TITLE: Great Stores, Great Choices
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG13
LENGTH: ~16,000 words approx
SUMMARY: Jack visits Daniel on the West Coast to check out the set-up of the new SSR office. But it's about to be a resoundingly bad day for both of them.
NOTES: Set between season 1 and season 2. Case fic with a heavy dose of Jack Thompson torture. Written for Redrikki for SSR Confidential 2016.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Great Stores, Great Choices

After the Bertrand farce three months ago, sending Lonnegan to Sousa as part of his 'goodwill' gesture - a few established agents to set the ball rolling in LA - seemed a perfect plan. Today, Jack Thompson can only read the untidy scrawl of the mission report written in three different hands from the side of a hospital bed, and reflect upon how the exact sort of antics Lonnegan had displayed on his last East Coast mission could've saved his former partner's ass. It's a sour truth to swallow that yesterday's unmitigated disaster probably wouldn't have happened with Lonnegan there.

Well, Daniel has him now, and Jack supposes it's his just desserts for sending Daniel the people he doesn't want, though that's little consolation to Anders. He's still not going to try and fish for Lonnegan back this weekend.

He's turning and putting the file away in the lockable cabinet when his office door opens. He's thinking about the flight ahead of him and whether he actually packed everything he needs in the ten minutes he took that morning, a lifetime ago between panicked 5AM phone calls and racing out to deal with the chaotic fallout that hasn't really stopped falling out all day. A brief rattling knock can't really be said to herald the door opening, since there's no time waited for response. He knows that knock anywhere.

Jack hasn't yet been bold or irritated enough to see if he can get away with sending Peggy Carter to Daniel.

"...Chief Thompson," she says crisply, and pauses.

"I'm heading out. Whatever it is you want, Carter, it had better be quick."

"You're going to the West Coast office," Peggy states.

"Yeah." A jab of annoyance. He'd tried to keep that quiet. "What possible interest could that fact have for you, Agent?" He pushes it, knowing full well he's being an ass, but he's too preoccupied for Carter. The flight will run overnight and he'll meet Daniel tomorrow morning off the plane. At least, hopefully he'll meet Daniel. The man could well send a lackey, and chances are it'd be one Jack doesn't want to see, but he's betting Chief Sousa won't have the stones to pull that just yet. There's also a function in the evening. Vernon Masters is in LA and invited him. There should be good opportunities to forge beneficial connections, according to Vernon. There usually are, wherever Vernon goes.

Carter's jaw is raised and locked when he looks up. She might crack something if she tries to be any more like stone. "Just... look out for Daniel out there. Bring back some news on how things are going. And... convey my good wishes." It's far more stilted a request than her usual bull-in-a-china-shop methods.

Jack frowns. "Looking out for Daniel out there is precisely why I'm going, Marge. Check he's set up right, see if there're any extra resources West Coast need, and wipe his nose, I'm sure, if he needs that doing..."

She rolls her eyes. He can see her thinking, ass. "Just say 'hello' for me," she says flatly, and turns her back. Her shoulders are high and tight as she leaves his office.

Jack shakes his head. She's never been truly subordinate. But then... she knows a secret that could destroy him. "Be sure to look after the place until I get back, Acting Chief Carter!" He hollers the words out of the open door, making the sarcasm nice and loud, and watches as she startles and everyone in the office stops and looks at her.

"You're an ass, Jack," she says, crisply, before stalking off, and he laughs and the office chatter resumes. There are a few who were there after Dooley blew up and others who heard about it in the immediate aftermath, who know the reasons she gets away with talking to him the way she does. That it isn't just because she's a woman and they have some kind of bizarre running banter. Jack's not going to worry about it either way.

He's actually leaving charge of the place to Nick Padden; though Carter could probably manage the workload just as well, she couldn't command the respect of the troops who haven't seen her in action, even if they have heard about it.

Jack picks up the case he packed that morning, casting aside lingering concerns. Heck, they have stores in LA, whatever he doesn't have with him, he'll buy. He sets his hat on his head and drapes his jacket over his shoulder. As he walks out through the main office, swinging his case, he gets bombarded on all sides - a dozen more messages to convey to Sousa, albeit far more casually framed than Peggy Carter's. This is exactly why he put the word out he was only going to a conference. He waves off the petitioners with a "Sure, sure."

So much for keeping this particular mission hush-hush.

When Jack found out he was intended to be head of the new West Coast office in a matter of months anyway, chief even if Dooley had made it, that had been the oddest of feelings.

It wasn't that he'd wanted Dooley dead, that he'd ever want Dooley dead, but he couldn't deny he'd taken the opportunity with both hands, and it's a funny feeling, knowing that he filled those boots but there would have been opportunity without there ever having to be empty boots to fill.

Still, it's more prestigious to be head of the East Coast office, and he has seniority, knows New York like the back of his hand, and who wants to live with that much sunshine anyway? He'd rather work in the established office, and dedicate his work in the old Chief's memory, since Dooley didn't make it anyway.

Jack started talking up Daniel just as soon as the higher-ups started fishing for someone to send West in his stead, and if the scale of his campaign ever gets back to Carter, he reckons he's a dead man. But it made sense for Sousa to get the promotion he deserved - if they'd never take Carter seriously, Daniel they might, even if he can't tapdance. A happy ending for most, and Sousa's out of his hair on the opposite side of the country. Splitting the office turned out a neat trick, allowing him to get rid of a few of those agents who'd been less amenable to the Jack Thompson administration.

It was a while before he really registered that in Daniel he'd sent away one of the few colleagues he could genuinely stand. They'd bonded, somewhat, on the Howard Stark case. Still, he'd bonded with Carter and next thing he knew he was telling her that goddamn story. Now she'll have that on him forever. Maybe it was self-preservation that caused him to send Sousa away.

He wakes up in the skies above a city where he's been less than a handful of times before. Wakes from a bad dream, that was probably about the war - that's his biggest association with aircraft now - but he isn't prepared to chase the memory of it down into the dark to find out. He lets it fade and sits up straighter. Looks out of the window at the approaching sun-drenched city.

Daniel meets him off the plane, crutch under one arm. He's wearing a terrible shirt.

"That shirt could blind a man-" Jack isn't expecting the sort of casual half-embrace as Daniel flings his spare arm briefly over his shoulder, retracting it almost before Jack registers it's there.

"You look good." Standing back, he's surprised to find how accurate the stock phrase is. Maybe it's the climate that suits Daniel. If the shirt and the near-hug are a sign of going native, it looks like he did Sousa one hell of a favour sending him West. He even looks a bit perkier in the manner he handles his weight on that crutch. "Enjoying the sunshine?"

Daniel offers a tip of his head and a wry grin. "How was the flight?"

"Slept through most of it..." Jack tries to kill a yawn and look more lively. He can't help but experience a ping of jealousy about how happy Daniel looks. But didn't he keep telling himself how Daniel deserved the promotion and reward? He kicks his own ass a bit, internally, over his sourness. Maybe the real difference was made by authority; Daniel's being taken seriously by the world again. Jack tries to ditch the bleak feelings that come with that sobering thought, but his smile becomes forced. "You got plans for today? Working any urgent cases?"

"I cleared my caseload." Listening to the way Daniel says it, Jack gathers that the West Coast office doesn't have any cases of note yet. "Thought I'd show you around the sights, let you get acclimatised to the city before we get down to the business of the office. Give you chance to recover from your flight."

"I'm fine, Sousa," Jack half talks over him, too loud and insistent for the back and forth of casual friendship they're trying to strike. He amends his tone and message: "Not that I'm not game for all of that, and good thinking."

"Well, let's get to it." Daniel is smiling but there's a, if not a falseness creeping in, at least a detectable effort involved on both sides of this. Jack wonders whether Sousa knows if and why it was Jack who campaigned for his promotion.

Well, if so he'd have to agree that Jack did him a favour, given how well he's so evidently doing, and the only thing Jack felt a twinge of guilt about was maybe splitting up him and Carter. Though he'd no real idea what that dance the two of them were doing was meant to be, and Daniel had jumped at the idea of promotion and coming West.

Maybe jumped is a cruel sort of description. "No offering to take my luggage?" Jack ribs in good humour as they cross the airport's expanse, Daniel's crutch-aided steps lurching to keep up beside his own stride.

He gets a silent, weary look and of course, no such offer. Daniel waves his free hand to indicate a waiting parked car to be his.

There's a goods van circling the parking lot, far bigger than anything else on the airport concourse. It trundles by as they're setting Jack's luggage in the trunk. Daniel looks up and follows it with his eyes a moment, snorts and grins. "Looks like another victim of this place's hellish road system, set to wander for eternity..."

Jack opens his mouth to comment upon the growth of Daniel's sense of humour, and hears a door click open on the parked car behind him. Then the world blurs into motion and pain and a face full of concrete.

A shout from Daniel gets cut off before it's really begun. Jack realises, dimly, that the goods van is blocking them from the view of most of the concourse. Sloppy... should have seen that... He feels himself get searched while he's on the ground. His line of sight is full of tyres and feet. His own hat wanders into view, only to be kicked away hard by one of the feet, adding a surreal touch. It's hard to think much at all.

He's dragged into the back of the van. He moves his jaw but speech or even just noise eludes him. His head is rattled. It's dingy inside the van and he didn't have a clear view of any one of their attackers prior to entering. He can tell Daniel by the light colours of his suit and shirt, a form being shoved around by more shadowy figures. The big doors at the back slam shut, sinking them in a more complete darkness, making Jack's head pound. Then he's on the floor again, a weight on his back keeping him down, until something clicks and the weight leaves. When he tries to roll over, he discovers he can't move his hands from behind him, and metal bites his wrists.

