[Fic] Wayfaring Stranger

[kittydesade]

Title: Wayfaring Stranger
Fandom: Human Target
Prompt: Human Target, the team, Guerrero is captured and for once can't think his way out of it; Chance and Winston are going to get him back and will not be playing nice. Torture.
Characters: Winston, Chance, Guerrero, Eve (OC), Dawn (OC)
Word Count: ~4,760
Rating: R for violence
Summary: Guerrero was trying to help Chance without him knowing. Getting kidnapped and tortured kind of hampers that.


They don't tell you about interrogation rooms.

The light bulb wasn't swinging. The table wasn't metal. The floor was carpet underneath the plastic wrap they had laid down to catch the blood. The chair he was tied to was solid, and probably expensive.

It was somebody's house. Or it had been. Before they'd taken over.

He didn't know who they are, although he could make a pretty good guess by the way they spoke. By the way they moved. By the patterns they beat into him in intervals.

Different people from different secret police around the world had different interrogation techniques. Different places they liked to go for.

And what does it say about me that I know this?

I'm too old for this shit.

The door creaked again. He tensed, because by now he didn't know when the door was creaking open for his daily feeding (he assumed it was once daily) or the Watcher (because all that guy did was stand around and stare at him) or his next beating (they came at random intervals). Footsteps thudded on the carpet, back and forth, then stopped. There was a hushed conversation in some language he could barely understand because everything sounded like it was under water after he'd gotten hit in the head two beatings ago.

That couldn't be a good sign. Probably something had snapped or broken that would be easily fixed if he was near a hospital. But they weren't interested in fixing him.

He didn't know what they were interested in. Right now, he wasn't sure he cared.

He was just tired.




"What do you mean you don't know??"

"Just what I said! I. Don't. Know. No se! Я не знаю! How many languages do you want me to say it in?"

"Guys!" Chance raised his voice. Chance never raised his voice, but he had to, right now, to be heard above the arguing. Eve and Winston were snapping and growling at each other, more than Winston usually snapped and growled. He was pretty sure he was on the verge of snapping and growling too, as an objective determination, and he didn't want to get to that point. "Can we focus, please?"

Eve took a breath and let it out, took the arms of her chair and pulled it forward, sitting down with the kind of deliberate movements he'd come to expect from her. Winston made one of his faces and stood back.

"You said Guerrero came to see you about something. What did he go to see you about?"

"A date," she snapped. "He had something for me to translate, what do you think?"

"And what was that?"

Eve closed her eyes, elbows on the arms of her chair and lacing her fingers behind her head. "A file. Some emails, some transcribed text messages. It was something about someone he was tracking down. Someone ..."

She stopped there, and Chance wasn't sure with her hair falling over her face like that but he was pretty sure she looked up at him through the dark strands. Given that it was Guerrero they were talking about, and that they weren't working a case at the moment (or hadn't been), that made it a short list of things that he could have been working on.

Damn. Guerrero had just been trying to help, and now he was disappeared. Had been disappeared, as Eve had put it.

They had been in so many countries where people had been disappeared, for protesting, for existing. They had been the ghosts going through and disappearing people, sometimes, for their benefit or because the people had represented a threat that could not be tolerated. Maybe this was karma. He knew Guerrero, he knew the man had done some nasty things.

"No," Chance shook his head grimly. "No, that's not ... going to happen."

"What are you mumbling about over there?" Winston frowned.

"Nothing."

Over in the corner Dawn made a sharp, triumphant cry. "Gotcha!" Winston was on his way over, and Eve had pushed herself up on the arms of her chair, touched feet to the seat to spring herself up and out of it sideways over the arm, and was bounding onto the couch next to her sister before the larger man could come near.

Chance leaned over the couch behind both of them, looking up at Winston and warning him in a glance to stay a little distance from the fiery women. "What did you find?"

"Oh, nothing much." Her voice was light, airy, and full of self-satisfaction. "Just a house where the electricity is on but they receive no paper subscription, no magazines, no one is registered with that as their known address. Half-acre lot in a suburban neighborhood, no moving violations in a several block radius, most of the neighbors are retired or older, it's perfectly quiet."

Eve was reading over her shoulder. "The owners of the house recently died, the electricity was turned back on, and their estate is in the hands of a law firm on our list of people known to have connections with certain mercenary groups and certainly groups within the criteria."

"The criteria?" Winston said, looming more than standing in front of them. Both girls looked up, and neither of their expressions or postures were friendly.

