He stared at the ceiling and exhaled a loud breath.
Damn it.
The JTF basewas 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.