Daniel starts making a terrific amount of noise on the floor over to his left. Jack sees indistinct shapes moving through the dimness and grasps a few threads of dialogue that indicate Daniel kicked someone in the ear with his false leg, hard enough they're taking a serious grievance... And now they're taking the leg. Jack cringes and is glad, by the time his head finally clears enough, that he was too dazed to really bear witness to that event. Daniel is dressed again and looking pissed off, his arms also cuffed behind him and one empty pants leg dragging.

"What... the fuck... do you think you're doing?" Jack demands, shaping the words with care. This was an arranged abduction, well-planned and executed. All he can think is what is Sousa's office investigating that landed us in this? He has nightmare visions of Daniel Sousa trying to take a leaf out of Carter's book and go rogue. The Great Agent Stumpy wouldn't last five minutes. "Sousa, what have you gotten up to your neck in?!"

"One case..." Daniel manages to scrape together enough balance to raise his head and direct what Jack can mostly only surmise in the half-dark is an equally suspicious glare back. "I have one case and it's the SSR equivalent of a lost cat... This is not about me."

Maybe Jack's still not thinking straight from that knock on the head.

"Be quiet," a man says, not far behind Jack's ear. Jack whips around, but flops gracelessly from dizziness, darkness and restraint, and he can only tell that the man has a large shadow and is holding a gun. Jack thinks he was waiting inside the van when they were bundled in, eyes ready-adjusted to the darkness.

Some time passes. Jack shuffles and tries to keep a semi-comfortable position on the hard and rattling floor, and his eyes gradually adjust, and his head clears further. He can better make out the details in the darkness. Sousa's pale face, hovering over his terrible suit and shirt. The men around them are wearing some kind of overalls, like mechanics, which isn't particularly anonymous, but there aren't any identifying logos. They also don't speak with any other accents than... Californian, far as Jack can tell. Certainly nothing foreign. They don't look or sound like gangsters, and they don't seem professional enough for this to be a contracted abduction or hit.

...If Sousa hadn't just lost his leg, Jack would strongly suspect this was some kind of set-up, that the joke was on him. But... he can see Daniel's face. It's definitely not that.

He doesn't know how good his sense of being able to measure time was for a chunk of the time they've been travelling. With the van's cold floor rocking and the fabric sides rattling, air rushing through, Jack hasn't been able to keep track of outside noises or their twists and turns, and he doesn't know LA anyway. He wonders if Daniel tracked their progress, or if there's no point, if the distance involved is just too big, the roads too labyrinthine, the city too sprawling.

Who knows where they are by the time they slow to a creaking halt?

One of the men comes toward him with something dark draped across his hands. In his peripheral vision, Jack sees them forcing a hood on Daniel, and he lashes out, trying to fight even though it's useless. They get their hands on him and the world goes completely dark.

"What are you going to do?!" he hears Daniel yell, then an order of, "Quiet," and the sound of a blow.

Jack hears the door open. He's pushed from behind. He takes a handful of steps and then his leading foot makes a sharp descent and his stomach swoops in awful freefall. It gets no better as they push him forward again, left to step blindly as others propel him. Grasping that it's the sharp fall of the ramp at the back of the van doesn't help much as level ground hits him and jars his whole body.

He can't tell anything about where they go, turned around corners, blind, subject to an odd array of smells and, disturbingly, very public sounds, as though they're near a large gathering of people. At one point, he's pretty sure he's in an elevator. It makes hell of a din. He can't tell for sure whether they're going up or down, only that his stomach got left at their start point. He can hear Daniel's breathing, close by. He thinks it's so strange how there're maybe six, seven men there and he can pick out Daniel Sousa's breathing.

When they're pulled out of the elevator, he hears feet moving away from him and Daniel's voice rising again in protest is a lot more distant than it should be. Jack realises they've split the group. He's steered around another corner, further still from where they're taking Daniel. This is even worse. They're separating them.

What happens now?

He's usually on the other side of this. Jack supposes, as his face takes the hits again and again, that the situation could be considered very ironic.

"You're going to tell us what we want to know," the big guy says.

"I don't think you know who you're talking to," Jack chokes back, struggling to shape the words on his thick lips after their opening argument.

Their answer is deeply depressing. "Jack Thompson, Chief of the SSR."

"So you know me. Doesn't mean you know me... 'Cause if you did, of course you'd know-"

-that this is a waste of time; but he doesn't get chance to express the false bravado before another hit drives the side of his mouth into his teeth and any possibility of speech out of the equation.

His hands are still fixed behind him. He can't the stop other man's fist from hitting him. Can't stop his face hitting the wall as he staggers and sags, this time almost falling, and the bruiser drags him upright and slams him forward. The sound of flesh being bruised is as familiar as breathing. His knuckles are stinging with reflex, even though the real pain from the repeated blows is in his face - and suddenly in his back, where the enemy jabs an elbow, pressing him harder into the wall before he can pull away.

"You're going to co-operate with us," hisses the voice in his ear.

"Not a chance-"

"Aren't you a little curious about what we want?"

"I want to be back in my hotel with a decent scotch. What you want... not so much on my mind. Call me selfish-"

"They call you worse things than that."

The whisper sends horrible shivers through Jack. He can't know, can he? No one knows. Jack only ever told Carter, and she wouldn't tell. There are, have got to be, far more places he could have picked up other less damning nicknames than murderer, liar, coward.

"They say you're a worm, who got this job through crawling and grovelling..."

...See, that's better, isn't it? Jack tries for a smile, because it really is a relief, but he feels the split on his lip crack wider and a trickle of blood runs down his chin. "They say that, huh?" His voice cracks, too.

His tormenter pulls back enough that he's making a less intimate acquaintance with the wall. It's not much of a respite. He yanks Jack around and throws him back toward the small, dark room's single chair. The motion is dizzying, and maybe it's the way all the world's shifting and realigning around him that causes his particular reaction... Jack hears himself laugh and keeps it going. That's right, he'll laugh, and it's almost as funny as the fact there are people who say that, how he's here on the wrong end of someone's idea of an interrogation and couldn't care less. Jack Thompson isn't afraid...

Maybe he's been hit on the head a few too many times in the last few hours, though.

He keeps his feet and manages to side-step the chair, dragging himself around to face his approaching tormentor, who is the approximate size of two Jack Thompsons standing shoulder-to-shoulder. There's another man leaning by the door who hasn't got his hands dirty; his face is shaded in the dim-lit room, but Jack can see he's wearing a suit. The muscle isn't dumb muscle: the suited man has left all the talking to him so far, trusting him to ask the questions. Jack entertains paranoid wondering if the face and voice of the shadowed man would identify him, and that's why he's staying quiet and out of sight.

Jack was Dooley's tool a lot like how the bruiser who's hitting him works for the man in the suit. At the moment, that's something else that seems funny.

Jack wasn't made to be a bruiser. Everything seems to break too easily. He'd always gotten into fights - before the war he'd fight anyone over anything, especially after a drink. A scrapper by reputation. He took up formal boxing mainly after he and Dooley worked out their routine, needing to improve his skills so he didn't do almost as much damage to himself as his victims. He broke his thumb once hitting a prisoner, two fingers another time. Fortunate that he's good at covering up and bouncing back; switched paws and pretended it never happened. Dooley had a certain image of him, was the thing. Jack always tries to live up to a certain image. Looking bigger than he is might be his best skill.

"Get back here," the bruiser says, looking pissed off.

"No, thanks." Jack manages to duck and roll out under his grabbing arm, and it's a split second decision to go for the man in the suit, who is anyway between him and the door.

His assailant moves fast and desperately, with an urgent grunt. The desperation is underlined by the way that, after he grabs Jack and swings him around by the hair, kicks his feet out from under him and pushes him onto his knees, he then slams his face into the seat of the chair several times without asking any questions.

Jack can't answer questions if he's unconscious.

Might be the best thing, he thinks dizzily. Now he's in the moment, the adrenaline burst, that reeling, giddy high, shock, anger, grit is fading, and he's not sure if he's going to be as good at taking this as he managed to fake at doling it out. He can't betray his cowardice or the SSR if they knock him out.

The bruiser gets control of himself, helped by a minimal exclamation from his boss. Jack sags with his face on the seat of the chair and resents not being unconscious. "Hit me again..." he moans into the wood.

"I think you've had enough." The bruiser jostles his shoulder with a hand: Jack feels all five digits in the wary prod and doesn't move. "Gonna tell us all the information we need."

Jack swears at him, and hunches his head into his shoulders, tries to twist them high as they'll go to cover his ears. If he doesn't hear what they ask, he can't answer it.

"Stop that." The bruiser grabs his arm.

Jack tries to kick out backwards and his balance goes. The chair moves under his face and he almost knocks himself out as his chin hits the floor side-on. He feels the guy's feet moving around his legs and kicks out blindly from the floor. The other man has a lot more weight and leverage, and stomps down three times on Jack's calf, ankle and knee. Jack cries out and only realises after the thin sound is an echo that it was the first time.

The bruiser hauls him over and up and puts him back on the chair. Jack experiences a moment of panic at potential disfigurement and dribbles blood as he tries to search his mouth for missing teeth.

The bruiser puts his hand on Jack's thigh and grins at him. For a moment, Jack wonders precisely where this is going. The grip is hard, a tightening band at mid thigh, the man's thumb and forefinger pressing down fiercely. Jack jerks in place, trying to get loose, and an arm sets like a bar across his throat and collarbones, holding him against the chair back.

"Your buddy's missing a leg," the bruiser says. "War wound, real messy thing. Saw a few like that, myself. It's right about here."

