indigo_angels

Face gets some news which turns his life upside down. However, things may not be quite as they seem, and just when he needs the team the most, he finds himself out on a limb. This is a movie!verse, gritty reboot of the episode ‘Mind Games’ – same, but different!

Warnings for slash, language and scenes of torture (not that explicit).

Chapter One

“Oh, come on, boss! You really have got to be kidding me here!” Face’s voice had entered that whinging pitch now, he’d tried just about everything else he could think of and was starting to get desperate.

“Face, I am sorry,” but Hannibal was having none of it.

“You’re not changing your mind?”

“No.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Face spun on his heel and kicked the waste paper basket right across the carpet in Hannibal’s office, spraying paper everywhere as it ricocheted off the desk and the walls. Then he turned on the boss once more and Hannibal felt a surge of sympathy for him as he saw the desperation in his eyes, the rigid set to his body, he knew exactly how important this was to the kid. “It’s his funeral...” Face pleaded and Hannibal knew that any second now he would lose the battle with his tear ducts, “You didn’t want me to go to that reunion, I lost my last chance to see him alive, and now you won’t even let me go to his god damn funeral?!”

Hannibal swallowed back his anger, knowing how hard this was for Face, “But you went to that reunion anyway though didn’t you?” he retorted. “And the only reason you are not cooling your heels in a maximum security facility right now is because I was there as well, dressed as a nun, knowing damn well you were gonna ignore my advice! It’s not my fault the army decided to move in before you had chance to see him!”

“I had to go!” Face yelled back, “He was dying, Hannibal! Fucking, dying! And he wanted to see me!”

“No, he did not!” Despite his best intentions, Hannibal found himself shouting back and cringed at the way that Face’s expression fell, “He also specifically told you to stay away! He might have wanted to see you Face, but he sure as hell did not want to see you go back to prison!”

“What? And prison would be worse than this would it?” Face threw his arms up in the air and then pulled his hands, palms down over his face. “You never let me do anything,” he whispered, low and dangerous, staring at Hannibal with cold, cold eyes. “I’m never allowed to go out, get pissed, pull a girl, go to a football match – visit the closest thing I have to a father while he’s laid in bed dying of fucking cancer!” he exploded once more and Hannibal could see him positively vibrating with anger. “I may as well be inside! I had more freedom in there than I’ve got now!”

“Face,” Hannibal choked back his own anger, Face was hurting – hard, and when he hurt he lashed out at those around him. Hannibal knew this, he knew just about everything about this man, he just had to remember it all... “I am just trying to keep you safe...”

“Keep me safe or keep me out of trouble?”

Hannibal frowned, “Where’s the difference?”

“The difference is,” Face spat, “that when I get into trouble, you need to go to some effort to get me out again! So not letting me do anything saves you the effort, right old man?”

Hannibal swallowed hard, “Face, you are acting like a child.”

“You are treating me like a fucking child! I can damn well look after myself! And there is no way that Sosa would be so damn cold hearted as to try to pick me up at Father David’s funeral!”

It was getting harder by the second for Hannibal to hang onto his temper, “I am sick of telling you, kid,” he said, “it’s not just Sosa we have to worry about. It wasn’t Sosa who turned up at that Orphanage reunion, who almost caught you, and Murdock! Who, I might add, you pressured into joining you on your stupid hair brained scheme!”

Face turned away again and kicked out at the already dented waste basket. “You can’t stop me from going,” he whispered mutinously under his breath, “I was only telling you out of damn courtesy. You don't have a single thing you can say that will stop me from going.”

“I’m your CO, Face. You will do as you are damn well told.”

“And in case you haven’t noticed, John!” Face was back to yelling, “We are not in the army anymore! You are not my CO and you don't have one damn single right to tell me anything!”

Staring back into those furious blue eyes, Hannibal absorbed all the fury and forced his own voice to be steady and calm. “You will not go to Father David’s funeral Face. I am ordering you not to. In a few weeks when the army think they have missed their chance we will go together, take some flowers, you can see his grave, say your goodbyes. He wouldn’t want you to risk going back to prison for him, kid.”

“He wouldn’t want me to be living like this! Not allowed to walk out my own front door!”

“He wouldn’t want you back in prison,” Hannibal reiterated.

“Fuck you, Hannibal!” Face yelled again, stabbing a finger into Hannibal’s chest. “You have no rights over me anymore, no authority! You can’t tell me to do one damn thing! I’ve only followed you this past year out of sympathy! What the hell use is a commander with no one to command?”