"Connections with mercenary groups having to do with the translation he brought Eve," Chance offered. It was a reasonable guess, and Eve's lack of surprise at his deduction confirmed it more than any shocked stare would have. "What did he give you?"

Eve's palms dug into her eyes. Chance couldn't blame her for not wanting to divulge Guerrero's secrets, the man could be closed-mouthed, damnably so.

"Eve, there's a time for keeping secrets and there's a time..."

"To grow, a time to heal, yeah, I listened to them, too, Chance, just give me a second, all right?" Dawn glared at him over her shoulder while Eve scrubbed at her eyes some more.

Winston and Chance exchanged a look, though he wasn't sure Winston appreciated the depth or gravity of the situation. Then again, there was a lot he and Guerrero were keeping from Winston. And now Eve. Who was also keeping something from him and, dammit, why were they all keeping so many damn secrets from each other? Eve was keeping secrets from him and getting them out of her would involve doing things he really didn't want to do. Letting her keep them would involve letting Guerrero die.

"Two people," Eve said, without moving her hands or any part of her body at all, really. "Two men. Northeast United States, government trained but they don't work for the government anymore. They haven't worked for the government for... five, six years or more. They keep the vocabulary and some of the first taught phrases from government training but they're using a set of jargon I'm not familiar with other than that. Looks like paramilitary. They used an... an Osaka dialect in one place, so they're familiar with Japanese but whether or not they've had extensive experience there or as little as contact with or service under an Osakan, I don't know."

Dawn was back to tapping on her computer, but Winston and Chance were both staring at her. "You're not just the translator, are you?" Of course not. If Guerrero had wanted something translated in half those languages he could have done it himself, or asked Chance. "You're a full-on interpreter. And a profiler."

"Mmph," she said, looking up at him. "I would say whoever's holding them is paramilitary. I asked Dawn to check out law firms and other groups related to probate who had connections to paramilitary groups that worked in or around Japan, among other countries." And then, a longer pause, with a glance at Winston. "And who had connections to you."

Chance frowned. So it did have to do with that, and did that mean that this was... well, him... coming back to haunt him?

Dawn still didn't look up from her typing. Or playing Solitaire. She was playing Solitaire. He guessed something else was running in the background. Either way, none of this mattered. What mattered was: "You think this is where they're holding him?"

"How do you know he's not just dead in a ditch somewhere?" Winston offered.

Both women glared at him. Chance kind of wanted to do the same.

"All right, all right. I'll call the hospitals, see if they have a John Doe matching his description in there."

Chance nodded. Both of the women were still glaring at Winston as he turned and stomped off to the phone. He reached down and put a hand on Eve's shoulder. "Hey. Do you think this is where they're holding him?"

She took a breath, got a hold of herself, and looked up at him. "I think it's the best shot we have right now. If it turns out not to be that, we ... maybe can retrace his steps from where he left my place of work, but the chances of finding his damn battle wagon when half the city drives cars like that?"

"I can call in a couple favors, get an APB put out," Winston called over the phone, one hand covering the mouthpiece. It made Eve look more favorably at him anyway. Good man.

"I take your point," Chance nodded, smiling dryly and without a hint of mirth in it. "All right. Let's gear up and go."



He had no idea what time it was. Late. It sounded late, by the lack of cars outside, noise, anything resembling daytime foot traffic. No gossiping adults, no playing kids. Nothing. Crickets and the crackle of electric lights.

There was blood in his mouth. He was a little surprised no teeth were loose, but he clenched his jaw and ran his tongue along the upper and lower sets and no, no loose teeth. Just blood where he'd cut his cheek or lip or something. His head was still ringing, though. They hadn't spared the head shots. Just concentrated them where it would do the most lasting damage.

He was pretty sure a couple of his ribs were broken. Just by the way it hurt to breathe. At the very least they were cracked. There were other broken bones, but since he couldn't flee at the moment they were immaterial. When he was mobile, he'd worry about things hampering his mobility.

More footsteps. They hadn't closed the door behind them, so this just sounded like the transition from linoleum to carpet.

"Hey, you guys have a soda on you? I'm getting kinda thirsty here, dude."

The fist caught him upside the head and knocked him twice, once in the temple and once in the back of the head when his head rocked backwards and hit the chair. Red spots swam in front of his bound eyes.

"That wasn't very nice."