He grinds his grip harder.

"Question is whether you want to be a matching pair?"

The world reels, slides and skews under the unexpected twist. Jack tastes vomit around the blood already in his mouth.

He thinks, Oh, God, what does it matter? He's always going to be the guy who buried the white flag. He can never outrun that. He might as well stop and save himself again.

It's pretty sick. They could've just hit him for weeks. He can take that. The instant they start talking about cutting things off... Mutilation, humiliation... waving around even the threat of what Daniel Sousa lives with, he's lost.

They don't just want his words. That's the only spark of hope; if they want access to SSR's locked storage of confiscated devices, which seems to be what they do want, then passwords and information alone aren't enough. For that, they need him to take them inside, and if they need him with them, he can still do something. Jack desperately presses the argument of how much they need him; need him mobile, need him to look normal.

Well. It's only going to be more or less normal, right now.

Eventually they head off to consider their options and leave him alone in the small, locked room still decorated with his blood.

Alone, he hurls himself at the walls and curses himself for being Jack Thompson, breaking more skin and spilling more blood in the process. He's not sure if it's self-punishment or an attempt at sabotage based around his own argument.

His mouth is torn against his teeth. His face feels several sizes too big. His shoulder feels wrenched, and he's walking almost as jerkily as Daniel on the leg that got stomped. He can barely feel his hands, cuffed behind him.

He can't stop his mind replaying his own wavering words, telling them what they wanted to know. Can't stop that recall blurring with the night in Okinawa.

He'd been doing well. Chief of SSR - hadn't earned it, perhaps, except with opportunism, but how he got there made him no less able to make a difference in the post. It wasn't as if they'd have given it to Carter or Sousa anyway; wasn't like he stole the position, just... secured it. It wasn't as though he'd not intended to earn it. Someday 'the war hero' wouldn't be the first thing on anyone's mind when the name Jack Thompson was mentioned. "They say you're a worm..." He supposes, though, that he might as well be a worm as anything else.

...No, he has to pull this back. Now they're not here and not directly threatening him, at least he can think again. He can still redeem himself. Get himself out, get off them the notes they took. Kill the bastards to erase the notes in their heads and the memories they have of seeing him crack.

He needs to drag himself up to meet this, he reminds himself, because it's not going to be Sousa who gets them out. Sure, Daniel's resourceful, but they took his leg, and there's only so much a man can do with that.

It's a combination of already having hit that pain wall and desperation, he suspects, that he manages to pull one hand free of the cuffs. Those things, plus his awkward, clicking thumb that's been clicking and never moved quite right again since the first time he tried to hit a guy harder than he'd ever tried to hit anyone, to keep Chief Dooley's respect.

It's a painful, pointless victory, he thinks, running his battered hands over the door in exploration. He's not going to get through a solid door with nothing but bare hands, a chair, and the couple of metal rings that are still attached to him. There are no parts on the cuffs small enough to use to pick a lock. The chair isn't heavy enough to work as a battering ram against the solid wood of the door. Jack's shoulder isn't heavy enough - he already tried that inadvertently, while he was throwing himself around.

He makes himself slow down and think, and sits on the chair again a while, with his painful leg stretched out in front of him, hands curled on the edge of the seat between his thighs.

He decides he isn't above playing up what they think of him already and hauls his body back up again. Then lifts his voice - not to curse and threaten, but to whine and whimper, grovelling through the door. "Hey... I'm bleeding... please... I think you hurt something real bad. Won't you fetch - fetch me a doctor? Please... I think you ruptured something in my gut...!"

He hears a faint laugh and a cruel comment, but it's confirmation there's someone out there to hear him, and he throws himself into the acting role with even greater enthusiasm. They think he's pathetic, he'll show them pathetic.

Eventually the door opens. Bruiser cautiously looks in, leading with his face, the gun lower, held back.

The theatricals actually kind of took it out of him - Jack's panting for breath as he breaks the chair over the bruiser's head. That only staggers the large man, but Jack's ready - he drives all his weight into a right-fisted punch he suspects breaks at least one finger on his good hand as well as splits the skin around his knuckles, where he looped the dangling handcuff ring into a knuckleduster. He manages to cover the gun with his left hand and shove it aside. Maybe his blood makes the other man's fingers too slippery to pull the trigger, maybe the guy's genuinely too slow, or maybe the bruiser isn't trying to kill him.

"The ironic thing is," Jack pants, before he hits him again, pain a blaring siren in his hand, "I'm you."

The other man's face hits the floor with finality and that too-familiar meaty thud.

Jack doesn't recognise the other man in the room behind Bruiser, and it's certainly not the suited man, but there is another man, the facts landing in a panicked flurry. The gun in Jack's hand is backwards. He hurdles the bruiser's body in an unsteady leap and hits that man, too; smack smack smack smack, because his arm is getting weaker or just has less conviction, when he knows it's gonna hurt so much every time he lands the blow. Afterward he has no idea at all how, that time, he avoided getting shot.

He's shaking as he picks the handcuff ring and the embedded scraps of shirt he'd tried to cushion it with from his flesh. The room he was locked in is actually a store room. The room outside it is an only slightly larger utility room. There's a sink in one corner. Jack runs water over his hands and splashes his face. Then he swears at himself and goes to haul the two downed men into his former prison and lock them inside. He should kill the bruiser, who was there to hear him spill SSR's secrets, but he hasn't the stomach. He locks the door and returns to the sink, splashes more of the water, and looks for a reflective surface he can examine his face in.

He's been hit before plenty, contrary to what they seemed to think. Broke his nose, broke his jaw, healed okay... His body's always been pretty good at bouncing back, but he's never been subject to that level of sustained, systematic brutality before, and there's a nasty unease in not knowing the extent of the damage. In the unpolished metal of the tea tray he finds, once it's divested of cups and washed clear of stains, everything just looks swollen and it's impossible to tell if there's anything that will badly scar.

Goddamn it, he has to stop moping over his reflection and fix this.

The thing is, in the crunch, Jack breaks. Always has. Despite everything he wishes he could be, somehow he never has the resolve right there in the moment.

It's never yet stopped him from picking up with the best damage control in the world to try and make himself look good again afterward.

He tries to quickly clean up his clothes as well as his face, but there isn't a lot he can do to look normal either way. He searches for anything else in the utility room that he can make use of. Gulps someone else's cooling mug of coffee, refusing to think about another mouth touching it. He finds the keys to his handcuffs and peels them all the way off. He can't see the notes the shadowed man was writing. He can't see Sousa's leg.

He's honestly tempted to leave Daniel locked up, wherever he is. Jack has his own damage control to run and doesn't want to have to make explanations for it. Anyway, without the leg - well, it's debatable how much use Sousa is in a field situation to start with, but without his leg it's got to be actually into negative numbers. But who knows what treatment they've already dished out to Daniel, given their handling of Jack? Let alone what they'll do if they find that Jack is gone but still have Sousa in their clutches. No... there's no way he can leave him behind.

The dusty and cramped corridors he finds himself in on the other side of the utility room's door seem empty, but opening the closed doors that line it is a nerve-racking game. He finds uniforms, cleaning products, shelves upon shelves of wrapped packages. Confused and frustrated, he stumbles into what looks like a break room with three armed men inside it, and almost doesn't level the gun in time to get the situation under control. He must look like he's not screwing about, though, because they disarm themselves fast upon instruction.

"Thompson!" There's banging on another off-leading door. It mirrors the situation Jack was held in, and relief floods him. That's Daniel, alright, with just the note of exasperation in Jack's name that he could've anticipated, in place of any gratitude for the rescue.

"Open that door and get him out," Jack says. He looks around for Daniel's leg. It's not there. Please, God, let it be on him...

It's not on him. The man who opened the door hauls Daniel out at an extremely hampered drag. Jack swears and glares at the three men, as well as the supported agent. "Where's his leg?"

They look blank, except the one with the bloody ear, who just looks meanly satisfied. Jack reminds himself that they took the leg off in the back of the van. It could be anywhere. He makes a noise of frustration and disgust. "Get him out of those cuffs, too."

"Give me a stick and I can hop." Daniel pushes away from the man holding him up as soon as he's free, preferring the support of the table. Jack reaches among the cleaning items piled up against the wall and hands him a broom. "...Classy." The quip is half-hearted; Daniel's looking him up and down with shock in his eyes. "What happened to you?"

...Because while Sousa doesn't exactly not have a mark on him, he's no more than scuffed and bruised, in contrast with the deliberate focus of the damage done to Jack.

Jack also knows from a wealth of experience that if you've got two prisoners to interrogate, you don't screw around making things unnecessarily difficult for yourself, you focus efforts on the one most likely to break. He swears a lot.

"The hell's wrong with you?" one of the men asks, wide-eyed and uneasy. Good. At least he's got them nervous now, when he's this pissed off with his hands free and holding a gun.

"Get in the damn room." Jack brandishes the weapon with more deliberate focus. "You, too." The others reluctantly go. Jack must look like he intends to shoot. He goes to lock the door securely on them.

Daniel dances around with his broom turned upside down, worn-down bristles rested under his arm. It doesn't look comfortable but Daniel only looks relieved. He manages to hook up a dropped gun. Jack retrieves the others, discovering that one of them is his own Smith & Wesson, and hands Daniel the spare to hide in a pocket. Daniel's brow wrinkles as his eyes examine Jack more thoroughly. "Guess they thought you'd be the one with the secrets worth getting. You've been chief a while longer than I have."

Daniel's giving him an out, but he also knows the equations... maybe not so up close and personal, but he knows them. Jack narrows his eyes and defies him to add to the softening lie. He asks, "You're going to be okay getting around on that thing?"

