Hurt/Comfort All For Nothing (M; gen; Reacher)

[Qwerty77]

This is a piece of much longer something that I've had in my mind for years but never translated to words.

headcanon: Maka (mah-kah) is third/fourth-generation Hawai'ian Japanese; she is the lawyer/business manager/HR person/all-things-at-all-times of a small (tiny) med-research company in Oahu.

Jack Reacher is a 6'5 wall of solid muscle ex-Military Police who wanders the US, and it's debatable whether he finds trouble, or trouble finds him.
---

The sultry humidity of the outdoors evaporated almost immediately once inside the sliding double doors of Oahu International, replaced with a ruthlessly chilled and recycled blast of air conditioning. Maka almost faltered on that threshold, but pulled herself together and stepped smoothly through without betraying her trepidation.

Not so her travelling companion. She glanced back as she realised that she had lost him in the sudden surge of people. His height made him easy to spot, a looming figure with dirty-blond hair and hard blue eyes, a single point of stillness in the rush. And then, abruptly -

'HRRSCH!'

Oh.

Jack caught up to her a moment later, and though his eyes were alert, she noticed that he still had a tissue crumpled in his massive fist. As she watched, his breath hitched again, and he snapped forward with another violently efficient sneeze.

'HRRSCH!'

'Excuse me,' he said, with all the disciplined politeness of military training, and tucked the tissue away.

'Air-conditioning does that to a lot of people,' Maka noted to him. 

Jack said nothing. His nose very deliberately did not twitch.

'But this is the third time we've met,' she continued. 'And all you ever carry is a bank card, an ID card and a toothbrush. You don't even own a spare change of clothes.'

Jack said nothing.

'So if you're carrying tissues, it's because you need them. You wouldn't just have them handy. So you're sick, and we have a problem.' Maka inclined her head to a new checkpoint that had been established just beyond the check in counters. 'They're scanning body temperatures of passengers.'

'I don't have the virus,' Jack said mildly. 'The military vaccinated us all.'

'But you do have a virus,' Maka said, worry making her words more tart than she had intended. 'Do you also have a temperature?' 

Jack just looked at her, inscrutable as ever. He didn't look sick, she tried to console herself. There was no more flush across his cheeks than could be explained by the Hawai'ian heat, and that arrogant, broken nose wasn't betraying him. He looked grimmer than the last time she'd seen him though, nearly three weeks ago now, a mild but constant tension across his brow and mouth. And wearier, as though gravity were working just that bit harder on him than before. She suspected it would take more than most mortals could bear to make those broad shoulders slump, but there was a definite softening to his posture that was new. Maka wondered, not for the first time, what he'd been mixed up in in those missing three weeks. 

But she had a more immediate question she wanted the answer to. She startled Jack by reaching up and placing three light fingertips on his jaw, not wanting to attract any attention by reaching for his forehead, Florence Nightingale style. His stubble was bristly, and his skin was scalding. Maka snatched her hand back in surprise. 'Well, clearly that's a 'yes'.'

Jack shifted a little, clearly embarrassed and just as clearly not used to the emotion. 'I also have a solution,' he rasped.

'Advil?' she suggested, only somewhat facetiously, glancing again at the temperature scanner. 'Lots and lots of advil?'

He shook his head. 'Won't work fast enough. Or effectively enough.'

'What then?' 

'I'll meet you on the other side of check in in twenty minutes,' was his terse and uninformative reply, and then he strode off, leaving her standing alone and shaking her head at the series of poor life choices that had lead her to this moment.

Half an hour later, she had cleared both the check in line and the body scanner queue without any sign of Jack. She loitered just beyond the scanning station, far enough away to avoid suspicion, but close enough that she could watch the colourful parade of human-esque blobs on the monitor of the scanner. Pale yellow seemed to indicate a healthy passenger, whereas orange flagged an attendant with a surgical mask and rubber gloves and a trip to a private room. Maka winced. Despite Jack's proven ability to MacGyver solutions to odd and pressing problems and his own stoic outlook on things, she wouldn't have been surprised if the screen flashed a warning red when he walked through. She could see him in the crowd now, tension written on his face even though his movements were still deliberately relaxed.

Reacher strolled through the scanner with outwardly little notice of the scrutiny of the infrared cameras. Maka held her breath, heart beating senselessly in her chest. The screen showed a pale yellow, Jack-shaped blob. The attendants paid him no heed.