The guy hit him again, across the thigh with something thick and round and heavy. A bat. A pipe, PVC pipe maybe. Did it really matter? At least, he realized, they were going for blunt torture. Beating him to death slowly over a period of days. Starving him, too. Giving him water, but starving him slowly. That was its own kind of torture, giving him water and leaving him tied in the chair.

He'd shut that part of what was going on out of his mind but a small voice in the back of his brain wondered how they felt about the smell.

Maybe he should be glad they weren't feeding him.

The guy kept it up with the bat-pipe-thing. Until he felt another rib crack. At least he was staying away from the knees, or maybe it was just that he didn't want to bend over far enough. Kicks didn't dislocate knees as well when the victim was bound. If they'd seen the right movies they might have gone for the ball peen hammer. He could live with a couple of broken toes.

The beatings stopped eventually. Now all he had to do was count the breaths until they started again.



"It looks so normal."

Dawn wrinkled her nose as she stared, a little puzzled, at the house in the suburbs where Guerrero was supposedly being held. There was no way yet to tell if it was true or not.

"I see someone in the dining room."

The curtains were drawn. There was movement in the house but it appeared only as flickers of shadow against the white curtains. "I count three of them," Eve breathed in Chance's ear, leaning just over where he was crouched at the edge of the van, looking into the mirror and around the corner.

"Three?"

"One, two..." she pointed.

"Okay, okay, I see it."

It unnerved him, a little, to have her along. The last time he'd met her she'd been looking for help to get her sister out of trouble, and while that could have been her not wanting to let her emotions get the better of her, it also meant he had no real evaluation of her skills. Guerrero trusted her, but Chance didn't know how far.

On the other hand, Guerrero trusted her to watch his back, too, or so he'd said. And that was good enough for him for most things, including this one.

Especially when he could keep an eye on her.

"How do you want to play this?" He looked over his shoulder at her. No concern in her face, no worry or fuss, just calm resolution and acceptance of what they had to do and what they might find, and the possibility that they might not find anything. She had to be thinking that; they had discussed it on the drive out here.

"Dawn stays in the van with Winston," one hand came up to forestall her sister's protests. "You and I go in, we can do the new neighbors thing if you want, to get in the door. But we should go in now, before they have a chance to do anything else to him. We'll stay hooked up, Winston can tell us if his scans and microphones..."

"Uh, Chance?"

Both heads turned. Evidently Winston did have something on his scanners and microphones.

"I don't know what's going on in there, but they're hurting someone."

Eve's lips twitched, once. Chance didn't know what it was, but he nodded in his handler's direction and jumped out of the van, and she followed. "Cop instincts," she half-explained, as they headed to the front door. "Knowing your guys are in there, not being able to do anything about it, and then you hear something, screams or something, and even though bad shit is going down you can't help but feel relieved because now you can do something about it."

"Huh." It made sense. But that was as far as he got (and he kind of wondered how she got all that from one sentence) before someone opened the door. Someone big, broad across as he was, with what looked like a tattoo peeking out from beneath the sleeve of his t-shirt. "Hi, my name is Steve, this is Betty, we'd like to welcome you to the..."

The man's posture was all wrong. He carried himself like security, shoulders back and eyes scanning both the two of them and the area behind them. Nothing on his hands, nothing encumbering him, feet spread apart and stance at the ready.

"Neighborhood."

Without losing his easy smile, Chance punched him in the face.

Eve took the cue, to Chance's relief, and as he pushed the guy in and closed the door behind them she darted through the doorway to the left of them, leaping the corner of the coffee table and heading into the dining room where Chance could see a silhouette of a man in a chair, and that was it.

The man he was facing recovered quickly, aiming a couple of jabs to his side. Chance took one, sidestepped the second, and somehow managed to knock the other man off balance with one or two punches to get behind him. From there it wasn't long, no matter how much time seemed to pass, to get an arm around his throat and press his forearm to the carotid artery, blocking the flow of blood. Squeeze until he went limp. Then squeeze a second or two longer. Just in case. Chance was in that cold place where he didn't care if these guys lived or died, and they probably wouldn't afford him the same consideration of applying non-lethal force. Better safe than sorry.

His head jerked up as the body dropped to the floor, hearing the clatter in the kitchen. "Eve?" There didn't seem to be any more antagonists, which didn't rule out the possibility and he should do a sweep and was she hitting someone with a frying pan? Or pot? "Eve?"

The person in the chair was gone.

"Clear!" she called from the ... bedroom, he thought. Somewhere down the hall. And she sounded annoyed. "You'd better get over here. Tell Winston he can come in," she added. "While you're at it."

