Ben hadn't thought a vacation would mean much. He'd resented having to get off the ship and avoid work for a week or more, at least until Dave showed up on his doorstep. Once Dave did show up, everything changed. Now the whole world seemed brighter. He wasn't fighting against a tide of evil and misery, he was back to just helping people who'd been hurt. He didn't feel compelled to work until he fell over. He worked until he was done, and that was it.

He didn't want to think Dave could be the cause. There wasn't any kind of long-term future ahead of them. Dave would go back to his war zone, or back to whatever part of the US the SEALs were based out of. Ben hadn't been "home" in four years and didn't feel a strong compulsion to make a new one.

Well, that wasn't entirely true. As he worked in the treatment areas and supply closets, helping to put things away for the coming return to Syria, he had to admit he could think of worse things. A lot of surgeons did short tours, he could certainly become one of them. It wouldn't be much different from one of Dave's deployments.

Of course, maybe he was seriously misunderstanding the nature of the deployment. Most Sailors deployed for a long time. He knew that from speaking to Soldiers brought in for help, but Special Forces were different, right? They didn't stick around.

He had to laugh at himself. Here he was putting the cart before the horse, when he had no idea what Dave was thinking. He'd see what happened. He enjoyed Dave's company, the sex was phenomenal, and if they couldn't make it work over the long term there was no harm to them from it.

The trip back to Syria took three days. The last time Ben had been going to Syria he'd been nervous. The situation there, even if one didn't take sides on any of the issues, was too volatile to ever really feel safe. This time around Ben would only put his boots on dry land if things really hit the fan, and he didn't see any reason why they would. He would be safe on board the Solace, in a clean and secure environment. Everyone around him was relatively friendly, and he was going to be doing work he loved.

Aziza was making friends on board, too. She'd come out of her shell a little bit and started talking to some of the female corpsmen. Ben thought it was good for her. She smiled more than she had before they boarded the Solace, and she could usually be found chatting with one of her new friends. Maybe, if they could get a visa for her, she could land in the US. Who knew? There were hundreds of nursing jobs for her.

Once they arrived at their destination, just off the shores of Latakia where they'd started, business picked up. They didn't see the volume of injuries that had brought Ben and Aziza into service in the first place, but they saw patients just as soon as their presence was known, and they didn't have many idle moments during their shifts.

When the Solace weighed anchor, Latakia was still under siege. A distress call came in from some Peshmerga, which resulted in SEALs being deployed to evacuate the wounded. "Funny," Ben remarked as he and Aziza prepped their OR. "When we were there, we didn't see any Peshmerga at all."

Aziza scoffed at him. "We were gone for over a week, Doctor. We might as well have been gone for over a century, the way things are here."

The SEALs were gone over twenty-four hours. They came back with twenty wounded locals, both Peshmerga and civilian. Two of the SEALs, Kulkarni and Tinker, came back with injuries too. While they tried to insist they were fine, they got treated right away and by the two Navy surgeons on staff. That left Ben to handle the first of the local wounded.

His first patient was a child. He hated working on children. Every time a child came through his OR, it meant they'd been through something no child should have seen or experienced. This little girl had suffered stab wounds to her arms and her chest. It didn't take much to figure out that the arm injuries were defensive wounds.

He didn't know the story. He'd find out later, when everything was over. Maybe he wouldn't. All he knew was that he had to save this child, right now. According to film, she'd narrowly missed a cardiac injury, but there had been a nick to a major blood vessel in the chest, and it needed to be repaired quickly. The poor girl was bleeding out into her chest cavity.

He worked to repair the vessel and cleaned up her chest cavity while he was at it. She still had a long road to go before she could be considered recovered, but she was on her way. He sent her on to recovery and went to scrub in for the next patient.

The next patient was a young man in olive drab with a bullet wound to the abdomen. The imaging staff had done a full workup, but that was the only information anyone had on him. Ben didn't need more than that. He didn't need to know the guy's name to know he was in for a world of hurt, or that a bullet fragment had splintered off to damage his patient's liver. This surgery would be arduous and delicate.