'How did you do that?' she demanded in a low whisper when he had caught up to her, shrugging back into his jacket. She brushed her fingers against his hand. It was freezing, as if he were on the verge of hypothermia rather than burning up just a half hour ago.

'A lot of ice in my drink,' he said, a little ruefully. 'And I borrowed the staff shower.'

Now Maka could see the damp spikes of his hair and the tiny tremors that ran across his skin, his body clearly confused by circumstances and the lurking fever as to what temperature it should actually be.

'Jesus,' she said. 'That can't have been fun.'

'I've had -' he began, before he gave a breathy grimace and mercilessly muffled a harsh sneeze into a tissue. 'H'rmphh!' He blinked at the force of it, but didn't lower the tissue as his nose continued to twitch. 'Hhh...hheh...HMPFF!'

'I've had worse,' he finished, clearing his throat either to soothe it or out of embarrassment. Maka couldn't tell. Maybe both. 'Excuse me.'

She noted idly that it didn't seem to be possible to bless him when he sneezed; that he had a habit of excusing himself immediately afterwards so that the matter was dealt with and concluded, with no further room to engage in pleasantries. 

'This way,' she said instead, leading him up a flight of escalators then through a discreet set of glass-frosted doors. She flashed him a brief smile. 'Lounge access. One perk of my job.' To the man at the front desk: 'A private meeting room, please.'

Maka followed the desk clerk, and Jack towered above them both, both his physicality and his carelessly cheap clothing putting him out of place from the doughy men and slim women in their carefully tailored suits. He rubbed at his nose with a knuckle, blinking a bit, but the pressure seemed to be enough to keep the impending sneeze at bay.

The meeting room was tiny, with two chairs facing off over a polished wooden desk, and a small couch that not quite big enough for two occupants. Reacher took the couch and almost filled it, somehow managing both to lounge and be alert at the same time. He leafed through a copy of the Tribune-Herald without seeming to take much of it in. Maka, ostensibly flicking through pages on her tablet, watched from the corner of her eye as he grimaced uncomfortably and pinched at the bridge of his nose. He paused for several seconds, breath coming unsteadily, before he blinked the moisture from his eyes and returned his attention to the paper.

It wasn't long though until his concentration was broken again, this time by a series of inhalations which appeared as begrudging as they were tormenting. They overtook him with such speed that he had no time to exhale after each reflexive inbreath, chest swelling in preparation for what would surely be a convulsive round of sneezing. But Jack dealt with the whole episode by clamping his nose in a wad of tissue and suppressing the sneeze as mercilessly as Maka imagined that he might an armed combatant. 

He looked up and unfortunately caught her glance, his eyes rather less sharp and more bleary for the first time that she'd ever seen. 'Excuse me,' he said hoarsely, and it was only because she was being extremely charitable that she did not describe it as a croak.

Maka shook her head. 'While there's a laundry list of reservations and regrets I have about this whole exercise, you needing to sneeze isn't actually one of them.'

Jack sighed ruefully at that - although it was more of a huff, as apparently he was too congested to exhale through his nose. 'Still,' he said. He buried his nose in the tissues again, then gave up trying to blow and settled for scrubbing roughly at it instead. When he pocketed the tissues once more, his nose was beginning to show the abuse that it had suffered, looking faintly swollen and red with irritation. 

'M'xmhph!'

The sneeze snuck up on him to quickly for him to reach his tissues, but it was smothered between his thumb and forefinger with such ruthlessness that Maka winced in sympathy.

'Bless you,' she offered, before he had recovered enough to excuse himself first. 'You're going to do yourself some serious damage if you keep that up, you know.'

'I'll be fine,' he rasped.

'Probably in the long term,' Maka allowed, slightly mocking. 'But in the short-to-medium term, I think you'll find flying when you're that congested is no fun at all.'

Jack grimaced, but before he could reply, his breath was snatched by a shuddering inhalation. 'Hhheh.... hhehhh...' This time, the sneeze disappeared without any interference from Jack, leaving him blinking uncertainly and soothing (?) his nose with his knuckles again.

'Fun isn't... isn...' His face crumpled despite himself, nose scrunched in an agony of anticipation. 'Ehhh... hahhh...!' But once again there was no relief, as though his body had taken to heart his unrelenting determination to suppress all sneezes from now into the foreseeable future. 

'I broke it last year,' Jack said, half explanation, half excuse, the subject of the sentence once again buried futilely in a wad of tissues. 'It's been a lot more sensitive since then.' 