Hannibal felt his control beginning to crumble, “Well, you shouldn’t have bothered!” he spat out. “No one forced you out of that van, Face, no one made you run with us. You could have gone back to jail, served out your sentence.”

“And don’t think I don’t wish I had!” Hannibal could see the tears standing in his XO’s eyes, knew he didn’t mean the words he was saying, but that didn’t stop them from hurting. “Don’t think I don't long, every damn day that you had never dragged me into all this, that you’d left me in the regular army where you found me, so I could still be a soldier, all I ever wanted to be, and not some fucking Robin Hood type fugitive!”

“Face...” Hannibal could feel the tightness of his own throat.

“Don’t ‘Face’ me!” the retort was spat at him. “I am sick of all this fucking running, and I’m sick of you thinking you can tell me what to do all that time! I am going to that funeral and I don’t care if they do arrest me or not!”

“Face!” Hannibal reached out, grabbing at fresh air as Face turned on his heel once more, stalking to the door and striding out and slamming it hard behind him. For a second he considered running after him, dragging him back, but a fist fight with his XO was not how he wanted to end his afternoon so he let him go, listening to the throaty roar of the 1964 black Mustang as it screeched out into the road.

BA wandered in from the garage next door, the look on his face telling Hannibal he had heard every word of their argument - but then he would have had to have been deaf not to... He looked sympathetically at Hannibal, “You think he’s gonna go boss?” he asked as he wiped grease from his hands onto a dirty rag.

“No,” Hannibal sighed, bending to pick up the paper that was strewn all over the floor. “Kid’s never bucked a direct order from me yet. He’s not going to start now.”

BA didn’t look convinced. “Yeah, well, drivin’ like that, he aint gonna make no funeral anyway – damn traffic cops’ll pick him up first.”

Hannibal just sighed as he looked out of the window at the parking lot of the warehouse they used as their base of operations. “He’ll be okay, BA he always is. He won’t go to the funeral and he’ll keep out of the way of the traffic cops and he’ll be as unpleasant as all hell for a couple of weeks, that’s all.”

As Hannibal stood the paper basket back up under the desk, and looked back out of the window, he just hoped to god that he was right.

__________________

In the end, Hannibal was only half right. Face didn’t go to the funeral and he didn’t get picked up by the traffic cops, but he was unpleasant as all hell for the best part of a month.

He was awkward, sulky and belligerent, argumentative and explosive. Hannibal, figuring that the acting out was a blatant attention seeking attempt, did his very best to just ignore the whole month long strop. Face seemed desperate for an argument with him at every turn, none more so than when he found out that Father David’s ashes were being taken back to Ireland to be scattered over the hills of his boyhood home. Hannibal’s offer to accompany Face to Ireland just as soon as they could sort out safe travel arrangements was met with a stony stare, a, “Well, I won’t hold my fucking breath,” and yet another slammed door.

BA and Murdock, however, were not quite as adapt at deflecting the tension. BA had to be physically and emotionally restrained on any number of occasions and was finding Face’s mere presence testing at the best of times, while Murdock had taken to just staring, his eyes wide and hang dog, clothes and caps wrung and twisted over and over as he watched Face’s screwed up grieving process. “It’s like the fool thinks he’s the only one ever lost someone!” BA grumbled one day after yet another yelling match. Hannibal had just kept his mouth shut and watched as Face stalked down the beach away from them in a temper. He knew it was more than that though, he knew that Face had just lost the only person he’d ever felt he’d had.

But even Face’s temper couldn’t be sustained eternally, eventually he started to calm down a little, could respond to a question without biting someone’s head off, could be in the same room as Hannibal for more than three minutes without trying to start an argument. Hannibal was just starting the think that things could go back to normal, that Face would help him sort through the two or three prospective clients he’d lined up and they would be able to get on and start doing what they were supposed to be doing, when they were all blown right up and out of the water.

It was a beautiful morning. They’d woken up to warm sunshine and the disappearance of the smog that had been choking the city for the last couple of days. Hannibal had lined up a bit of surveillance for them, checking out one of their prospective clients, making sure they weren’t a military plant and they were in BA’s van, driving through a quiet suburban neighbourhood when Murdock leaned over and cracked on the radio.