It took forever, but he got through it, and so did his patient. He moved on to his next patient, who needed a simple chest tube. The next just had a bullet to the shoulder, which likely hurt like hell but was easy enough to fix. He moved quickly through the injured as the severity of their wounds decreased, and soon they had no one else waiting for surgery.

He checked on his patients in the ward. They were all recovering well, so he went ahead and headed back to his bunk.

Dave met him there. He looked Ben up and down. "Rough one?"

"You could say that." Ben closed his eyes and melted into Dave's warm embrace. "I hate working on kids. I've seen some of the worst injuries you can imagine, and I've been able to get through it. Just a little bit of blood on a kid, though, and I'm done."

"Yeah. Yeah, a lot of us get that way." Dave rubbed his back. "Does it make you feel better to know someone was trying to save her?"

"Really?" Ben huffed out a bitter laugh and sat down on his bed. There wasn't any place else to go in the tiny bunk. "Bang up job they did."

"It would have been worse, I promise. Whenever you get war, you get some…well, some ugly individuals. They'll show up on any side, you know? They don't believe in any particular cause, they just want the excuse to hurt people with impunity. This is all third-hand, I didn't go out on this expedition, but I guess one of the ISIS bastards out there isn't the 'true believer' he pretended to be. He grabbed onto this little girl and tried to make off with her."

Ben doubled over, nauseous. "That's disgusting."

"Isn't it?" Dave's tone was flat. "One of the Peshmerga saw what was going on and brought a unit to step in. They defended the girl and the civilians with her. The scumbag still got a few digs in, because dirtbags gonna dirtbag, but you know. It's not like she was just alone out there."

Ben pulled himself together. "It does make me feel a little bit better. You see kids coming in all the time, and you don't know. They got separated from their families somehow, maybe their families are dead, maybe they each think the other's dead. Maybe there's something else going on, it's not like that stuff doesn't happen everywhere." He took a deep breath and sat up straighter. "I'm glad she had someone looking out for her. Hopefully they'll be able to take care of her when she's released."

Dave had tensed up when he was talking about the little girl, but now he relaxed. "She survived?"

"Yeah. It's still a dangerous situation, she's going to be in intensive care for a while, but she fought hard and she wants to live. I think she's going to make it, you know?"

"That's good to hear." Dave gave Ben a hand up. "Come on, let's get you some grub."

Ben had missed that, the way it felt to have someone come along and pick up your spirits just like that. They headed into the mess hall, and Dave sat down to eat with the corpsmen instead of with the SEALs. That was a huge deal, incalculably different for everyone involved, and it made Ben's heart warm up just a little.

The next day saw a new party of SEALs going out to rescue people, and this time Dave was one of them. Ben knew it was possible for him to get sent out. It was his job. When the time came, though, he found he wasn't ready at all. He tried to read patients' charts upside-down, and he flinched every time the intercom blared.

His supervisor didn't say anything to him, just quietly steered him toward a supply closet to do inventory. Not long after that, Chief Petty Officer Kelly showed up. "How are you holding up?" he asked, leaning up against the door jamb.

"I'm fine." Ben forced a smile and kept reorganizing the bandages on the shelf in front of him.

"Oh, you look fine." Kelly snorted. "Bandages don't come in alphabetical order, you know. They just sit there. My husband's a nurse. I do have a little bit of insight into these things." He stepped into the supply compartment and gave a little bit of a smile. "I'll let you in on a little something, something we don't talk about much outside the unit. He didn't start out as a nurse."

Ben turned around. "Medical student? Computer scientist? Failed artist?"

"Cute. No. He was part of a vigilante group that was probably half a step away from being terrorists. I'm only telling you this because we've already told you about the white supremacists we're chasing. I met him when we first ran into them. He, ah. He did a lot of high-risk things. And he did them alone, even when he was pregnant."

