John raps his knuckles on the firepit while trying to work the stiffness out of his back. The two months of intensive team training was hard enough, but the tacked on three months to get everyone used to the new gear had him ground into the fucking dirt. All of that was nothing to say for two dozen months of non stop operations back to back to back before they landed here. Weeks in Yemen, Portugal, Peru, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Libya, all the way to Nepal, Tibet, and Bangladesh. Cleaning up anomalies big and small all around the world not a single fuckin’ op location had a single god damn palm-tree.

  “At the very least it isn’t a desert,” Bella chuckles, lighting Casper's cigarette, before turning over to light Johns.

  “Hey, what the fuck.” Kane throws his arms up, his own smoke still unlit.

  “Get your own lighter.”

  “You gave them a light!”

  “They are close.”

  “I am just as close.” Kane scowls as he holds out his cigarette to the crackling firepit, only for a warm breeze to brush the flame across his knuckles instead, singing them as he recoils his hand, making him mutter.

  “After Bangladesh? Fuck I’m glad Blackwood had the brains enough to send us somewhere tropical.” John pulls in the nicotine and lets the smoke out in a steady stream above him.

  Cuba isn’t the nicest place in the world but damnit if the weather isn’t a pleasant change of pace. It made the training a hell of a lot more worth it. Clearing sim rooms wasn’t so hard when you could relax on the private beach just outside afterwards. Scuba infills weren’t nearly as grueling in nice, warm, crystal clear waters. Hell he didn’t even mind the six, full op simulations they ran, because afterword's he could actually go to a fucking restaurant, or the bar, or a club whenever Kane insisted on dragging him around to the party scene he and Spaz enjoyed so much.

  “The best part is, no more fucking devils. I swear I thought they would pop out around every corner in the middle east…” John rubs the bridge of his nose, prompting a round of nods from everyone.

  Despite being outside they were free to talk about damn near anything. Blackwood sold his compound in Jordan to the Israelis who seemed all too keen on taking the base, and over the past few months spent the money on building up a new one on the coast. They owned a couple dozen acres of land in the surrounding area with the site just as secure as the last one, but this time in the tropics.

  Now, the full team—save for Kid who doesn’t like smoking—sit around a firepit on a section of grass right by the beach, surrounded by palm trees, white sands, and perfect weather.

  “I’ll miss those incredible tits,” Kane sighs dramatically.

  “I still find myself dreaming of her ass.” Spaz joins Kane by shaking his head.

  Bronco is the only one who groans. Not only a devout Christian, but also straight as an arrow and sufficiently disgusted with everyone's infatuation with the devil's physical form.

  John can’t lie though, Lilith did leave an impression. The op is still talked about to this day, as she often comes up in discussions involving drinks. Kane was eager to keep her around longer just to look at her, and Spaz was inclined to agree, but for some more than others that op had left some nasty scars, the kind the stims and med teams couldn’t heal.

  “Shut the hell up,” Bronco pleads as Spaz and Kane make a show of describing all of the things they wish they could have done.

  “Even Bella agrees!” Kane counters, looking to the French woman, practically pleading.

  She rolls her eyes, and Casper has to cut in as the Aussie begins a tirade.

  “Alright, calm down,” he laughs, taking a swig of his beer..

  John holds out his hands and as soon as he does a cold beer finds its way to him. Without a word they pass the drinks around, pop the tops and drown the conversation in booze.

  In just a little over 2 years, John found himself taking Bella’s words to heart. It was especially easy to think of these people like family after the Iraq op. They had spilled blood together, fought together, damn near died together. The months of additional drills and practice were there to keep them busy and pointed towards a goal as they worked towards their next mission, but John didn’t need it, not with these people. It helps that they were all special forces in a past life, all had earned their rank, every last one forged in fire and polished to a razor's edge under the same conditions John was.

  The past two years since Iraq only further confirmed everything he felt after that first mission. They have his back, and god damnit he has theirs. They signed away their souls for one another and even though Kid and Bronco sat the op out he didn’t think any less of them.

