Ashes in the Darkness

Grim

WRITERS NOTE: This is another filler chapter. It's trash writing again. I'm sorry. I promise the next few chapters are gonna be much better and much longer. More smut, more action... maybe some more betrayal *wink wink* We are building to the good shit. Bare with me.

The plane ride seemed short because I slept through most of it in silence, as did the rest of the team. The car ride from the Missoula airport was just as short, because I slept through that as well. But now I was looking at a wooden door that led inside to the cabin I used to live in, the same wooden door I had left two months ago with Kate Laswell. I fumbled with the keys that I forgot were in my bag, tumbling around in the rest of the random shit I carried with me.

My fingers shook, as I placed the key into the door and turned it, but I was even more horrified by the smell that came from inside when it swung open. Dust, mildew, and leather. Before I had even broken the threshold, I eyed my father's hunting rifle and tears sprung to my eyes. I grabbed it and pulled it into my chest. Holding it again was so foreign yet felt so right. It was unlike the M4 that I worked with every day, it was worn and chipped and had still had the little spots of blood from hunting on it. My father's signatures.

I stepped inside and nearly collapsed as I saw nothing had been changed since I left it. My bed was still in the same position that I had left it, the blankets had not even been made up. I saw my towel still hanging over the back of one of my kitchen table chairs, my bathroom door was still open from the shower I took after I nearly died of hyperthermia. Although I should have cried, I should have felt something, I didn't step further inside. I looked around at the numerous books that I always told myself that I was going to read and never did.

"Jamie, we need to keep moving," Captain Price said from behind me. Ghost stood outside the SUV on the lawn with a cigarette in his mouth and Soap leaned against the hood with a pair of pitch-black sunglasses over his eyes. We had thirty-six hours to intercept the Russian smugglers who were going to be moving. I was wasting time, but I couldn't stop looking at who I used to be in the room around me. I saw my darkness in these walls, but the darkness was different. The darkness that Ghost and I shared was all consuming and felt like black flames touching my skin over and over again. The darkness that I was living in before was like a cloud constantly hanging over my head, holding onto my shoulders like a demon constantly stalking me.

I flung my father's rifle over my shoulder and turned, not looking back as I closed the door behind me and locked it again. I doubted I would ever come back to this little cabin, whoever came into my job for David after me was welcome to my shit inside. I didn't want any of it anymore. It wasn't home anymore. "We're Oscar mike," I say as I put my sunglasses back over my eyes and pull myself into the back of the SUV again. Squishing between Gaz and Soap wasn't ideal, but no one said anything to each other the entire ride, only the occasional time check or request to lower the air conditioner in the car.

I sat and stared out the windshield of the vehicle, almost feeling sick to my stomach at the thought of what was going to happen once we got to the top of the hill. Laswell had let David know that we were coming, but there was a small part of me that hoped that he wouldn't be there. How could I face the man who brought me from the brinks of homelessness and gave me a reason to keep going after I went AWOL. My gaze went to Ghost who sat in the passenger seat next to Price, arms crossed over his chest and a fresh black balaclava over his face. David was to me what Price was to Ghost.

I closed my eyes and sighed a little too loudly, and Price's calm but stern voice broke the nearly ten hours of silence between all of us. "You're nervous to be back, love?"

I hesitated for a moment, not really wanting to answer him but figured it would be disrespectful to ignore his question, "Yes, it's weird."

"David will be protected, I can promise you that," Price said, even though I was going to tell David to take his wife Amy and the kids to their flat in Missoula the first moment that they could. I wouldn't have David brought into the mess that we were about to make in his forest.