Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
HUDSON
The extraction team found them five minutes after touchdown.
Hudson leaned back against the hull of the downed helicopter, hands pressed flat against his thighs.
His co-pilot Sergeant Martinez walked the four ground team members toward the waiting vehicle.
One of them was limping. Another had his arm cradled to his chest. Martinez called over his shoulder, but Hudson couldn’t hear anything other than the ringing in his ears.
They were alive. All six of them.
He kept reminding himself of that.
A woman from the extraction team crouched in front of him. “Captain. You with us?”
“Yeah.” Hudson couldn’t lift his eyes to hers. “Yeah. I’m good.”
“Medical is at base. We’re moving.”
Hudson let her guide him to the vehicle. Martinez sat beside him, a cut above his eyebrow still seeping, eyes too wide and hands not quite still. Neither of them said anything for the first few minutes.
“Nice landing, Cap,” Martinez said eventually.
“Thanks.”
“I mean it.” He paused. “That was… something.”
The Syrian landscape moved past outside the window, flat and pale in the afternoon light.
In the distance, his bird was being towed onto a military low-loader.
His mind wandered to the tail rotor failing, the aircraft pulling hard right and the two minutes following which he would spend a significant amount of time trying to forget.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Joint task force base. Twenty minutes out. Better medical facility.” The sergeant in the passenger seat glanced back. “You’ll be debriefed there too. Your unit’s being folded into the JTF—they need more aviation support.”
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, trying to steady his breathing—in… out. In… out.
That voice on the comms. He couldn't believe he hadn't recognized it before he heard it say his name.
Not Hale. Not Captain. Hudson. Like he had heard it on the last day of Selection, on the crowded dance floor back home, in Shaw’s bed. Said with so much emotion it ached. Carrying the same weight even through the static of a helicopter going down over hostile territory.
He stared at the ceiling and exhaled a loud breath.
Damn it.
The JTF base was bigger than their own. Hudson clocked it as soon as they pulled in—more personnel, more vehicles, the operations building a proper reinforced structure. He was still taking it all in when he spotted a figure standing at the far end of the landing area.
Elliot.
Hudson took in the sight of him.
It was the first time he saw him in two years, but his body still remembered. Heat crept up his neck and his throat tightened.
Shaw wore a standard dull military outfit, but the beige T-shirt revealed those damn hot tattoos.
Apparently the heat gave him no other option than to put them on full display.
Hudson didn't think he could hate the ungodly temperatures more. And yet. There were Shaw’s tattoos, out in the open, doing absolutely nothing to help.
When the rest of the personnel came forward to meet the extraction vehicles, Shaw stayed back, very deliberately not looking in Hudson’s direction.
Coward. Guess he hadn’t expected this when he decided to ghost him.
Hudson got out. He kept his eyes on Shaw the entire time, and when Shaw’s eyes found him, he stilled.
For a moment neither of them moved. Hudson was aware of Martinez beside him, of the extraction team moving around them, of the injured ground team members being ushered toward medical. But all of that faded into the background.
Shaw was twenty feet away looking at him with an expression on his face that Hudson had never seen before. It wasn’t the controlled neutral he'd spent years learning to read, nor the deliberate blankness Shaw wore like armor.
It was broken and unguarded.
Hudson walked toward him, even though Shaw’s eyes begged him not to.
He stopped a few feet in front of him.
Hudson had imagined this moment approximately a thousand times and in none of them had he been covered in dust with bruised ribs and ringing ears.
"You're alive," Shaw said.
"Observant, Sierra Ops."
Shaw’s jaw tightened. "Don't make this a joke."
The thing was, if he didn’t make it a joke, he was going to have to feel it all. And he wasn’t ready for that yet.
"I'm alive. We're all good," Hudson said.
Shaw nodded once and looked away. "Medical. Now. Then debrief."
"Shaw—"
"Now, Captain Hale."
Two years, an unanswered text, and a helicopter going down and this was how they were going about it.
Right. Fine.
If this was how Shaw wanted it, Hudson could play along.
Medical was over in an hour. The flight surgeon went over everything—concussion protocol, blood pressure, the previously broken wrist he’d slammed against the panel during impact, the bruised ribs. Nothing requiring evacuation.
He couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or not. Might be better to put some distance between him and Shaw. Like, now.
"You've broken this wrist recently," the surgeon said, looking at the imaging.
"Yeah. Three months ago.”
"Captain Hale." The surgeon shot him a disapproving look. "You're going to feel this for a while. No flight ops for a minimum of two weeks."