"Define high-risk. Drinking and smoking?"

"No. He took pretty good care of himself on that count. No, I mean like taking on three White Dawn members, alone, in close quarters, while visibly pregnant." He winced at the memory. "He won, but just the idea that he'd put himself in harm's way like that threatened to send me right over the edge into insanity. And I wasn't exactly nice about it either." He picked up a bandage and toyed with it. "I almost lost him, Doc, because I kept letting my overprotectiveness get in the way of my love for Mal. I mean Mal is who he is. I fell in love with him, and if he suddenly changed who he was just because of biology I don't think things would have worked out well at all.

"I'm not sure how you feel about Hopper, or how he feels about you, but you seem to be pretty good together. Hopper deserves some happiness in life." Kelly shrugged and met Ben's eyes. "You probably do too, but he's my brother."

Ben could huff out a little laugh there. "Well, of course. He's your responsibility. You've barely met me."

"Right?" Kelly grinned. "Anyway, you seem to like Dave. And Dave is a SEAL. He likes his job. He's not going to stop being a SEAL. Even when he retires, he'll still be a SEAL. It's hard to see him go out on jobs, but he's going to be doing this for as long as you know him. You've got to build a thicker skin about it, man."

Ben nodded. "I do. And I want to. It's just… "

"You think you can change him?" Kelly's voice took on a brittle note.

"No. No, it's nothing to do with him, really. My fiancé died on my operating table." Kelly flinched, but Ben pressed on. "I'm trying not to say anything to Dave about it, because talking too much about your ex is creepy and because I don't want to put that on him, you know? Especially right before he jumps into a dangerous situation. But knowing he's out there getting shot at, I can't shake this fear that he's going to wind up in my OR again."

Kelly staggered back, just a little. "Well, shit. That's a whole different level of unpleasant."

"Yeah. Yeah, it is. Like I said, it's nothing to do with him. It's my hangup, and he shouldn't have to deal with it. But it's still my hangup, if you know what I mean." Ben rubbed at his face. "I didn't think it would be as hard as this."

Kelly grinned. "Well, think about it this way. If it's hard, then that means you must really care about him. And honestly, I won't tell you it gets easier. I still cringe every time I leave Mal behind, because I know he won't hesitate to throw down if he feels he has to. And I know his stomach ties itself up in knots every time I get deployed. It doesn't get easier, but you do learn to work around it better." He put a hand on Ben's shoulder. "I'll have Hopper stick his head in when they get back, just to prove he's doing okay. That way you'll know, and you can set your mind at ease."

"Won't he get in trouble for that?" Ben hated how pathetic and eager he sounded.

"It'll be quick, and I'll smooth it over with Chief." Kelly winked. "I'll see you soon."

The rescue party returned not long after that. Dave did rush down to the OR, carrying a wounded infant in his arms. He looked grimy, but Ben could see that none of the blood on his uniform belonged to him.

Dave greeted him with a kiss to the cheek. "Kelly said you were worried about me?" A sweet, little grin lit up his soot-streaked face.

"I was. Thanks for checking in." Ben felt sixty pounds lighter. He didn't have time to melt into his lover's arms, but he rested his head against Dave's broad shoulder for a moment. "What've we got here?"

"I don't know. She was awfully close to the blast. Her mama died protecting her from it. I'd better go. I'll see you when you're done down here."

Ben handed the baby over to Aziza for triage and went to scrub in. He all but skipped as he made his way over. Maybe this was love, after all.

* * *

Dave checked in with Ben at the end of his shift, only to be met with the deepest and most passionate kiss the Solace was likely to have ever seen. He gave himself over completely to the embrace, welcoming every moment. When Ben finally pulled back for air, Dave chuckled and smiled at him. "What brought that on?"

Ben ducked his head and blushed as they headed out onto the deck. "I couldn't get away with it earlier so I'm doing it now." He licked his lips. "Sorry. I'm a little bit of an emotional wreck today."

