Shaded Soldiers || Gay MxM || Omegaverse

13. Silenced

In my eyes, it was chaos. There was so much talking, so many people on their phones, people asking questions, talking or shouting over each other, and so many machines beeping and whirring as everyone hurriedly did their job. I didn't dare to get up from my seat in the fear of getting body-slammed to the ground by the large alphas who rushed from computer to computer, or in and out of the tech room.

But whenever I took a break to rest my eyes and watched my team instead, I learned to see the harmony in that chaos. No one ran into anyone. No one tried to use the same machine at the same time. Not a single shouted word disrupted another conversation. The way they worked together was seamless, almost like they shared their existence as one being.

And there was I, sitting behind my computer in my corner, trying to find all the files I needed and to figure out how to read them. I felt like a caveman from hundreds of years ago seeing a keyboard for the first time. But I did my best, as I'd promised.

I knew my task wasn't relevant to the mission. My job was to isolate every piece of information about the tormented kid, and there wasn't much of it. Only pictures and brief mentions. No names, no details, nothing. It didn't help our case. My task did nothing to help the others find the terrorists. My information wasn't useful in finding the kid himself either.

But it was important to me. No one else seemed to care about him. The first time the kid was mentioned in any of the reports was almost five years ago. He was mentioned several times after that over the years, even pictured and filmed on multiple different occasions, and none of the people filing these reports showed any interest or concern over the obvious deterioration of his mental and physical health. Hell, none of it was even mentioned, even though the evidence was right there, shown in the recordings of him. Like he was nothing but a pet dog, not worth enough to pay attention to.

And the people monitoring Hill were supposed to be the good guys who cared...

Then there was Captain Hale, who only had to watch one recording to notice his desperate need for help. My respect for him grew exponentially in that single afternoon. And he gave this task to me. The task of caring about this kid and his life, to value him as a person, as a victim in need of being saved, not as an irrelevant bystander.

I took that task very seriously.

It frustrated me how little information there was about him, but it made me even more determined to find out everything there was to know about him. I listened to the others with one ear, and learned about programs and other means they could use to identify people, so I knew I could do it if someone just taught me how. I'd learn this kid's name. I'd learn about his life. I'd learn what they did to him. I just needed to gather every piece of information we had so far first.

"You hungry?"

I snapped out of my focus and turned to look at Reid, who was rubbing his stubble while watching me.

"I uh... No, but I guess I need to eat," I said, checking the clock. "Fuck, it's been five hours already?"

"Uh-huh," Reid said, and moved his chair next to me to see the report I was reading through. "Any luck?"

"Not really," I said with a sigh. "They've got all these extremely detailed reports about Hill digging his fucking nose or scratching his ass, but they're only mentioning the kid with three words, if at all..."

"Yeah, sounds about right..." Reid muttered.

"Do we even care about the victims here?" I asked quietly.

"This team does," Reid said. "Zero-Six are all good men too, but the rest...? Not a chance. They're only here to kill terrorists."

"Figures..." I said. "This kid is an alpha, by the way. And still, no one cares. I wouldn't be so surprised if he were an omega. But how blind can you be to not see his distress?"