This, Mako thought, was the closest Jack had ever come to complaining about anything, which meant that it must have been close to unbearable for him. She abandoned the tablet that she'd only been pretending to read anyway, and perched on an arm of the couch.

'You'll feel a lot better if you just let yourself sneeze,' she told him. 'And flying while congested is not recommended for a reason.'

Jack said nothing. 

'These meeting rooms are soundproof,' she offered. 

Jack said nothing, but something like desperation flickered across his face. A heartbeat later and it turned into a true expression of desperation, eyes squeezing shut and mouth falling open, defenseless against the tortuous prickling deep in his sinuses.

'Hhehhh... hahh... HAHH-HAH-HUHH...!'

This time, Jack actually gave a soft groan as he blinked irritated tears away and reached up to scrub at his much-abused nose again.

'Stop that,' Maka said, grabbing his hand with her own. In truth, if he had had even half a mind to resist, she would have been powerless to stop him, but the misery at the lack of forthcoming relief had evidently distracted him. Maka leaned across the table and pulled out three or four tissues from the box there, folding them into the curve of her palm.

Jack did pull away then, or tried to as much as he could while seated and still trapped by Maka's other hand. 'Whad do you thigk you're doig?'

If his agonizing struggle with the relentless need to sneeze hadn't fully convinced her, the state of his voice, ragged with congestion, certainly had.

'I'm supposed to trust you enough to leave my life behind on your word that I'm some kind of missing link to tracking a bio-terrorist, but you won't trust me when I say that flying in your state is going to be unpleasant?' she asked, only half-teasing. 'Relax.'

His expression was anything but relaxed as another desperate itch began deep in his nose, far beyond his reach no matter how he rubbed at it.

'huhhh.... hhEHH.... HAHH...!'

At the apex of the build up, at the point where his breath caught on the precipice of torment and relief, Maka ran a teasing finger along the swollen bridge of his nose, across the raw and irritated nostrils. The effect was immediate and convulsive.

'Huh-RSCHHU! HRRSCHUU! ESCHHU-ESXHOO-ECHXUU-HRRSHXU! Huhh...ISSHXUU!'

Jack's hand compulsively closed around hers as his head snapped forward with sneeze after sneeze muffled viciously but not altogether effectively into the nest of tissues in her hand. Despite herself, Maka startled at their violence and ferocity. 

Finally, Jack drew in a shuddering breath and Maka took her hand away. Jack shut his eyes and gave blow after gurgling blow, his cheeks pink with fever or exertion or embarrassment or all three, until finally he seemed to breathe more freely.

'Bless you. Feeling better?' she asked him as he gingerly wiped his nose.

Jack nodded, still flushed. 'Much. Thank you. I think.'

'Good,' said Maka. 'Because I think this is going to be a very long flight to Washington.'

---

headcanon for this fic that will never be: it's ostensibly just Jack's job to deliver Maka safely to The General, but at the end of an extremely uncomfortable plane trip, they discover that The General is dead, their allies are fractured or not to be trusted, and it's Jack and Maka against the world - and Jack's not going to let something like a mild cold get in the way.

epilogue headcanon: they save the world and get the girl, but Jack, who's actually in quite an awful state by this point and who should at the very least be in bed and more sensibly should be receiving expert medical attention, slinks off to hole himself up in another one of his non-descript motels to ride this out by himself, not because he's masochistic or even particularly stubborn, but because it genuinely never occurred to him that being cared for by allies or by professionals was an option at all. 

epilogue to the epilogue headcanon: Jack has rather a bad time of it. Someone does end up caring though - although whether it's Maka or the pretty-but-in-trouble-but-determined-and-practical woman who manages the motel... we'll probably never know.

------

I'm so old to this I'm new again, but I look forward to fangirling with likeminded souls in the future! Especially for swaps or mutual squeeing

 

 

[supernaturalfragalistic]

I loved this! I'm not part of this fandom or anything but I'm in love with the characters and I could feel the essences of them both. Please continue 

[ToothTen]

oh god yes yes yes I somehow didn't realize I needed a jack reacher fic in my life until just now

just so you know, you've probably created a monster because somehpw SOMEHOW I've been reading this series without reallyconsidering a  reacher fic and now I read THIS and good lord have i been missing out because this is a slice of heaven god damn your dESCRIPTIONS AMD REACHER ABD THE WAY YOU FUCKIN WRITE IT I AM IN LOVE I AM      REBORN  wow sorry I just really enjoyed this and you caught me at a weak moment and knocked my legs out from under me what a ride