Daniel half-laughs, clearly embarrassed. "It's not the deluxe model. I'll manage. Or I'll let you know if I'm about to fall over..." He shakes his head in weary self-deprecation and glances around. "Do you know where we are?"

Jack shakes his own head and presses his lips together, trying to bring his mind around to practicalities.

"We need to get out of here, or contact someone at the office... mine is closer, but mine is..." Daniel pulls a face. "About fifty times greener. I think we might be down to Rose leading the charge. Either way, we need to make contact, arrange an assault on this place to mop this operation up."

Obviously, they'd want to get other people involved, the condition the two of them are in. Jack's heart struggles in his chest and he feels sick, but he brashly musters, "About that. I had to tell these people a few things, to make them let their guard down enough I could stage a breakout. The man in charge wrote it down. We need to find that, before the rest of SSR come in. You know how something like that could be... misinterpreted."

Sousa gives him a hard look and alright, but they didn't fucking torture Sousa, not even a little bit, so he has no business looking at Jack like that.

"What did they do to you?" Jack bursts out, unable to hold it in, though the way it comes out kind of makes it sound like he's mad that they didn't torture Sousa. "They do anything to you?"

"We exchanged some verbal spars about my pain threshold after amputation. They waved around the idea they'd cut off other things." Daniel's face reddens and his eyes crease and he looks harassed by Jack's intense focus, and fends him off with visible irritation. He sounds angry as he continues his answer. "I pointed out their lack of evident medical equipment or professionals, and that the things they were asking me to do required me alive."

Jack feels fiercely resentful. It isn't as if they mightn't have produced such equipment or professionals. Or fancied that they could perform amateur amputations themselves, for that matter. But okay, Sousa's logic trumps his own fear response. Of course it does.

"Okay, let's... let's go," he says, feeling deflated. "I can't get out of this place soon enough."

He can't. He wants to be left alone with a large drink. He wants to be home, but he'll settle for his hotel room.

"...Jack." Daniel's looking at him in a softer manner, quite intently. "What did they say to you?" He gestures with his free hand, the one not welded to the broom holding him up. "Their physical focus is pretty clear, but... they didn't try any of that same crap, trying to mess with your head, did they?"

"No, nothing like that." He can never tell Daniel what they threatened. Jack affects a stiff, offended demeanour instead, and aims for a tightly wounded smile. "Apparently I've a reputation in some circles. People who don't think I deserved this job, think I crawled and lied my way to getting it. So... I played the role. So long as it serves its purpose, let them think Jack Thompson is weak, let them think I'd cave from a few punches. I know the truth."

He notices the way Daniel's face flickers and hates him a little bit.

But they need to move on, and Daniel needs his help to do so. He offers the other man a shoulder as far as the door. Daniel feels startlingly light, but of course, he's missing almost a quarter of his body mass. A leg is such a large proportion of a man. Jack swallows and tries to push away the feeling of his throat contracting to choke his air. He pulls away to make the foray outside on his own.

Out in the dingy, twisting corridors with all the doors either side, he leaves Daniel to his own devices. Daniel slows the search too much, on one foot, and there's always a wall within reach, usually two, for him hang onto. Jack's also still shaking and thus would rather Daniel had as little contact with him as possible. Being under his fellow agent's scrutiny makes it both better and worse. He has to pull himself together as a show for Daniel, but it's such a relief to turn the corridor and be out of sight.

Jack's searched most of the doors already and knows they're just empty store-rooms - empty at least of people. That's got to be a plus, because he can hear, faintly, the men he locked up banging and yelling.

His face hurts so much it'd make it hard to focus on anything else, if abject humiliation wasn't the other order of the day. He feels like a gargoyle. He can see parts of his cheeks and lip, and the ugly expanded ridge of his right eyebrow, jutting and pink. His fingers are starting to swell, making it difficult to hold the gun.

"Did they break your fingers?" Daniel asks, noticing on Jack's return.

"I broke my fingers," Jack fills him in with exaggerated dignity. "Escaping."

There doesn't seem to be an obvious way out of the twists of corridors. He's hit some walls with no doors in them but has yet to see a window, which makes him think they're underground. What kind of villainous base this is, he still can't begin to guess, but apart from the men stationed outside their separate prisons, it seems to be deserted. What he does find on his next foray is an elevator.

Using the elevator doesn't strike him as the best option - they'll be sitting ducks in that metal box when it comes to rest. But, as Daniel says, "It's not as though I can manage stairs."

Inside the elevator, Daniel props himself next to the controls, Jack poises himself in front of the doors with gun at the ready. They travel slowly upward. The clanking of the machinery in the shaft is much slower and more regular than the panicked flutters of Jack's heart.

The door opens on a man in some kind of worker's uniform, who gapes at them. "No-one's supposed to be in the basement except for the fumigation cr-" His eyes pin on the gun. Jack grabs him and slams his head against the door almost accidentally while pulling him forward. He ditches him on the floor inside the elevator, then moves to push the doors wider with his own body weight so that Daniel can scramble out.

"What is this?" Daniel asks, wide-eyed. He clings to a big metal cage-trolley, stacked with what looks like men's clothes in neat-folded packages. The worker they just accosted was pushing it. There seem to be more corridors, stretching left and right of them, alike to the lower level but bordered by less doors. There's only one broad door on the facing wall. Soft music and much brighter lighting seeps through the cracks at its edges. Jack signals for Daniel to stay quiet where he is and steps up to the door.

He tries to see through the cracks first, but can't make out enough detail and can't really believe the things he thinks he's seeing. He pokes his head around slowly, not leading with his Smith & Wesson, very glad he didn't a moment later, upon visual confirmation of what lurks on the other side...

The bright lighting stings his eyes and leaves him fast-blinking, but he can see enough. Well-dressed people meander by, not noticing him. They're in no hurry, chattering and browsing. There are more corridors outside, but they're formed from stands of items and row upon row of artfully displayed goods.

Holy-

They're in a department store.

Jack shuts the door, his chest lurching.

"What is it?" Daniel asks. He's investigating a trolley - smaller than the big cage, from a recess a few yards further down the corridor - but he stops to look intently at Jack, his balance precariously held between foot and stick. "...Jack, talk to me. What is it that's going on here?" There's a wheedling laugh in his voice but tension in his eyes.

Jack can't not tell him they're in a store. That they could walk out there into the public eye and demand help. The police, a phone, someone would surely have to oblige them.

Then he'd have to go back and explain, or more likely look for ways not to explain, to hide his failure to protect the SSR's secrets. He needs to fix this first. Deliver some return to these guys, pull his ass out of the fire, so he can stand up and say, It was all part of the plan. He can't stumble out like this to call in a rescue and emerge from this nightmare with his head held high.

Ass. You're an ass, he tells himself.

Aloud, he says, "We're in a store. Big, glossy, chandeliers and piano music."

Daniel frowns and his forehead wrinkles. He lurches slowly to the door to take his own look through it. He shuts the door with a pensive and very concerned frown on his face. "Neither of us look normal enough to be certain of walking out of here without plenty of excuse for the staff to accost us, and there are too many civilians for us to lay down gunfire in a damn store."

"...You're right. That's a good point." Jack can hardly believe his luck. "We don't know how many of the employees are involved in whatever the hell this racket is." They don't, it's true. He eyes Daniel's empty, swinging pants leg - he's tied it in a knot at around knee level, but it still leaves a length of cloth and the weighted knot on the bottom to swing - and wonders if he's not the only one looking to walk out of this a bit more intact. "We need to get back the information they wrote down from me, and find your leg."

"Or just find a phone," Daniel adds, so maybe not. He lurches back to the smaller trolley and starts dragging at it. Jack winces because as well as the trundling sound it makes, there's a squeak on the thing like a mouse being repeatedly squashed. Still, he supposes that even if people hear them coming, it's not a sound out of place for the environment.

Daniel is able to hang off it and push with his foot and freewheel, though it looks hellishly awkward. He looks back at Jack and pats the metal frame and offers a tentative grin. "Maybe we can use more of this gear that's lying around. We can't do anything about your face and my leg, but they've provided a change of clothes. We wouldn't have to look like we've both been dragged through the dust. And-" He nods his head toward Jack's liberally blood-spattered shirt, hesitation in the back of his eyes. "A bit ghoulish right now, Thompson."

"If we get recaptured because we stopped to change, I'll be making sure you never live it down," Jack complains, but the temptation once offered isn't one he can pass up. He's not tracking clearly, or he'd have thought of it already. He grabs at the packages in the big cage trolley, sorting through for his size. Finds something he thinks will fit Daniel first, and tosses it to him. It falls on the floor and Sousa gives him that look, like he thinks Jack did it on purpose. "It's not as colourful as your own," Jack offers.

Daniel may have suggested it, but he can't easily change himself while down a limb. Jack watches warily out of the corner of his eye, aware of the seconds ticking away while they linger for this, and wonders at what point he gives in and asks for help, but Daniel sits down on the empty trolley to put the shirt on, and takes a size larger pair of pants to pull on over the grubby ones. He manages to squirm into those deftly enough, though Jack still has the feeling undressing the others would've been harder, and clearly if he can avoid showing off the scars underneath, after one enforced freak-show already when they took his leg from him, he's all for that.

Jack, meanwhile, sheds his own pants to discover half his left leg bruised almost black, knee swollen with a big lump at one side. Daniel swears for him. Jack scowls and hides the damage under clean clothes.

"Did a number on you," Daniel remarks.