Chance shook his head, following the sound of her voice. She had indeed hit someone on the head with a pan, a cast-iron one by the look of it, because he was bleeding and at least unconscious on the kitchen floor. He stepped over him. "Winston."

"Yeah?"

"I think it's clear. I'm going to clear the rest of the rooms, but you two should be good to come..."

The bedroom.

"... in."

She'd laid Guerrero out on the bed. He must have been the figure he'd seen in the chair, no one else was conscious. Then again, he wasn't sure Guerrero was conscious. The man's face was crusted all over in blood, and there was the stink of urine in the air. The rise and fall of his chest reassured Chance that at least he was alive, but he didn't know what the damage was, and they should get him to a hospital. Or somewhere like that. They must have had him tied to the chair the whole time.

"He looks like hell."

"He's been tied to a chair and had the shit kicked out of him for a couple days, how would you look?" Eve's voice was mild, as quiet as Chance's had been. They were whispering. Why were they whispering? It wasn't like Guerrero could hear them.

He thought.

"We should..."

"Chance?"

That was Dawn's voice crackling in his ear. Why? "Yeah, Dawn?"

"I think you'd better come out here."



He went. Eve stayed with Guerrero and called around for an opening at a clinic. A black clinic, she called it, which triggered off faint alarm bells in the back of his mind but they had bigger problems than that right now.

Way bigger problems.

Like that guy about to give Dawn a .44 caliber love tap.

She had Winston's earwig Bluetooth thing, and Winston was standing beside her with his hands up too, which meant the guy had taken both of them by surprise but was more focused on Dawn, for some reason. Standing there for more than two seconds told him why.

"... such a moron. I mean, to kidnap that guy, of all people, and actually leave him alive long enough to get at you? Why don't you just go up to, say, an airport security guard and tell him you're gonna light your shoe bombs on fire while you're at it, they might kill you quickly for resisting arrest or just ... you don't even know what I'm talking about, do you. I mean, you guys are supposed to be all big and bad, and you don't know what goes on in the world these days? Wow, they really are breeding them stupid..."

Chance's eyebrows shot up and he looked at Winston, who raised both shoulders barely a quarter of an inch higher and dropped them again. He didn't look around at Chance.

And the man seemed more interested in trying to either make sense out of Dawn's endless stream of chatter, or get her to shut up, or both. It was amazing, in a train wreck kind of a way, and Chance would definitely have to bring this up with Eve, later. Right now he was sneaking.

"... and you didn't even bother to check either of us for weapons, now that is just sloppy. I mean, we've been standing here all this time and you haven't told us to turn around or face the wall..."

"Turn around!" he yelped, somewhat high pitched and strained. As though he didn't want to admit that he hadn't thought of that while his prisoner had. "Face the wall! Hands behind your head!"

"See, now, that's better. We might make a hostage taker out of you yet, except for the part that Chance is totally going to kick your ass..."

He couldn't see the man's face from the vantage point of sneaking up behind him, but the gasp and choked-off exclamation of surprise was deeply satisfying as he applied pressure until a couple of seconds after the man went limp, then dragged him none-to-gently over to the wall. Winston was at his side in a second with the plastic cuffs.

"What happened with Guerrero?"

Chance tilted his head back at the front door. "He's in the bedroom. Eve was getting a doctor for him somewhere. He's not good."

Winston's mouth twisted in poorly concealed worry. "I may not like the bastard, but I don't want him dead. Do you think..."

"Nah, I don't think it'll come to that."

But the silence inside the house was not reassuring, and the silence outside of it seemed near to sepulchral. Suddenly Chance wanted to hear his old friend's labored breathing again. Winston's eyebrows shot up, and Chance shrugged and dug his hands into his pockets, uncomfortable.

"Let's get back inside, huh?"

"Sure."



Guerrero opened his eyes.

He was somewhere else. He was lying down, and he didn't feel either cold and wet or warm and wet anywhere on his person. Nothing hurt, either. This was preferable to before, when all states had been very much present at the same time.

He closed his eyes again.



"Hey. I think he's coming around."

Whispers. Some he couldn't make out, others he could hear as clearly as if the speaker was next to him. Maybe she was.

"He's been asleep for twelve hours."

In the background Chance said something, and Winston responded, but they weren't close enough for him to make out the words. That put names, identities to all four people in the room. If there was anyone else he couldn't pinpoint their location.

He was ready to open his eyes now. But they seemed to be gummed closed.