Dave took his hand. "Did you lose a patient?" His stomach twisted. "Not the baby!"

"Not the baby. She's got a little bit of a concussive injury to her lungs, but she's going to make it. We're still trying to figure out who her family is or what her name is, but in the meantime Aziza's really taken her under her wing. It's good for her," he added, in a soft voice. "She lost her whole family, early on. Husband, kids, everyone. It's good to see her forming an attachment like this." He cleared his throat. "For now, she's calling the baby Khadijah. It works. Anyway, we did lose a patient, but saving him was a long shot. A bone fragment pierced his—"

Dave held up a hand. "I don't need the details." He gave a little laugh. "I know, I know, I deal with blood and guts all day, but it's different. It's in the moment, it's primal. It's not clinical. Somehow I'm squeamish about that kind of thing."

Ben tilted his head to the side. "Huh. I guess it doesn't have to make sense to me. Good to know, though."

Dave put his arm around Ben's narrow shoulders. He knew Ben would remember that, the same way he would remember an anatomical chart or a medication's side effects. "Okay. So what's got you all twisted up?"

Ben turned his head to look out over the sea. "Today was hard. I talked with Kelly, and I don't want to put it on you because it's not your issue, but I don't want to keep this kind of thing from you either. Just, you know, so you know where my head's at, and if I'm a little irrational at times like this."

"Spit it out, darlin'." Dave rubbed his back. He couldn't imagine why Ben would have confided in Kelly, of all people.

"So I get that you're a SEAL. You were a SEAL when I met you, and you'll always be a SEAL. You do dangerous work, it's part of the job, and I accept that. The thing is, my fiancé died on my operating table. So when you go out, and I'm working in the same place and everything, I get scared." Ben spoke in a rush, like he didn't want to give the words time to catch in his mouth.

Dave kissed him, quickly and chastely. "That probably took a lot to admit, huh?"

"Maybe a little." Ben's cheeks reddened over his stubble.

"I appreciate that. I'm actually kind of floored by the way you made that distinction, where you said it's not my issue." Dave didn't think "floored" was a strong enough word, but he didn't have language for anything more emphatic. "And it's only natural that you'd be traumatized by something like that, dude. It's horrifying. Why wouldn't you be? It's okay to have a few issues tied back to it."

Ben nodded, a little glumly. "I think it does mean something, though. It means I feel something pretty strong for you, Dave. I don't know—we haven't talked about anything past when your job is over and that's okay. We've both got kind of demanding careers, and we might not be able to work anything out after your deployment ends, if that's even something you'd want. But I just thought you should know. I’m feeling pretty strongly about you, too strongly for me to just push it aside and not tell you.” There was something else there, something that seemed to be on the tip of his tongue, but it remained unsaid.

Dave gaped for a long moment. He would have said something, but all of the air had been sucked out of his lungs. The potential of that moment, everything that could be said but wasn’t, stopped his words and his breath. "I think I know what you’re getting at,” he said when air finally came. “I’m not a hundred percent sure what exactly I’m feeling, since I don’t really have context for it, but I know it’s strong.” He pulled Ben closer to himself. "Considering how some of the guys I know got when they fell in love, I wasn't sure. I mean, Adami's my best friend and he turned into a ragingly jealous asshole, so I can’t be sure."

He knew he was babbling, but Ben just laughed and rested his head on Dave's shoulder. "Well, I'd rather live with the uncertainty than raging jealousy, but somehow you don't quite strike me that way anyway." He nuzzled in. "I don't know what the future holds. We don't have to figure anything out now, though. We'll get there eventually."

They retreated to Ben's bunk, where any kind of sex act required some heroic acts of flexibility. Ben didn't seem to want or need anything fancy tonight. In fact, all he seemed to want was Dave's cock, in his mouth. Dave wasn't going to object to that at all. He sat back on the bed with his legs parted and let Ben settle himself between them. When he felt the damp heat of his lover's mouth engulfing him, he closed his eyes and let himself accept this as home.