Jack re-laces his shoes, gathers up both their shed clothes to stuff down the back of the cage trolley, and holds a staying hand out as Daniel moves to scramble up from his sprawl. They need to move on from here faster than that. "Why not stay on board?"

"I don't need to be-" But Jack already has hold of the push bar and swings the trolley around with Daniel still sitting on the base. Daniel shuts up and focuses on balancing while grabbing up a gun ready to greet whatever they might encounter. "Okay, we should look for offices." He clings on precariously as they turn, and Jack stifles a grunt of pain as the rattling progress jolts his damaged hands. "More likely to have either the answers or an outgoing telephone line, right?"

"...Right."

"You're quiet, Thompson. You know, I don't like you quiet. Gives me the heebie-jeebies."

"Screw you, Sousa."

"At least that's honest."

Jack doesn't have the energy. "We may not be stealthy, but we'd do better just sounding like a trolley, so can it, alright?"

It's hard to think past all the other things trying to keep up an endless echo through his head, Okinawa and spilling his guts and 'They say you're a worm...' He'd rather not invite further comment from Daniel, but he's struggling to remember how to act normal. He tightens his hands on the push bar, using the pain for distraction.

Fuck you. He projects the thought at the unconscious bruiser. Should've killed him even if he is just another stick.

Just as well they hushed the banter. They're approaching one corner when a voice calls out, "Larry, you better have a bunch more of those medium shirts before you even think of coming back, the racks out there are empty!"

Jack swings the trolley around fast. Given the tone of the man who called out, a hasty, trundling, squeaky retreat won't be suspicious. He doesn't risk offering a verbal acknowledgement.

"Maybe we should go back to the elevator," Daniel suggests quietly once they're safely out of earshot. "Offices might be on an upper floor. Everything looks to fit a pretty similar plan down here."

Jack makes a noise of frustration. Sousa's probably right, it's becoming clear there's nothing on their current floor of the building except a thin spread of private staff corridors and stock rooms, running like hidden arteries throughout the store's public face.

"Left an unconscious employee in the elevator," he points out.

"...Damn." Daniel catches just the right tone to prompt a snort of laughter in spite of everything. In some ways, Jack's glad it's Sousa who's here with him, even if that's not doing Daniel any favours, and even if that adds so many of its own complications. "If we go back now, he might still be unconscious and no-one have found him yet."

Back in the elevator, Jack asks Daniel, "Is he all right?" as Daniel leans off the trolley, way over his centre of gravity, to examine the man still slumped in the corner. Since they knocked him out, it's become entirely possible he's nothing more than a hapless store employee who has no idea what was going on in the basement, so Jack's feeling maybe a twinge of guilt.

"He's breathing," Daniel says. "We'll send him help once we get free and clear."

Jack drags the door of the elevator car shut and hovers bloody fingers over the array of buttons. "Top floor first?" Daniel gives a nod and he presses the uppermost. The goods elevator makes an almighty noise and rattles their bones again as it sets off upward. Jack flaps his hand for Daniel to pick up his weapon again before they can come to rest, but the trundling progress seems to take a disproportionate amount of time to his restless nerves. He's starting to become increasingly aware that unless they have the wildest of luck, their escape is likely to be discovered soon; they can't possibly have a lot of time left clear of active pursuit. Maybe he should ditch Daniel someplace safe and go off on his own. Daniel, at the moment, is hardly mobile, let alone fast.

Jack bursts out into a short, empty corridor. Daniel comes after him, not waiting to be pushed, upright and hanging onto the trolley while awkwardly levelling his gun. At the end of the small corridor, Jack backwheels frantically from bright lights and restful dinner music. They're at the back of a public restaurant. He can see windows onto the sky, and a view of the city streets half a dozen floors below.

"It's the Randall Arthur building," Daniel says.

"You've been in here?"

"Only seen it from outside." One shoulder moves in an awkward shrug. "It's about, um-" His eyes tip back as he tries to recall the visual "-six storeys, I think? He's an entrepreneur of sorts, a local mover. Everything's all about bigger, faster, more... mostly profits. He's got a reputation for scandal with a bunch of incidents over other people's patents."

Jack frowns. "A man like that wants two SSR chiefs?" His next breath chokes him with a surge of disgusted anger. "They were asking about SSR's confiscations. All that goddamn stuff we've got in storage. Weapons, espionage devices, tools of warfare... You're suggesting he wants us to help him steal those things for commercial use?"

"I wasn't suggesting it," Daniel says calmly, "but now that you mention... It makes as much sense as any of this."

"None of this makes sense," Jack snaps. Who they are, they should be safe from this kind of... of civilian interference. Yet there are new self-made businessmen aplenty in the clubs of power, and he knows the way Vernon and his set talk. He's heard Vernon talk and he's seen Vernon drink. Blabs his mouth off far worse than Jack did, down in that room, and with far less provocation. He's done it to big up Jack, hand slapping genially on his shoulder: Do you know what these guys found today, huh...? If people in those circles know that the SSR have those things, it's down to occasions such as that. Not, of course, Jack thinks bitterly, that people in those circles would ever be tarred by suspicions they might use the knowledge for criminal acts.

He wonders in a way he hasn't before what others think when they see him with men like Vernon, trading in honey-tongued diplomacy and backslaps. To him, trying to stay in their good graces is just sense. Doesn't mean he agrees with the lines he spouts for their favour, or has to hold up his end - it's all about creative reinterpretation.

Jack swears. "A damn store owner-" They were brought to this by someone who sells men's clothing and lighting solutions. "Why would that person take the risk? Kidnapping two chiefs of a government agency just like that?" It sounds like insanity. Also, ow. Jack can't click his fingers right now and it was a lousy idea to try.

Daniel gives him a tired, knowing look far more cynical than he generally associates with Daniel. "You know what they're saying..."

Jack stares, nonplussed.

"You must. SSR has had its day. We were a wartime organisation. They downsized the New York office to split operations to LA, a fresh chief in place at each... On the face of it, they're calling it expansion, but the West Coast office was really just to keep closer to the cluster of international contacts working their way in via the movie industry. As to what they say about us..."

-A worm- "What do they say about us?" Jack asks, dangerously.

"We're young, Jack. We're both green as my whole damn office, so far as this position goes. The higher-ups chose to promote from within rather than bring on board anyone with real leadership experience. No-one with genuine political clout, who might carry the organisation when it comes to the crunch, no-one used to wielding power. And I'm a crip and you're... you. We're just counting time until they choose to declare the SSR defunct. Not that the chieftancy won't look good on both our records."

Jack grinds his teeth. He forgets that people talk in front of Daniel. He shouldn't forget, considering the things he's said in front of Daniel. Nobody normally talks like that in front of him.

Though now, thanks to his interrogation, he's fully briefed on the other things said about him.

"Don't flip." Daniel eyes him with a bit too much wariness. "We've still done well for ourselves."

"...How the fuck do people get off on saying these things to your face?" Jack demands. Can't help it. He's supposed to be the realist, he tells himself. Get a grip.

"Ask yourself," Daniel grunts back. "It's uncanny, really, the way amputation does something to other people's brains."

Jack thinks he flushes, but his face is too hot and hurting already to tell. He needs a break away from Daniel, at least for a moment, to wind down and process his anger. "You wait here. I'm gonna see if I can find which floors the store occupies and which aren't public access. There should be signage by the customer elevators."

Daniel opens his mouth to protest, but only says, "Be careful." He gestures quickly and desperately with an open hand in front of his face as Jack backs off. Reminding Jack that he looks like the worst loser of a title match in history. Thanks for that, Sousa.

Jack scowls - which only hurts more - and puts his Smith & Wesson in his pocket and covers as much of his face as he can by holding up a hand to his hair. It probably doesn't look particularly casual, but it has to look more casual than the state of his face.

There are kitchens over the far side, off the restaurant, and between there and all the public seating, the elevator and a large stairwell for shopper use. Jack limps quickly straight ahead to the elevator, pretending to be rearranging his hair all the way. It can't hide the damage from all angles, but it's the best he's got.

He fields some stares. As long as their owners aren't alerting store security, he tells himself that's fine.

His feet root to the floor in front of the elevator doors and he stands there frowning... He knows the building has six floors, seven with the basement, but the only buttons on the elevator are 1 - 2 - 3: clothing and hosiery, household, and gifts and electricals respectively. Even if Daniel was one floor mistaken, that's still two floors unaccounted for, unless Daniel's mistaken about the whole building... They can't afford the time to search up and down.

He waits for the car anyway. He can see Daniel's worried face mouthing at him from around the distant corner as the door opens. He holds up a hand in a subtle 'ok' gesture and mouths reassurance back. This won't take long. The public elevator has an operator stationed on it, who regards him with suspicion. He tries to hurry things up, but a couple get into the car beside him before the attendant can close the doors. The woman gives a shocked exclamation as she sees Jack's face.

"Walked into a door," he provides, averting it. He could use a hat. How come they couldn't stumble across those in the staff corridors?

He asks for the next floor down, and tries to ignore the looks. He needs to concentrate to count the seconds as they descend. When they stop and the operator opens the door, Jack looks out at rows of wireless radios and shakes his head. "Oh, no, I'm sorry. I must've been thinking of the next."

The man and woman get annoyed as he pulls the same trick on the next floor, and the operator is glaring by the time they're down to street level. Jack attempts, "I need to head back up to the restaurant... forgot my hat..." tapping his head again, but gets a glower that tells him he's pushed it one step too far.

"Alright, I guess I'll take the stairs..." He doesn't want security getting called over. He backs off through the open doors where the couple have already gone. Another couple approach just in time to be ever-so-delicately shocked as he passes them.

"What happened to you?!" asks a pretty woman he all but bumps into as he turns, her face dismayed.

