snowdarkred

Title: the thing about you and me
Author:

snowdarkred
Word Count: ~1.1K
Pairings: girl!Jensen/Cougar
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, because apparently I'm just sliding backwards. No real warnings except for swearing?
Author's Note: Movie!verse AU. Part of the alive with the glory of love 'verse. I've been wanting to try this style of fic in a while, and now I've finally done it! \o/ Also, it felt really weird to not post any fic over the weekend. I'm telling you, you people have secretly brainwashed me or something.

Summary: The things that Carlos “Cougar” Alvarez knows about Jocelyn “Jake” Jensen, and the things that she knows about him.

the thing about you and me

Cougar knows that Jensen dreams of a white picket fence life. When she has time free, she searches the listings for four bedroom houses in quiet suburban neighborhoods. She reads articles about the housing market, about the best places to raise kids, about the current trends in décor. She keeps a list of baby names, handwritten and taped to the inside of her laptop's shell. Some of them are crossed out (Amber, Emma) while others had been added in (Aisha, Jolene). She keeps it all hidden, as if acknowledging that she wants a life after revenge would be some sort of betrayal.

What Cougar doesn't know (doesn't realize) is that all of the names in her top twenty were chosen because she thinks that they sound good in front of Alvarez.

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Jensen knows how Cougar got his name. She can't think of it without laughing, which usually leads to whoever is standing near her at the time quickly edging away.

But, come on. The man's named after a stuffed animal he used to carry around as a kid. How is that not adorable?

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Cougar knows that anyone who calls Jensen Jenny meets a messy, painful death. He still doesn't know exactly why, though he has his suspicions, and they make him want to kill people.

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Jensen knows that Cougar actually hates spicy food, which is unfortunate, given how much time they spend traipsing around South America.

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Cougar knows that Jensen's mom was the one who first taught her how to shoot a gun. It had been a TaurusCIA revolver, a lady's gun. Jensen still had it, and it had saved her life once or twice after a mission had gone to shit. What he doesn't know is that her sister is twice as good with a gun than Jensen will ever hope to be. (But Jensen's sister can't hack her way out of a paper bag, so.)

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Jensen knows that Cougar has nightmares. They're so bad that he occasionally goes for days with little sleep, though he rarely makes a sound. But sometimes, during the really bad ones, he calls out Maria, Maria, Maria, again and again. (It breaks her heart, because he sounds so broken, and Cougar shouldn't be in pain, ever.) She doesn't know who Maria is, or why she's in his dreams, and she doesn't ever quite work up the nerve to ask. She has things that she doesn't want to talk about, so if he doesn't bring it up, she won't either.

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Cougar knows that Jensen think that Clay's new (crazy) playmate is smokin' hot. He is selfishly thankful that Aisha is completely uninterested in women.

At the same time, he doesn't understand how anyone, man or woman, straight or any of the rainbow of other possibilities, could not be attracted to her. (He's pretty sure that if Jensen were a guy, he's still want her – him. It just feels right.)

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Jensen knows that it had taken Cougar a while to get used to working with a woman. After all, women were disappointingly rare at their level of, er, work, and the glass ceiling isn't made of glass so much as titanium.

What she doesn't know is that he wasn't getting used to working with a woman, he wasn't getting used to working with a woman he was attracted to. It had been surprisingly distracting.

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Cougar knows that kissing the tiny scar behind Jensen's left ear will produce the most glorious sounds. He does it every time he gets the chance.

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Jensen knows that nothing gets Cougar harder than techno-babble. God knows why, since he doesn't understand any of it. (She doesn't know that it's not what she's saying but how she's saying it and the fact that she's talking at all.)

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Cougar knows that Jensen can't say the alphabet forwards without falling into that silly little children's song, but she can say it backwards with no hesitation. It's fucking weird.

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Jensen knows that Cougar's file is suspiciously empty. When she joined the team, she did a full work up of everyone, getting her hands on The Big Alphabet Soup's records for them, from the FBI and CIA to fucking NASA. (The fact that NASA even had files on them still surprises her.) It was like a puzzle, trying to piece together which agency had what to say about which of them. Jensen likes puzzles; it's one of the reasons she took up hacking.

But she had no idea what to expect from Cougar when she was finally introduced to Clay's team. She kept her eye on him through her whole name-speech, and other than the fact that he was shorter than she'd imagined, she still knew just as much about him as when she read through page after page of his empty file.

Now she knows more about him than anyone else still alive. She's not sure if that makes her sad or not.

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Cougar knows that Jensen can't watch the ending of Homeward Bound without crying. He doesn't get it. It's a happy ending. About pets. What is there to cry about?

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Jensen knows that Cougar secretly bawls like a baby at the ending of Titanic. Every. Time. She usually has to excuse herself from the room whenever it's airing on whatever shitty TV they managed to get on the ass end of nowhere, because, really? Seriously? The Titanic? She just cannot stop laughing at the thought of it.

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Cougar knows that Jensen is scary smart. She could do anything she wanted to, from robbing banks halfway around the world to bring down satellites in space. Her brain is her weapon, and that fact will never cease to amaze and astound him.

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Jensen knows that Cougar is just as smart as she is, even if he won't let himself realize it. Come on, he calculates and compensates for wind trajectory from miles away in his head. It's fucking awesome.

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Cougar knows that Jensen sleeps better when he is pressed against her side, one hand on her waist and his head nestled against her shoulder. (He sleeps better too.)

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Jensen knows that Cougar once fought against actual pirates. When she found out, it pretty much cemented his place in her Most Awesome Person Hall of Fame.

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Cougar knows how Jensen feels about pirates. He let that story slip on purpose, after all.

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Jensen knows that Cougar loves her. She hopes that he knows that she loves him too.

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Cougar knows that Jensen loves him. He also knows that she knows that he wouldn't be able to live without her.

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This is like, the schmoopy-ist thing EVER and I APOLOGIZE.