Maybe love wouldn't be enough. Dave might be young, but he wasn't naive. He knew they faced obstacles bigger than just competing, incompatible careers. Still, they had love or whatever they had right now, and it would be a good memory to carry with him.

The SEALs weren't just in Syria to poke around and pull civilians to safety. They were there to find and catch the next big White Dawn fish on their radar. Before Bogdanovic’s heart gave out, unable to withstand questioning so soon after his injuries, he'd given them a name. Bruce Conley was an American national under indictment for murder and hate crimes in six states. He hadn't stood trial for any of them because he'd fled the country and found shelter in France.

France had declined to extradite him because one of the states accusing him of murder refused to take the death penalty off the table. From there he'd gone underground, popping up here and there in Russia and a few former Yugoslav republics. According to Bogdanovic, Conley had been the one to hire him and the one to pay him. They would find proof of this in a bank account under Bogdanovic's alias, in Serbia.

They'd gotten the name to Baldinotti back in Virginia and to Mal Kelly on the sly. Baldinotti had come back with information about the bank accounts, as well as some details about Conley's activities since disappearing. Mal had come up with Conley's last known whereabouts.

Dave didn't get it. If Conley was as high up on the food chain as Bogdanovic claimed, what the hell would he be doing in a place like Syria? Syria was all but in anarchy right now, and his ISIS buddies weren't going to be able to protect him long.

He guessed he didn't have to be able to wrap his head around it. He trusted Baldinotti. He trusted Mal even more, having seen what the guy could and would do. Whatever the reason, Conley was apparently still in Syria, and so to Syria they would go.

SEALs went out on assignments to help bring in the wounded, but once they got a rough location from Mal they started going out on recon missions to try to track Conley down. Dave was on one of the first outings. He didn't share that with Ben. For one thing, it was classified. For another, he didn't want to get Ben more worked up than he had to. If Ben was already anxious about Dave going out to save lives, how much more would he worry about him going up against actual enemies?

Their first raid took them up from Latakia toward Ildib. Their quarry had been seen in a mixed group of ISIS and "Crusader filth," creeping along a section of the Turkish border between the two cities. Given that Ildib was pretty far from the border, his intention seemed pretty clear. He was trying to sneak across the border and escape from Syria now that his servant, Bogdanovic, had been captured. Mal's contact obviously had strong views about the subject.

Kelly had command of their party of four. In addition to Kelly and Dave, they had Floyd and Van Heel. Kelly was the kind of guy who liked to make sure everyone knew as much as possible about the situation they were going into, so they could make informed decisions when shit hit the fan. He wasn't a big fan of "need to know." Dave liked that about him.

Kelly's plan was pretty simple. Conley was trying to get across the border. Their best and safest bet to intercept the enemy was where the road came closest to the border, even if the road had more holes in it than Swiss cheese right about now. "Turkey has a contingent of guards on the other side of the border, to include Mal's contact. They are loaded for bear. Right now, we're on the same side as they are because they don't want White Dawn in their borders, and they're not big fans of ISIS. They're not big fans of ours at the moment, whatever leadership might say, so do not engage. We're not even supposed to be here, so let's try to keep international incidents to a minimum shall we?"

In an ideal situation, they would capture Conley alive. They had every right to bring him home to face justice. The idea of leaving so soon and losing Ben gave Dave a pang, but they'd cross that bridge when they came to it.

They set up their ambush on both sides of the road, preparing for the convoy that would bring their enemy to the border. There was no way a figure like Conley would travel this area without a convoy. The roads were too lousy to go without heavy trucks, for one thing. Anyone with anything to take would be worried about theft, for another.

They waited on site for twenty-four hours until the convoy they wanted pulled through. The first couple of drivers looked normal, but when a truck rolled past with pale, blonde drivers Kelly gave the signal to act. Dave shot out the tires on the front truck while Van Heel got the tires on the rear. No one was getting out this way.