"...You should see the other guy!" Jack touches an imaginary hat, hates what he looks like right now all the more, and breaks for the stairs at virtually a run.

He didn't particularly want to take the stairs. Aside from his current limp, anyone walking down toward him as he hurries up the staircase has opportunity for a damned good eyeful, and he just has to hope his luck holds and he doesn't run into any of the staff who'd actually recognise him.

There wasn't enough time for any additional floors between first, second and third, so anything else going on in this building is between the third floor and the restaurant on the roof. The stairs, it turns out, make things a lot clearer, with doors leading off to men's and women's restrooms on the fourth and fifth floors, but only one disguised private access door and in each case, that's firmly locked. He doesn't risk attracting further attention by trying to force it. He does slink into the men's restroom briefly to attempt again to tone down the damage to his face, but it looks horrendous and he gives up quickly, after wiping clear what he can of the drying blood only to start a weal on his cheek bleeding afresh.

Either way, they can't use public stairs or elevator to get where they want to go, which Daniel will probably appreciate, at least in the sense of not having to hop or wheel through the busy restaurant.

Jack goes back to Daniel, who looks on the verge of a fit. "-the hell were you doing?!" He grabs Jack by the shirt collar to pull him back into cover. Given their respective capacity for balance, that leaves Jack with a Sousa hanging off his shirt as soon as he gets his own footing back.

"Leave it out, Sousa. Any kind of offices or sinister bases in here are on fourth or fifth. I checked out the elevator and the stairs. But neither stop where we want to go."

"I've been rethinking. What say the two of us walk out of here by the front door and find the nearest public telephone?" Daniel grits. "I don't know what you did that you feel you have to cover it up so badly-"

"Hey! I'm only trying to save both our asses here! It won't do your reputation any good, and you are the one so hot to emphasize how precarious our positions might be." Jack puts him back upright against the wall and jabs him in the chest with an unbroken finger.

"It's neither of our faults that we got abducted!" Daniel protests fiercely. "It's - well, it's probably understandable if you told them something, given how they clearly put in significant time and effort to rearrange your face-"

"I had to let them think I was weak, or I'd never have been able to pull off that escape!" Jack corrects, unable to let that one past.

"So let's capitalize on your sacrifice and escape..."

Jack doesn't appreciate the sarcasm, but he abruptly finds other things to think about. He shushes Daniel and manhandles him desperately back as he spies men in security uniforms coming up from the staircase and out into the restaurant. Daniel mutters a curse as Jack releases him, and doesn't argue when Jack starts to hustle them back into the staff area.

"Looks like there's no going out that way, after all..."

"You're an idiot. We could've walked out of here. Pig-headed, prideful, overly-ambitious idiot..."

"Savin' both our jobs," Jack says again.

"I'm safe," snaps Daniel.

Jack prods, "Bet you'd still rather walk out of here on your own two feet."

"The leg could be a hundred miles away, still in the back of that van, for all I know!" Although Daniel looks afraid saying it.

Bit of a custom item, that leg, Jack also bets, and a real pain to have to replace if it's lost or damaged. "Get back on the trolley."

The buttons on the service elevator aren't marked, not even with numbers. Jack pushes the next one and hopes. The elevator travels a short way down and Jack readies his gun and checks the spare in his pocket as they grind very slowly to a halt. He has to use at least one hand to pull back the heavy door, so he looks to Daniel to make sure he's prepared to meet whatever's on the other side, and tries not to block his shot as he hauls the door open.

Jack sees an office, but there's no protection or cover, the elevator opens straight onto it. Big, open plan, desk upon desk. Women typing aren't going to be a part of any steal-military-technology-to-get-rich scheme, though the nearest look up and make exclamation at the sight of them, attracting the attention of all the rest. Jack ducks back behind the door, but Daniel can't easily move. He struggles to hide his guns and hisses at Jack desperately, "Down one?"

Jack slams the door closed all the way and hits the next button again, though he thinks that maybe they should've charged out and demanded to see the boss, or as Daniel wants, demanded a telephone. He hears running steps on the other side of the door before the elevator moves out of range.

"Ready?" This floor's their last shot, and by God he's going to start shooting and demanding to speak to someone this time.

Daniel grimaces and nods, levering to his foot and gripping the trolley in a manner that tells Jack he, too, is committed to this. Jack hauls the door back and bursts out to slam into the opposite wall. Corridors again, but white-painted, clean and crisp. Daniel's trolley squeaks as he trundles in Jack's wake, awkwardly hopping.

There's natural light coming through windows. A door they pass says Lab 1, and another says Development Room. They can hear voices, normal workplace chatter. There's a stairwell in a corner, more obvious in the wider and brighter corridors and straightforward layout. Jack can hear shouting, agitated voices coming toward them. The sound is bounced around and he can't tell if they're coming from above or below. He runs to the side of the stairwell and leans over to discover security uniforms approaching from both directions. He gestures frantically to Daniel, still several yards behind him. "Get back on the damn trolley!"

The force of his own running leap allows him to catch the back of the thing and starts them moving in a crazy slide down the long, polished floor of the narrower corridor that cuts down at right angles between the closed doors of Lab 1 and the Development Room.

There are observation windows lining either side of them. It isn't lab techs, but engineers in familiar overalls and regularly dressed workers who stare up to watch them sail past.

"Nice going, Jack!" Daniel's voice cracks unhappily.

"Shut up!" Jack kicks off against the floor, moving them faster. They're heading full-pelt toward a door with some kind of a large, exotic potted plant outside it and an expensive looking name plate.

"Oh, screw you," blurts Daniel, with a force like he suspects they might be his last words. He abandons one of his guns, which skitters away and whacks off two walls, bouncing like a ricocheting eight-ball, in order to cling to the trolley and hold an arm protectively over his face as they impact.

On impact, they manage to decimate the door and most of a desk located on the other side of it. It's a desk about the size of a large family dinner table, so there's still a solid amount of it left standing. It's a pity. They didn't manage to include in their damage tally the man sitting behind the far end of it.

The shadowed, suited man.

Jack has somehow managed to ride through the careening, crazy entrance with an absurdist streak of elegance, clinging one-handed to the back of the trolley, Smith & Wesson raised in his other hand and his centre of balance artfully arranged so he neither tipped them nor fell off. The impact spits him across the top surface of the desk - clearing the nearer half before it groans and collapses - through papers and other oddments, rolling over once but still ending up stretched out on his front, perched on one supporting elbow as he instinctively braces to rise. The gun is miraculously still in his hand, pointing in the right direction, and hasn't discharged accidentally into himself, Daniel, bystanders, or their jaw-agape mysterious enemy.

Daniel moans from somewhere underneath the collapsed part of the desk.

Jack gapes back at the suited man. They're probably equally stunned. He manages to put strength into his words after one squeaky false start: "You're under arrest."

"What the hell?"

Daniel's face pops up over the desk's edge several feet to Jack's left, a scrape across his face and his hair all sticking up. "Mr. Arthur...?"

Jack scrambles backward, panicked by the sound of running feet as security catch up. They're not free and clear yet. He'd lock the door, if he hadn't just destroyed it. He slides his spare gun across to Daniel, who takes it, bearing out the impression he's lost both his now. He indicates the open doorway and is aware of Daniel hauling himself into a position to lean against the wall to cover it.

Drawback is how that leaves Jack with Arthur, and Jack hasn't even begun to wrap his head around how he's going to deal with that... The suited man, the man from the shadows of his interrogation. Memory and every hurt with it seems to press back in on him. It brings a return of tightness of breath and the painful contracting of his stomach, and all of the fear that was generated in that closed, dark experience in that tiny room.

Jack staggers aside to throw up in another elegant exotic potted plant, but keeps his gun on Randall Arthur the whole time, which he supposes is a victory.

Maybe some of the sickness in his stomach could be accounted for by the manner of their arrival, or could easily be mistaken for it. He straightens and wipes his mouth.

"You alright?" Daniel asks, wide-eyed.

"Just keep them out." Jack jerks his head in the vague direction of the door, not looking. A cabinet stocked with glittering decanters of mellow shaded liquids stands against one wall, having happily escaped their path of destruction. Jack goes to it and one-handedly pours himself out a very large glass, and takes a gulp before he ventures back to the desk, keeping the tumbler. "Good stuff." He wheezes the bravado to no-one in particular.

That Arthur has been wary and watchful, not crying outrage and protesting the intrusion throughout, tells him volumes. Though he already knows that Arthur was the man in the shadows, in the suit.

"Got a bone to pick." Jack hooks his hip over the edge of the desk and seats himself a few feet from Arthur. Toys with his drink on the polished wood surface in front of him. In the background, Daniel tells people not to come any closer, and then retorts that he is the police, damn it. Jack surmises that the men outside are just store security, so far, and that store security are in fact not in on the rest. It doesn't help them a lot when they're demanding of Daniel I.D. that neither of them have. "Where are the notes you took?"

"I... I don't know what you're talking about." The other man bluffs too late. Jack's hackles rise, but if anger replaces fear, that's all for the best. "You people are in a lot of trouble, even if you are the police. Don't you know who I am?"

"No. Don't you know who I am?" Jack echoes, loudly, pausing and punctuating every word, before he loses it and sweeps all the contents off the desk onto the floor. As it goes down, he spies a familiar notebook. He dives and grabs for it, shoving his Smith & Wesson up into Arthur's throat as his knee hits the floor. Bloodied fingers scrabbling, he comes up with the papers crushed triumphantly in his hand. "I should shoot you right now-"

"Jack!" Daniel, he decides, is nothing but a spoilsport.