“Well, coming up in the news at eight this morning, Mack, there is some real interesting news about those urban myths of ours, the A-Team!”

BA almost gave everyone whiplash with the speed he pulled to the side of the road.

“The A-Team, Grant? You mean those ex-soldier mercenary types?”

BA couldn’t help but laugh as Hannibal muttered, “Soldiers of fortune...” under his breath.

“Yeah, real modern day Robin Hoods! And I can’t say too much now, but the news has something to do with pardons...”

The atmosphere in the van suddenly tightened.

“Oooh, Grant! I can’t stand it! Unfortunately, we are all gonna have to wait until after this next tune, a personal oldie favourite of mine, those Mamas and those Papas!”

As the opening strains of ‘California Dreamin’’ filled the van, chaos erupted the between the four men.

“You hear that, Hannibal? They gonna give us our pardons, man!”

“I told ya! I told ya, Facey! They couldn’t hold out on us forever!”

“Fucking-A, boss! You still up for that trip to Ireland? I can almost taste that first Guinness...”

“Whoa, whoa boys,” Hannibal turned in his seat so that he could see Murdock and Face as well as BA and his heart sank at the looks of joy and excitement in their expressions. “It’s gonna take more than a couple of cheesy radio DJs before I start cracking open the champagne.”

“I know bossman,” Murdock’s eyes were alight, “but what else can they mean, huh? How many sentences can you think of with the words ‘A-Team’ and ‘pardon’ in them that don't mean us getting off?”

“I got one!” Face looked happy for the first time in a month, “HM Murdock, crazy pilot from the A-Team, farted when mid-way through a death defying barrel roll and didn’t even stop to say ‘pardon’!” Murdock and even BA collapsed in laughter at the infantile humour while Hannibal just shook his head.

“Or this one!” Murdock shouted, “BA Baracus, resident A-Team mud sucker fell over his own feet when-” Murdock tailed off into a squeak and Face collapsed in very unmanly giggles as BA’s thick arm wound around Murdock’s throat just as the last bars of California Dreamin’ ran out into the airwaves.

“Quiet! All of you!” Hannibal barked as he leaned over and turned the volume up, his men falling silent around him.

The news jingle had never lasted so long as it did that morning and it seemed as if none of the four men could even breathe as the Newscaster embarked on his announcement. “Military and law enforcement agencies the country over are in turmoil today as shock news of a pardon for one of the notorious A-Team is announced.”

“One of us!” BA exclaimed as Hannibal instantly shushed him.

“At a press conference held in the last twenty minutes US Army spokesman, General Jay Dobson, had the following to say.” A different, deeper voice sounded over the radio. “It has recently come to the attention of the United States Military Police that a miscarriage of justice has been perpetrated against a dedicated US veteran of many recent conflicts.”

Murdock and Face looked sharply at each other in the back of the van, both expressions grim.

“Reviewing CCTV footage, it seems that Lieutenant Templeton Peck, presumed member of the fugitive group, the A-Team, never escaped from custody as was previously assumed. It appears he was in fact abducted against his will.” Horrified gasps could be heard coming from the venue of the press conference, but inside the van, no one spoke, no one moved. No one even looked at each other. “And with that now being the case, and the only remaining charges standing against the entire A-Team relating to unlawful escape from custody, it seems that we do not have a case for Lt. Peck to answer at all.”

Again the gasps from the press conference and silence in the van. Face was looking down at the floor but could feel three pairs of eyes burning into the top of his head.

A woman’s voice sounded out over the airwaves, “General Dobson, sir, does this mean that Lt. Peck is a free man?”

“Yes, ma’am it means exactly that.”

“The rest of the A-Team as well?”

It was like the entire van held its breath.

“No ma’am. We would in fact like to talk to former Colonel John Smith about Lt. Peck’s kidnapping at his earliest possible convenience. It seems that there may be more charges we need to discuss with him.”

Still no one moved.

“And what does Lt. Peck have to say about all of this?” This was the woman once more.

“At present, we are not sure. It seems that Lt. Peck may still be being held against his will by the rest of the A-Team. It will be interesting to see if he can make it along to his nearest Police Station where he will be escorted to an army base and his ordeal can finally come to an end, before he is released as a free man.”

“Will Lt. Peck be rejoining the Army?”

“I’m sorry, that’s all the time we have for questions at the minutes. Thank you.”

The newscaster was back. “In other news today-” but BA flicked the radio off with a resounding snap.

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