The enemy fought back right away. Dave wouldn't have expected anything less. They had semi-automatic weapons at the ready and jumped from the trucks firing. Dave fired from his sheltered location. The bullets whizzed by, sometimes close enough for him to feel their heat. None of them landed. He'd chosen his shelter well.

Kelly hurled a grenade at the trucks, and Dave braced himself for the blast. Once the wave passed over him, he came up firing again. Only a handful of enemy soldiers remained to fight, and he and Floyd mopped them up easily. Van Heel fired at a dirt bike fleeing back toward Ildib, but nothing landed.

"Fuck!" Kelly shot the engine on one of the trucks, just because he was pissed off.

Dave didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say. He just set about checking the bodies for evidence and identity. Floyd picked up on his intentions and did the same with the trucks. They didn't get a lot, but they got enough to prove Conley had been there and had intended to cross into Turkey.

Together, they made the scene look like an accident and set the whole crime scene ablaze. Then they took off toward Latakia and their ship. At least they'd gotten away without injuries.

The trip back to Latakia took a day of intense hiking. They took a cluster of wounded civilians back to the Solace as a cover for their activities. Unfortunately, they weren't hard to find. When the civil war in Syria first started, it had been easy for Dave to get judgmental about the people involved. ISIS bad, Assad bad, rebels good. As the war dragged on, though, he was coming to understand that there were no "good guys" in a civil war when civilians suffered like this.

No one escaped suffering, and Dave couldn't make himself care if the people he brought back to the Solace were civilians or fighters anymore. He carried regime soldiers too wounded to keep up with their comrades back to the ambulances right along with civilians and injured Peshmerga. No one complained. No one started crap with anyone else, either.

They pulled up to the boat and got the patients on board. Everything about Dave ached, even his eyelids. He just wanted to close them and sleep for a while. Still, he stuck his head in down in the triage unit to assure Ben he was still alive.

Ben's relief was palpable. He kissed Dave's cheek quickly and then wrinkled his nose. "Handsome Sailors who stay out in the field too long need showers," he teased, and dropped his eyes to a stretcher near Dave's left side. Switching to Arabic, he asked, "Good evening. Can you move your legs at all?"

Dave patted Ben's back and let him go do his job. He had to debrief anyway, before he could shower or sleep.

Fortunately for him, Chief had soup and sandwiches waiting for him and the guys in the briefing room. "All right. You boys came back empty handed. Why?"

Kelly bit his lip. "He was prepared, sir. He had a bike and a ramp, in one of the trucks."

DeWitt scowled. "Do you think he was tipped off?"

Floyd shook his head. "It looked like an older modification. My guess would be that he just travels this way. I don't think we're the only ones gunning for him. I mean, he hired the guy who bombed that office tower, so Assad's got to want him. I'm pretty sure they've got a nice, comfortable place for him in Bosnia, too. And I can't imagine the Kurds are in love with him."

"Aiding and abetting ISIS? Nah. And I'd guess Iraq would want a piece of him too." Chief sighed. "So, he's slippery. More slippery than we thought. It's okay, because we're still going to get him, but it does complicate things. We'll get him next time."

"Damn straight, Chief." Van Heel slammed his fist into his hand. "We won't let you down."

Chief gave him a concerned look. "It's not personal, Van Heel. Don't make it personal. Otherwise you'll just make yourself crazy. A vendetta is the best way to get yourself killed."

"Of course, Chief." Van Heel dug into his soup mechanically. He looked like a robot. He didn't like to fail.

Well, neither did Dave. None of them did. "It's just a delayed catch," he told his buddy. "We got information. And if nothing else, we killed fifteen of the bastards, ISIS and White Dawn both."

Van Heel relaxed a little bit. "I suppose that's true."

Dave started in on his soup. Maybe it wasn't ideal, but the world was definitely a safer place because of what they'd done.