"Hold on a second." And that was Eve again, and he must have made some sort of sound or twitch because there was a cool damp cloth over his face, sponging things away. And then the sensation of exhaustion seemed to lift, or the physical aspects, the palpability of it. He could open his eyes.

Yep. Eve. "Wow. All this and a candy-striper, too."

She punched him in the arm.

"Hey," Chance called as he walked on over. Guerrero could see Winston hovering in the background. "Don't hit the invalid."

"I'm not an invalid," he scowled at his friend.

"Uh-huh. You're just cheerfully walking around with cracked ribs and a bunch of other injuries for the fun of it."

If it was only 'a bunch of other injuries' it was probably bad. He wondered who Chance was toning that down for. Not him, surely. Eve?

"We got you to the hospital," she told him, quiet tones and serious expression, as though she'd heard his thoughts. "Well, not the hospital-hospital. Liam's place. They got you patched up. It was pretty bad."

But her voice was too even to be too upset, at least, so that meant it was Dawn they were all censoring themselves for. Which made sense, now that he thought about it. He leaned back onto the pillows, which was about when he realized he'd sat up in the first place. Maybe he should have stayed asleep.

"How long?"

Eve looked up at Chance to answer. "Three weeks or so, you'll be back on your feet. It'll be like no time at all."

"Hurm," Guerrero said.




He stayed at the loft overnight, at Chance's insistence. At Guerrero's insistence and after much glaring all around, he'd move back to wherever he came from the following evening if he proved better enough to get around on his own. For his own peace of mind, he thought he'd better achieve that goal. He didn't do well in the long term around people. Eve had found that out the hard way. Chance knew from having similar sorts of problems, even if he tended to be less extreme than the smaller man.

Right now it wasn't a matter of being good around people so much as he couldn't do well on his own, not with his injuries, and he knew that. He might not like it much, but there wasn't much he could do on force of dislike alone.

Chance's sleeper sofa was pretty comfortable, at least.

He woke up with someone else's hair in his mouth. Eve had fallen asleep sitting propped up against one of the fold-out legs of the bed, book on cryptography theory in her hand and her cheek resting on the corner of the mattress. Chance was sitting in the armchair in front of both of them, and he couldn't tell if the blond was awake or asleep.

"Dawn's in the bedroom. Winston went home."

So, awake, then.

"Why are they still here?" He asked it quietly, though. The same whisper Chance used, one hand reaching cross-body as much as he could and touching her hair. No, he didn't know why. Maybe just a need to reach out and touch someone, an ally, maybe a friend.

Chance shrugged, rising soundlessly out of his seat and coming over to lean on the back of the couch. "She wanted to make sure you'd be okay. Dawn probably did, too, but she didn't say anything. I figured you wouldn't mind."

Guerrero grunted, continuing to point his eyebrow at Chance, but he didn't say anything or stop touching her hair. Feather-light touches, so as not to wake her up. Explanations would be wicked awkward, and even the thought of trying to explain made him surly.

"You people worry too much," he grunted, when Chance insisted on giving him that knowing half-smirk of a look. Now he did lay back on the couch, because he was hard to avoid that look and touch at the same time, at least with these injuries. Maybe twenty four hours wasn't enough. He shied away from that thought.

"Considering you came within a couple degrees of a cracked rib of getting yourself beat to death I'd say we worry just enough."

He rolled his eyes and held up a hand, which Chance took after a moment. For all the busting of chops and aggravation, they had few enough friends in this world. Especially friends who went back as far as they did. Neither of them wanted to lose the other, and they both knew it. And neither would ever say it in words.

"Get some sleep, huh?" Chance laid a hand on his shoulder, about as close to that kind of move as he could get with the various broken bones, then moved back around the couch and to his arm chair.

Guerrero snorted, burrowing back down into the sleeper sofa. "How am I supposed to get any sleep with you watching me all night," he groused for the sake of grousing, so Chance would know he was all right, and because he was achy and in pain and cranky as a result. Somewhere between all three. Chance only laughed softly and settled in again.

"You could use the beauty sleep," Eve mumbled into the mattress, making him jerk hard enough to make him swear as the movement shocked his body awake and jarred every broken bone against each other. "You look like shit."

Chance laughed harder. Guerrero swore again.

"Crazy bitch," he muttered, pulling a pillow over his head so neither of them would see or hear his amusement. She just laughed.

"Stupid bastard."

"She's got your number, man," Chance agreed.

Guerrero threw the pillow at him.