"-Or maybe your face needs a much closer acquaintance with that chair." Although Arthur's chair isn't hard wood, but covered with padding and plush leather. Still, that means it might be possible to asphyxiate him with it if Jack mashed his face down hard enough.

"Jack!"

The moment slows and stills.

Daniel's here, Jack thinks, and there are still things he needs to keep hidden, if after this he intends to go back to anything like normal...

Calm resumes.

...He can see Daniel's leg, he realises suddenly - propped bizarrely in a nook between a filing cabinet and the big near-ceiling-to-floor window. He climbs over to retrieve it. Daniel seems to be breathing a sigh of relief even before he brandishes the prize to show him. The crutch is next to it, and Jack hauls them both onto the big desk to shunt across to his crippled colleague.

"Oh, thank God. And, thanks, Jack."

Jack scowls at Arthur anew, and moves so he can cover the door while Daniel Sousa goes through a bunch of acrobatics required to get out of his pants and put his leg back on that Jack never needed to see.

Jack looks the other way and focuses on raising his eyebrows and tempting security to just try do something about him. They don't.

"What did you think this would achieve, Mr. Arthur? I can't really say I understand," Daniel asks.

"The scientific genius sitting in SSR's vaults? The products of some of the greatest minds on either side of the war, left to molder, when those ideas could be re-applied and mass produced and marketed?" Arthur rattles off the words like he's the one addressing a grievous crime.

"They're weapons of war, Mr. Arthur," Daniel says with an odd gentleness.

"You have no idea the advances the commercial sector could make out of the fruits of the war. Everything has a plethora of other applications! All that technology, all that potential..."

Jack snorts. That still hurts his nose quite a lot, pulls at the swollen skin of his cheek, and he can't help but follow it up with a small grunt of pain.

"You thought that was reason enough to take two government agency chiefs hostage and beat all hell out of my friend?" Daniel actually manages to sound quite aggrieved about the latter.

Jack turns a wry smile over to him. "I'm touched."

"Would've been my first guess, from the way you've been acting," Daniel grumps. Now Jack's looking at him again, Daniel has his leg on, and his pants on; a thousand percent improvement on any sight of him since they were taken back at the airport. Jack nods to him and manages to start to feel relieved.

The notebook is in his pocket: he can destroy it later. Hopefully neither Arthur nor Bruiser will remember enough that what he told them can damn him through their mouthing off alone. Daniel can walk out of here on his own two feet. And there's a phone on the desk in front of Arthur. Jack points to it briskly and says to Daniel, "Get-"

A woman screams from somewhere out of sight beyond the open doorway, back in the corridor where they've been holding off Arthur's employees.

A familiar male voice shouts, "Hey, Thompson!" and the woman whimpers and Jack's heart sinks as Bruiser drags her into view.

She isn't anyone he knows at all.

"How about I try out my fists on this pretty face instead?" Bruiser calls, stroking her face with the hand that holds his gun, making her squeal. Jack squeezes a shot off but Bruiser dances out of his line of fire.

There are a couple of smacks of fists hitting flesh and more whimpers. Jack gapes at the open doorway, unable to quite believe it. Daniel looks stunned. Arthur just looks pleased. Jack mouths at Daniel, "I don't know who she is."

...Apparently that's not even a relevant factor. Bruiser's voice comes from the unseen space outside: "Better yet, how about I keep dragging in random members of the public, and shooting them, until you boys throw those guns down and come out?"

Jack's face hits the wall again and he struggles for breath, pinned there with his arms yanked back and both his wrists squashed in one of Bruiser's overlarge paws. Bruiser leans back to accept some kind of rope from one of the others, which he uses to tie Jack's wrists. Then he pulls him the right way around. Jack is shaking all over, and he can't think it's anything but humiliatingly obvious.

Daniel stands to one side, upright and still wearing his leg, but not able to move fast or well without some kind of crutch to balance it. That false limb almost only makes him look normal, is what occurs to Jack suddenly, bizarre amid the situation. It's easier to keep Daniel subdued. The gun held on him by Arthur is probably enough. Bruiser pushes Jack back against the wall more roughly than he needs to, and goes to Daniel next anyway.

The girl Bruiser punched is standing by the doorway, with dry eyes, but looking sore and pissed off. She's one of them. Jack supposes it doesn't matter. They could still have done what they were threatening to do. He doesn't begin to understand how they explained the threat away to the regular store security employees, but they've sent those out now; said they were going to wait for the police. Jack's yell of, "They're not calling the police, they're breaking the law!" only got him punched. Again.

Daniel says, "If you tie my hands, then if you want me to go anywhere, you'll have to carry or drag me."

"We need to go somewhere we can at least lock the door," Arthur says. "The people in this building can only stay oblivious about so much."

"Wait for Mike to come back," Bruiser says. "It'll take more than two of us to move them safely."

The girl, who he hasn't counted even though she picked up Jack's fallen Smith & Wesson, says, "Randy, I hope you're going to get something good enough out of all this to make up for my face."

"Baby, of course I will," Arthur says. "We can pull something out of this yet."

"I wouldn't have done it if she hadn't suggested-" Bruiser looks awkward.

She sneers at him and says, "You don't hit that hard." Closer up, Jack can see the bump in her nose and catch the street in her attitude, and he thinks this girl usually hits back. Her comment is mostly in jest, but Jack scowls at them both.

One of the other men from earlier enters the room, takes a sharp stock of the situation and says with relief, "You got them back."

"Yes, I did discover they'd been running loose around the store for most of the last hour while you men kicked your heels in the basement... after they crashed through my door," Arthur says. "Alright, take them to the meeting room."

Jack jerks away before he can be manhandled again and steps forward of his own accord. For his efforts he gets to walk on his own, stumbling a bit, while they manhandle Daniel behind him. They're escorted along to a large, richly decorated conference room, all fine-polished wood and expensive red upholstery.

"Sure you want to get blood on all this?" Daniel asks, halting in the doorway. Jack wishes he wouldn't try to play the hero with the smart mouth when they're in this position. It isn't as if either of them are actually That Guy.

"We've a good, discreet cleaning service," Bruiser says with amusement.

At least the chair Jack is pushed into this time is more comfortable. The way he's positioned, they can't see his hands, behind him and obscured by the large table, but he hasn't had any luck loosening the bonds so far, and his hands were wrecked to begin with. Mike pushes Daniel toward another chair, on the side of the table closest the door, but he apparently gets to keep his hands free.

Bruiser shuts the door. The girl didn't come with them, gone to the ladies' room, no doubt to pout at her bruises. It's just Arthur and his two heavies, plus Jack and Daniel, now. "It seems we have a bit of a problem, gentlemen." Arthur spreads his hands on the head of the table and leans forward, wryly looking between them. "We underestimated you. Now you've seen a little more of our operation than we'd ever intended."

Jack bites down, grimly. They've seen his face and they know who he is, and since they didn't make a clean break, their chances of survival now are-

"I'll do it," he volunteers, shaking his head slightly at Sousa as the other agent's jaw jerks up in outrage. "Whatever you want. Access. SSR's vaults. I can still get that for you." He doesn't want to die, nor does he have any intention to help them, but pretending will extend their chances. They already have the career-damaging information from before. Arthur took his notebook back. Jack doesn't know how he'll claw this situation back, but he can try.

Randall Arthur barks a laugh. "We can never trust you, Mr. Thompson. No, we already know you'll say anything to save your hide... Then turn around and lie your way out of that, too."

Jack can see Daniel's face flatten at the description as he tries not to display... well, inappropriate amusement, at a guess, the bastard. But it flattens for real and with no humour at all as Arthur swings around to him and says, "You. It has to be you."

He's going to kill us anyway, it would be crazy not to. Jack is sure Daniel knows this and if he agrees to do anything, it will be just as much for the purpose of buying them time. Assuming that he does agree, boy-scout Daniel Sousa, instead of standing on honour and telling Arthur and his goons to get screwed. Which is apparently what he did before.

Daniel looks at Jack. It's a long look, and considering, but apart from that very hard to read. He sighs and scratches his head and looks pained to be involved in all of this, like fighting for his life by dissembling is beneath him. "I won't be able to get you into the East Coast office, you understand that? Only the one in LA."

...There are no vaults full of confiscations in the West Coast SSR office. If there has been anything at all transported over so far, and Jack's pretty good at keeping track of how things move in his own damn office, then it's certainly not on the scale of New York. Jack can't believe they'll fall for it, but it seems they do. The source for their information can't be all that detailed.

Jack has to quash a smile at the thought of Sousa weaselling the deal just as well as he could. But then, he's already seen that Daniel can play people when he wants to: that stunt with the earplugs being Exhibit A. It's only that normally Daniel is so straight-up, Jack forgets. But considering how, earlier, Daniel did not, he has to wonder why he'd fold now. The only difference is the company. Jack inclines his head and says, "Aw, Sousa, you care. I don't know what to say."

Daniel narrows his eyes and puts his hands on the table (for subtle support, Jack gauges, having been watching Sousa manoeuvre around his missing leg for a while now), and adjusts his stance to something... bigger, somehow, and more commanding. What do you know, he actually can look like he's chief of something when he tries. "What assurance do I have that you won't harm Thompson any further while I'm out doing what you want?"

"Where would be the point?" Arthur spreads his hands. "No gain for us. That's the forfeit for you not delivering. Besides, I'll leave Harry in charge. Harry's a fair fellow. Not a petty bone in him." He's looking at Bruiser, who gives a tight smile - is that insincerity Jack sees? - and a nod. "I'll be coming with you," Arthur continues, "but trust I'll have measures in place. If I give the wrong signal... your friend is dead."