  Bronco was there the whole way as everyone recovered from the mental strain of that mission. John wasn’t practicing but she sat there and said a prayer with him by his bedside, she did it with everyone who would let her.

  Kid and John hadn’t spilled blood together on that particular op but they sure as hell were spilling a lot of oil, grease, and solder. Whenever they weren’t training or running missions John and Kid were in the workshop refining, refining, and refining some more.

  Blackwood tasked them with taking John's prototype designs and making them applicable for other anomalies, A goal he was intent on seeing through regardless of orders, but orders made it more justifiable to stay in the shop for hours at a time. It was fun at first, up until the brief for this mission came through claiming that a Cuban trafficking operation had become, inexplicably bullet proof.

  John didn’t believe it at first, not until he watched the video of a large Cuban vessel clashing with the US coast guard off of Florida, resulting in the use of heavy machine gun fire by the coast guard.

  He watched with his own two eyes as nearly 50 rounds of 50 caliber machine gun fire hit a man square in the chest, before he leaped from his boat, uninjured, and proceeded to rip the turret and the man firing it in half in less than the blink of an eye.

  In a minute, the entire US coast guard ship was underwater, the Cuban man responsible leaped several hundred feet back to his own boat before sailing away without a scratch on him.

  Obviously the entire incident was buried deep, and Blackwood was tasked with making sure this never happened again.

  The entire ordeal means John's prototype weapon and armor system need to be fully operational, and after many sleepless nights that followed excruciating training, they had the final version up to operational standards.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  In addition to the rifle, which focused on using laser technology, they had also created two more weapons by stripping down some Williams tech to the bare bones, reverse engineering what few parts they could wrap their little minds around and refabricated it into what Kid dubbed a particle beam. The weapons internal generator accelerates charged particles gathered from a container mounted to an operator's back, and fires them out at near light speed, delivering some devastating kinetic damage at an atomic level. John didn’t care how durable a thing was, at the end of the day durability was nothing more than a measure of the atomic bond of a structure. If the kinetic damage targeted the atoms specifically, the bond they held didn’t matter.

  He had done more research than he ever thought to imagine on atomic physics and while he couldn’t grasp all of it, Kid sure as shit could, and helped make some of the final, necessary leaps to get it all working.

  The final weapons system was much simpler in theory and equally complex in its in field application. The short of it being, the weapon emits high frequency microwaves to disrupt the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a target, and with the right setting destabilize electrons, bypassing any amount of durability they could think of. Hell if John's first prototype started to carve through an actual devil from the real hell, then these newer weapons shouldn’t have too much of an issue.

  “You look like shit.” Bella prods gently, stirring John from his work related day dream. He had spent so fucking long in the workshop and in training it was all he could think about these days.

  “Thanks.” John rolls his eyes and sips his beer.

  “It’s true, you do.” Bella shrugs.

  “Well, you look just as fucking charming as ever. You sure you were born into money? I swear if I didn’t know any better I would say you were raised by fucking... panthers or something.”

  “Perhaps the French are just better?” she offers, downing the contents of her own beer in a few gulps.

  “Nah, USA all the way, I think you keep that fucking smile on to throw me. Make me think you aren’t just as burnt out as the rest of us.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” she does that damn thing with her tongue and her chin as she swipes his bottle away, drinks the rest of it and dangles the empty vessel in front of him.

  “Wipe it off your damn face.” John challenges, grabbing at the bottle in a feint before taking her wrist, pulling her close, and leaning in to nearly touch their two cruel grins together.

  “Would you two just fuck already?” Kane prods.

  John holds Bella's eyes for just a little while longer, hoping she would be the first to break, but she is fucking relentless. She makes a kissing face right at him, and John backs out, shifting his body to move past her, leaning fully into her to grab a new beer from the cooler before shoving her away with a hand.

  “See? I told you he is a coward,” Bella teases again, her eyes flickering with self satisfaction.

  “Really? Is that why your face turned all red when you caught me in the locker room?”

  “I liked what I saw, and the room was hot. There is no harm in a little look, no?” She shrugs innocently.

  “I just can’t win against you, can I?” John sighs, slinking back into his chair.

