.

A/N: me to myself: the chapter is….11,000 words…. but you could just…. post the whole thing now…..

also me, but in the process of smacking myself over the head with a chair: no! no! no! no! n

So I'm not gonna make y'all sit through ANOTHER insanely long chapter, not when there's this much happening at once. The last three are probably a third of all of Way to Fall's word count, good lordy. For full reading effect make sure you blast the Rocky training montage fight music at full volume

Thank you as always for your incredible comments! There was a big ol' influx of new readers on that last update, so welcome!

And hey, look at the boy getting such a good handle on his life! Give him a round of applause!

anyways totally unrelated but the next chapter is titled "Red" so take from that what you will

Final order of business here, but please pray to the employment gods y'all. I'm between jobs and trying my damnedest to find something to do with writing for my next big leap so here's hoping :,D