"It's really more like 'colleague'," Daniel corrects, counter to earlier, deliberately not looking at Jack. Ouch. He glances around the others shiftily. "When do we go?"

"No time like the present," says Arthur.

Jack ends up back where he began, locked in his small storage room prison with Bruiser for company. This time, Bruiser's name is Harry, and he isn't using his fists... despite some initial tension. The hour must be getting late, because they've added a mattress to the floor. It has pristine sheets tucked over it - straight off the store shelf, Jack guesses.

All of this experience has a surreal edge.

Bruiser - Harry - grunts and says, "You might as well sleep." Resentment rolls under his voice for the sleep that he isn't going to get while on duty guarding Jack.

Jack stumbles to the mattress and collapses to his knees, then sideways onto his face. It's not painless, but it's the easiest way to get down without the help of his hands. He should be working on plans to escape, but under so close a guard as this, he doesn't see any point. Maybe he has to just accept that it's all in Sousa's hands now.

Maybe he's just really damned tired.

He's drifting when Harry asks, with suspicion in his tone, "What did you mean, before, when you said I was you?"

"Fuck off," Jack grunts into the pristine sheets.

He hears Harry sit down at the table. Paper scrapes, and there are further similar small sounds like that. After a while, Jack realises that the bruiser has taken playing cards out, and is playing some kind of solitaire, or something else against himself.

Jack sleeps for a while, unconsciousness landing on him like a wall. It's maybe a few hours later when he wakes up with a cry, with everything stiffened up, his shoulders and arms seeming to have set in their wrenched-back position.

Harry throws over an idle-toned question, "You hurtin'?"

A stab of resentment helps drive back the pain. Jack can't decide if the tone is trying to be mocking or conciliatory. Insults seem an appropriate response either way. He bites his tongue instead.

He doesn't want to make nice with Harry. But stronger instincts within him rebel and rise up. Other parts of him groan, but the part that says survive no matter what, but try to make it look good is the one that wins, exactly the way it always does. If he can get the bruiser to like him, he's less likely to shoot him later, and it doesn't actually lose him anything in the meantime. Any honour he ever had already expired in the war.

Jack rolls over on the mattress, to face Harry instead of the wall. It's a struggle and he notices that the sheets are no longer pristine where his battered face has been rested, but the reminder doesn't sway him. He contemplates rising to a sitting position or standing up and asks, "You want an opponent?" tipping his forehead at the cards on the table.

Harry stares back at him with suspicion.

He can't help but shudder when the other man stands and comes to get him, and he half-attempts to rise then cringes and falls sideways as the bruiser reaches down. Harry catches him anyway and hauls him back onto the mattress, and Jack supposes the guy has had adequate provocation to tie his feet firmly before dragging him over to drop him in the chair. "Stay there a moment."

Harry leaves the room briefly, locking it all the same, and returns with another chair before Jack can begin to think about taking advantage of being unobserved. This time, though, Harry comes around behind him and unties his hands.

"I'm not actually Captain America," Jack tells him, taken aback. The caution seems to contradict their demonstrated disdain.

"No shit."

At first there's barely feeling in his fingers to play, and any conversation there is, is unsurprisingly awkward. Manipulating the cards isn't easy with the damage to his hands, but once he finds his rhythm he can work around that, and manages to shake loose his tongue just the same. When the game's warmed up, they're pretty evenly matched, and the conversation becomes rapid-fire. Jack wonders if he makes it easier than he should to cast aside how this guy beat the hell out of him and made him betray himself.

But he needs Harry to like him, and he's good at making people like him - when he tries - and so he plays on and marvels at how his pride will stretch and skew and go there.

"-How 'bout that girl, huh?" Jack asks casually. "She's something, telling you to hit her just like that." He throws a strong card down in distraction, making Harry curse.

"Aw, Clara, she's..." Suspicion chokes his words. "Never you mind. Just put your cards down." But Jack laughs it off, and makes a joke, and a few minutes later another nugget of information comes with the win.

When Daniel comes back with the cavalry - and he actually brought Rose, though Jack assumes there're other SSR West Coast personnel out there beyond Daniel's broad shoulders - Jack's still playing cards with the head henchman. What's more, he has just about all the dirt on this operation they could ever want already under his belt.

He fancies to himself that sitting up at the card table, leaning back and offering a greeting wave and whatever he can of a smile, he looks just as suave and dignified as anyone might in such straits.

Certainly it provides a startled moment of pause for Daniel and Rose, as they throw back the door.

Epilogue

Daniel has been worrying himself sick for the last eight or nine hours it took to get himself free, contain Randall Arthur, and put a team together fit to come back and rescue Jack. The last thing he expected was to find Jack sitting there cool as cucumber, playing cards with the enemy's right hand man.

Jack looks up and gives a little wave. Maybe it's harder to spot 'overwhelming relief' on him because of the relative immobility of his face at the moment.

The henchman groans and stands up, putting his hands behind his head, moving warily and slowly beneath Rose's glower and the aim of her revolver. Jack also puts his hands on his head, and leans back casually in his chair. His face forms something resembling a smug smile, which is just about possible to pick out, amid all of the marks.

"I guess worms are slippery," Jack tells the henchman like he in some way masterminded this. Daniel doesn't have the heart to throw in any correction.

Who the hell does Jack Thompson think he is anyway? he wonders sourly.

He's already exasperated by the contradictions of the last fraught day, and it's almost annoying to be reminded that even after all the time they've known each other, and some pretty sticky judgements on the way, he doesn't know everything about what makes Jack tick... Or what makes Jack break... and it was clear that, in some form, back in this miserable room when they had him before, he had broken. But it only seems he's swept it together from personal disaster to apparent heroism yet again. Daniel has the sneaking suspicion Jack's still going to end up coming out of this looking like he deserves another medal.

Especially since- "I got Arthur's notebook." Balancing on his good leg, he pats his jacket with his crutch hand, frowns a meaningful frown, and doesn't specify further in front of Rose.

"Excellent." Jack jerks in his chair, which unexpectedly wobbles the table. "A little assistance here?"

Daniel steps back and ducks his head enough to discover the reason for the continued casually-affected sprawl: Jack's feet tied and hooked around the table leg.

"I've got it!" Rose says, and drops with the same unexpected enthusiasm with which she's approached this whole venture. Daniel has no idea where she draws the knife from that's suddenly in her hand.

He waggles his gun at the henchman, the one he'd thought Jack particularly didn't like, making the large man retreat to the furthest corner of the room, and stumps around the table. As the last rope parts and Jack pulls his feet back with a relieved sigh, Daniel says, "I'll take it from here." He waits for Rose to climb back upright, brush her bright dress free of dust, and resume covering the henchman, before he braces his crutch and reaches down for Jack.

Who did come back for him, and did his damnedest to save them both, no matter where else his motivations hovered at. At the end of the day... well, the day probably revealed more depths to Jack than Daniel would have expected.

Jack reaches higher, curling his fingers around Daniel's wrist rather than the offered hand, and Daniel can see at least one twisted finger so lets himself do all the gripping, taking hold of Jack's wrist to haul him up. He's unsteady on his feet for a moment, and clings to Daniel, a support which isn't easy to maintain, but fair's fair after earlier.

"I still can't believe that stunt with the trolley," Daniel offers.

"Me either," Jack snorts. For a moment, Daniel sees something more vulnerable there, in place of, say, You're kidding, Sousa! That was one hundred percent Thompson skill. Jack's legs falter again and he grabs more heavily for support, then the next moment he's steadied himself and that brief... weakness... openness... it's gone.

Daniel pats Jack heartily on the back instead of offering the more expansive embrace he actually gets the feeling might not go amiss. "Let's get the hell out of here. My two best guys-" who were Jack's two worst guys a month ago, but never mind that "-have got the rest of this in hand. Arthur's in a cell at the SSR and the rest of his people are going to be joining him, soon as we shake loose who knew about this and who didn't."

"I might've got hold of some information that can help with that," Jack puts in, self-satisfied, and in the background the henchman curses.

"Good, good." Daniel hasn't slept in over twenty four hours and he knows it's starting to affect his thinking. Jack Thompson, he reminds himself, never did a thing that wasn't done to serve his own ends.

He points Jack toward the door. As they leave, he overhears Rose asking the henchman with edged politeness, "You do that to Chief Thompson's face?"

He's not truly sure where the edge in her voice lies, and as he shuffles around to allow another agent into the small room to back up Rose, he's hustling quick as he can on his crutch to get out of earshot before he finds out, and more pointedly before Jack can find out if Rose's question is focused upon retaliation or congratulation.

"Rose, huh?" Jack asks, deadpan.

"I've got six staff who've completed combat training and an office full of boxes," Daniel retorts. And whose fault is that, Jack?

"You know, you didn't have to accept the promotion or the transfer," Jack points out.

Daniel laughs in his face, makes a quick glance about for any SSR personnel nearby or looking their way, and shifts the hand from Jack's shoulder to pat his chest. Pushes Randall Arthur's notebook into his grasp on the second pat. Jack's hand curls up in an instant to take and hide it. Jack's always quick on the uptake when it come to covering his ass.

"We chiefs gotta look out for each other," Jack says, smiling; spreading the weight again, as he does so well.

Daniel gives in. Jack always fails, and the world always rewards him for it. Why break a tradition? Besides, they've both had a damned awful day. "You said it. Let's go take care of those welts and get you a drink. I can probably swing the confiscation of a medicinal bottle of scotch from the food hall upstairs, all things considered."

"Sousa - you're a pal."

They pick their slow way back to the service elevator, walking step-for-step from the weary hitch in Jack's walk.

END