  “No,” She says plainly, though her lips curl up into that fucking cat like smile as she pulls another bottle and takes a sip, making sure John catches the corner of her eye, before they wrinkle up to match that smile.

  “Need I remind the class...” Casper begins, but a series of groans rise up and stop his lecture about inter-team relationships.

  Truthfully John just considers Bella a damn good friend, that he happens to have enough chemistry with to be playful.

  Ever since their talk in her room he felt closer to the woman, and that closeness continued well into their healing process, well into the depths of their several dozen operations, and into the travel to Cuba and the training that followed. He had treated her as an equal operator from the very beginning, and she had helped him find solidarity and community in the people around him. It was an invaluable gift, one that shifted his entire perspective of the team’s and his way of doing things moving forward, it was the kind of gift playful banter alone could never repay.

  That wasn’t to say he didn’t find her attractive. She had started growing out her hair despite insisting it wasn’t because of John's comments, her body only continued to get more impressive and the familiarity and comfort they shared in their friendship had him feeling that familiar pang of guilt whenever a joke or a tease got a little too far.

  But still, he could never be with her, and he knew that in his heart, the very same heart that still belongs to the woman who wore the ring he still keeps on his nightstand.

  After learning heaven was a real place, he had spent more and more nights sending up little prayers to her, hoping that for all the space between them she would hear him. It had been such a long time since he spoke to her like that, spoke in earnest, he had cried himself to sleep.

  It became a little easier in the nights after, but still, every time he lay with his head to the ceiling, telling her about how shitty his day was, complaining about a technical hang-up in the weapons system or sharing a story about Spaz caught red handed with a working girl in his bed, he couldn’t help but feel that pain of her passing again and again.

  He wanted to hear her voice as he talked, feel her tiny little hands pounding against his chest as he didn’t leave out the “dirty” parts of the story before getting all riled up herself when the juiciest bits came out. He missed the smell of her, the weight of her, the warmth of her in his bed beside him. God how he missed just the presence she had. It had been three and a half years since she last told him she loved him, three and a half years since he last held her hand or kissed her lips, and still it felt like yesterday.

  Looking at Bella now, watching her drive her foot into Kane's face with a laugh as he tries to get to the beer, he wonders if she did the same thing, if she felt the same way he did.

  If she did she hid it well, then again here John was doing the same thing. Drinking his beer, playing around with everyone all the same. He supposed they all had their own brand of shit, probably everyone but Kane who, for as long as John had known the man, never broke stride from his usual chaotic nature.

  “You’re a sick man, a sick, sick man.” Blackbeard hollers, once more pulling John from his thoughts to refocus in on what the hell was going on.

  “I am cultured,” Kane corrects with a swig of beer.

  “I tuned in at the wrong time, what's happening?” John asks, looking around at the disgusted faces of his team.

  “Kane, please tell your friend what you told all of us,” Casper says with a voice so cold it makes John think they are about to take sniper fire.

  “I’m just sayin’, a whale is large enough that if I managed to fuck one it would be consensual.”

  “Jesus.” John lets his head fall, prompting another round of revulsion from the circle.

  “Spaz has my back, don't ya!” Kane tries, looking to the man who has since taken two large steps away.

  “I had your back at aliens, but a whale? Nah you’re on your own pal.”

  “Another body cast adrift,” Bella hums, swishing her bottle around like a corpse caught in the waves.

  “Do not use my analogy for this,” Casper grimaces, pinching his eyes shut.

  If all the team ever did was spend the rest of their days training and their nights like this then dammit he could die a happy man.

  Casper's analogy of bodies adrift was apt when he came here, but now he was standing on a small tropical island, alive and... maybe not totally well but definitely alive, and sure as shit happier than when he was drifting. He didn’t have it all figured out, far from it, but he was getting there, slowly, with the help of these chuckle fucks.

  The night carries on until the group disperses with a round of hugs and gibes and slaps on various exposed body parts signal its end.

  As much as he wants this to continue, he knows it won’t. This is a mission site, which means they have a mission to do.

  However, until the word comes down though, who did it hurt to indulge in a little vacation?