"Understood."
"I mean it, Captain."
"I heard you." Hudson meant it less than he'd implied.
The debrief took another hour. Major Okafor ran it and Hudson walked through the timeline from the initial call for support, the extraction, the tail rotor hit and the landing at Echo-Six. He answered everything accurately.
At the end, Okafor held his gaze. “You were ordered to pull back.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Multiple times.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you refused.”
“Yes, sir.”
Okafor sighed, clearly torn. He made a note. “Formal reprimand for non-compliance, Captain Hale. Goes in your file.”
“Understood, sir.”
“It’ll also go in my report that your non-compliance saved four lives.” Okafor closed the folder and gave him a nod. “Dismissed.”
Four lives. Even if Major Okafor had sent him stateside there would have been no regrets.
Hudson walked out into the corridor trying to find the way to the operations building.
Replaying the mission that almost killed him had changed his mind. He didn’t want distance. He needed to find Shaw and figure out what the hell was going on between them. He deserved some answers.
Martinez was waiting with two cups in hand, one of which he handed over without a word. “Reprimand?”
Hudson nodded while taking a sip of the much-needed coffee.
“Same,” Martinez said. “Worth it though.”
“Yeah.” He glanced down the corridor towards the exit. “It was.”
Despite Hudson’s best efforts, Shaw was nowhere to be found and Hudson wasn’t exactly familiar with the layout of the base. So instead he hit the showers. Probably for the best, anyway.
Afterward he needed to check on his bird. He found her in the base hangar—or at least what was left of her.
The tail rotor was gone entirely, sheared off clean.
The rear section had shrapnel damage along the port side.
Three punctures were visible from where he stood, but there were probably more on the other side.
The cockpit windows were intact, which felt like a small miracle given everything else.
She was tilted slightly to starboard, one landing strut bent, a dark stain spreading across the concrete beneath the fuel line.
She’d gotten them down somehow, against most reasonable expectations.
“Hell of a job, girl,” he said and put his hand flat against the hull.
Footsteps from behind startled him.
“You could have died today.”
Hudson turned around. Shaw was in the hangar entrance, arms crossed, clearly not here to assess the damage on the helicopter.
“No shit.”
“You were ordered to pull back.” Shaw’s voice cut straight through the air between them. “By me. Multiple times. And you didn’t.”
“My people were on the ground.”
Shaw stepped forward. “I don’t give a shit. I watched your marker go down and I—” He stopped. Restarted. “You don’t get to do that. You don't get to be reckless and then walk in here like it’s nothing.”
“I’m not. I made a call—”
“You made a call.” Shaw laughed, short and humorless. “Right. Like you always do. And everyone else is just along for the ride.”
Hudson straightened. “Well, it worked out pretty fucking great, if you ask me.”
“This time.” Shaw’s voice cracked on the words. “It worked out this time. What about next time? What about the time after that?”
“Wouldn’t I be doing you a favor? Making this whole thing tidier for you? No messy feelings, no unanswered texts, just—”
“Don’t.” Shaw’s voice dropped dangerously low. “Don’t you fucking dare.”
“Why not?” Hudson stepped toward him. “We’re nothing, right? Not a couple, never were.”
“That’s not—”
“You said my name on those comms today like it meant something and then I land and you’re straight back to ‘medical, now’ like I’m just another—”
“I thought you were dead, goddamnit.” The words came out ragged. “I thought you…”
“Jesus Christ, Elliot. What’s it gonna be?” Hudson's hands trembled. He clenched them at his side, feeling his injured wrist ache. “If you care so much, why didn’t you answer my text?”
Shaw not answering hurt his feelings—there was no way around it. He was hurt, and he had promised himself never to speak of that stupid text again.
Still, he continued. “You know how hard it was for me to say something like that? And you went dark. That was a dick move.”
“Not everyone gets to say what’s on their mind.” They were a few feet apart now. “You have no idea what it’s like to not be allowed to want things.”
“Your father’s not here, Elliot.”
“I know. Putain!”
“Then act like it. You’ve been blaming him for everything your entire life and at some point—” Hudson closed the remaining distance between them, his chest almost touching Shaw’s. “At some point it stops being his fault.”
“Fuck you.”
“Say that again.” Hudson stared him straight in the eye.
“Fuck. You.” Shaw said again and shoved him—both hands, hard against his chest.
Hudson stumbled back, surprised but also relieved to finally see Shaw lose his composure.