Chapter Text
”Mouser, you need to return to the pickup point.”
A static voice broke the dead silence inside a broken-down building in the middle of a busy city. The muffled, frustrated sigh that followed the order coming from the radio revealed a woman’s position. A woman with a sniper rifle scope covering one of her eyes was hiding at the top floor of the building, following a tuft of hair moving in the crowded street.
After making sure the target stayed in her vision, Mouser’s left hand deserted the rifle and moved to the radio located on her left shoulder.
“I got eyes on the target. This is not going to take long,” responded Mouser, her hand then returning to the rifle at hand.
“The target doesn’t matter anymore. What’s more important right now, is for you to return to the pickup point before I need to personally come get you,” came the response from the woman’s team member, Chip.
Not following instructions, Mouser kept the muzzle of the gun pointed at the target, who had stopped in front of a stand that sold freshly picked fruits.
“On who’s order?” Mouser questioned. She was sure Chip was just trying to prank her to make her fuck-up the mission; that wouldn’t have been the first time he’d tried something like that.
Silence took over the radio connection between Mouser and her partner. She was sure he just didn’t come up with a believable answer to her question, but she still burrowed her brows waiting for his answer.
“On my order,” was finally heard. The deep and scratchy voice of her partner had changed. The new voice had a higher, much more mature sound.
Mouser could recognize that voice anywhere.
“Should have known you were behind this, Laswell,” Mouser said, her eyes finally taking one last look at her ex-target before rolling on the floor from her stomach to her back. She knew she should have been angry with Laswell for interrupting her mission that she had been working her ass off for the last two weeks – the guy she was after, was a leader of a human trafficking company that had endangered the lives of thousands of people. However, her anger went down the drain as quickly as it surfaced.
“Finally agreeing to go out with me?” A joke that Mouser had asked Laswell when they’d first met.
Mouser could almost hear the other woman’s eyes rolling in their sockets. “You have fifteen minutes to get out of there. A chopper is already waiting for you,” Laswell answered, signaling the end of the conversation.
With a deep exhale to cover her laugh, Mouser muttered a quick ‘Yes, ma’am’ then pushed herself off the dusty floor and made her way out of the building without a single look back.
⸻⸻⸻⸻
Kate Laswell flipped through a pile of files in her hands and tried to zone out the constant bang of heavy boots making contact with the metal floor of the helicopter. Chip was pacing between the boxes of weapons and seats. He’d been pacing for the past fifteen minutes.
Laswell and Chip had had a heated argument an hour before contacting Mouser on the field. It took Chip almost 45 minutes to agree with Laswell to abort Mouser’s mission. Laswell couldn’t even count on her fingers, how many times she was about to lose her mind trying to reason with the man.
Kate had closed her eyes to try to calm herself when Chip’s pacing was seconds away from getting on her last nerve. Just when she was about to tell the man to sit his ass down, the pacing stopped. Laswell opened her eyes to look at the man whose gaze was pointed out of the open door of the chopper. Her eyes followed where he was looking at.
Her gaze met the woman she was waiting for – Mouser. Her tactical gear that held all the necessary items she might need in the field was dirtied by the dust from laying on the old building’s floor for hours. Her deep brown hair reached her shoulder blades even though it was pulled into a ponytail at the nape of her neck – pieces of shorter hair peaked from under her helmet and the balaclava she wore, framing her face. A sniper rifle was slung behind her back and a submachine gun occupied her gloved hands, the metals of them gleaming under the rays of the sun. The black technical t-shirt Mouser wore under her tactical vest revealed a few of her many scars gained from years of working in the field.
Mouser looked like a typical military member if you didn’t look at her face. The lower half of her face was covered with a matte black mask that hugged her face snuggly, and a layer of black paint was smeared on her face, covering the top of her nose, the area around her eyes, eyebrows and temples. If you inspected the mask closely, you could see some cuts and dents in the mask, showing how it had taken some hits before. The dark mask made the woman’s fair skin look even paler and her dark green eyes seem like they glowed as the sun hit them.
Mouser’s mask was something she was never seen without, and she planned to always keep it that way. It was something to hide her identity from others. It was something that made it easier for her to separate herself from her current self from her past self. It was something that enemies and allies recognized – something that made them fear her or respect her.
Laswell set down the files from her hands as Mouser made her way inside the chopper. With a signal to the pilot, the rotors of the helicopter came to life as they started to prepare for takeoff.
“I hope this interruption of yours is worth the time I wasted on tracking down that target,” Mouser pointedly said to the other woman as she greeted Chip with a firm fist to the shoulder that made the man give her a tight-lipped smile. That made Mouser realize; something about Laswell getting involved with their work was upsetting him.
The short-haired woman took a deep breath in as her eyes met Mouser’s. They had known each other for years. Kate knew how Mouser wanted the news to be told to her – straight to the point, no embellishing the truth no matter what.
“You’re being reassigned to another task force,” Kate finally let out. “Personally requested by Captain John Price.”
Kate tried to make out any change in Mouser’s stance – any facial expression, any body movement that might tell her where her thoughts were. But there was nothing. She couldn’t read her.
Chip, on the other hand, had curled his long fingers into tight fists. The man’s body was like an open book to Kate, he expressed himself almost too much. The argument they had almost an hour ago, was about how he wasn’t ready to lose Mouser. They had worked together for the past two years, always staying with each other. Chip tried to reason with Kate that Mouser’s and his relationship was something he was not ready to lose so suddenly.
But Kate had made up her mind a long time ago.
“The 141?” Mouser questioned to which Laswell nodded. “When do I leave?”
“What the hell?!”
Mouser and Laswell turned their eyes to look at Chip whose hands were thrown in the air. His eyes were fuming with anger and his cheeks had taken a light shade of pink – something that happened to him when he had extreme emotions.
“How can you move on like that? Didn’t this mean anything to you? Didn’t I mean anything to you? I thought I was your family, for god’s sake! I–,” Chip started to ramble, his hands going all over the place, but Mouser stopped him before he could continue any further.
“Of course, this meant something to me,” Mouser stated in a matter-of-fact voice. “But this isn’t something I have the right to remonstrate. This is a job.”
Laswell could see something break inside Chip with Mouser’s last sentence – she could almost even hear the broken pieces of his heart hit the bottom of his stomach. Mouser had meant something more to Chip besides a partner that he’d worked with.
The heartbroken man opened his mouth to try to form a sentence, to tell how he truly felt, but he just ended up looking like a fish out of water. Thus, he closed his mouth, keeping his emotions bottled up.
Returning her gaze to Laswell, Mouser asked again: “When do I leave?”
“Now.”