The twins might think they're all that, both sets, but it's fucking Thor who could drop me like a rock from a mile away, Dice thought, watching the man leave before turning his attention back to the narrow road leading into the compound.
His heart thudded in his chest as the cars arrived, parking right in front of him. When the door to the first one opened, Dice thought he wouldn't be able to find any words to speak ever again.
It was her. It was Meredith.
And she was alive. And she was here.
"Meredith," he whispered, staring at her dumbly while she seemed to be doing much the same in response.
What's a man supposed to do when he's reunited with a woman he thought he lost five years ago? Whatever it was, Dice couldn't quite wrap his mind around it, so he did the one thing that felt natural.
He walked over to her, pulled her out of the car and into his arms and kissed her like she was the only oxygen he could ever breathe again.
Four
Meredith
The kiss still lingered on her lips, raw and passionate and almost angry in its energy. It wasn't like she didn't have enough to deal with after almost getting killed in an attack on the armored vehicle she was in and then being kidnapped from her previous kidnappers, but now to find the love of her life waiting for her back at the place she'd been held captive at? It was all a tiny bit much for Meredith, to be perfectly truthful.
She'd been in a haze as Dice had finally let her up for air, his eyes ablaze with desire and disbelief in equal measure. She vaguely remembered him taking her hand while Rio and Ryker catcalled and whistled at the impromptu makeout session, only to receive a threatening roar from Dice that sent them scrambling with smirks on their lips.
He led her into the second building and though she couldn't spot any bodies, the blood splatter on the wall told her that the people she'd known and come to begrudgingly tolerate over the last half a year were no more. As if he knew – and he could probably smell it, if Meredith actually thought about it a little – Dice led her to her sleeping quarters, a bit messy and unkempt as they were.
She'd pushed two single beds together to form one bigger one, a scrap of luxury afforded her thanks to the fact that the compound was understaffed. They stopped in the middle of the room, Dice's gaze going down to their intertwined fingers before he let go reluctantly, his body tense and loaded like a spring. Where he'd touched her, her skin tingled. She missed the feeling of his body against hers immediately.
Feeling her head spinning slightly, she went to the bed and sat down, staring at the man she'd known well, but had thought to never see again.
It's like he hasn't changed at all, she thought at first, though on closer inspection she had to change her assessment.
"Prowler, I need the laptop here," Dice spoke into his headset, before looking down at his boots.
They both seemed to be rather at a loss for words.
His expression had grown harder and the lines that made up his stern, but to her also loving, expression were now deeper, as if he'd aged inward rather than just suffered the passing of years as she must have to his eyes as well.
It had been almost six years since she'd seen him. He'd left for a mission in Iraq and he'd never come back, disappearing from communications about four months into his supposedly nine-month stay. One day, it was like he'd never existed at all and no one would tell her a thing about where he'd gone or why she couldn't get in contact with him.
"I thought you were dead," Meredith said finally, and it seemed to be the perfect echo of Dice's thoughts as well.
"So did I," he confirmed, just as a knock sounded at the door, though the guy on the other side – Prowler, Meredith assumed – didn't bother to wait for an invite, pushing the door open and shoving a slim laptop into Dice's hands unceremoniously.
The man paused after handing over the computer, giving Meredith a long, grinning look. His bright eyes seemed to be almost haunted in a way. In fact, the more she thought about it, all of the men she'd seen so far had looked a bit off, like they were battling demons that could very well be stronger than they were.
Weird.
"You got a problem, Prowler?" Dice asked evenly, though Meredith immediately recognized the soft growl of possession in his tone.
She smiled slightly. She remembered it from way back when. Dice had always been a reasonable sort of guy but shifters got really territorial with their girlfriends and while he'd mostly restrained himself, she could remember at least one case where a guy who was too quick on the yap got his mouth shut really fast by the trained, steely fist of a US Navy SEAL. He might have lost a tooth or two as well.
Dice had never looked very guilty about it, though.
"Oh, just wanted to see the fabled woman, the special flower that has wrapped Slicey's mind up in a lovey-dovey cocoon," Prowler crooned, though he danced away quickly as Dice took a step towards him.
Prowler put up his hands in mock-defeat, grinning like the joker he was as he slipped behind the door. "Whoa there. Calm down, big guy. All in good fun. Try not to break the bed."
With that, he was gone, and Meredith stopped holding in the almost hysterical giggle that had been building since she recognized who she was staring at when the car door had been opened. Dice Alderson. The man she'd thought she'd one day marry, whose babies she was going to have. Standing before her in the middle of a werewolf terrorist compound in Peru.
Meredith was sure that there were some ways to make this even weirder, but she was sort of running out of feasible ones that she could think of.
Dice grumbled under his breath, striding to the door and slamming the lock on, the little click having become very recognizable to Meredith. The Arctics could of course open it from the other side if they needed to, or they'd been able to when they were still alive, but luckily enough they'd never tried it on Meredith.
It had given her a false sense of security. One that was very obviously only imaginary, considering that the men she'd thought to be her biggest problems were all dead now.
"What's so funny?" Dice asked, turning to face her.
He cocked a brow, but there were the makings of a smile on his lips, immediately putting Meredith at ease. Grabbing a chair, he sat across from her, balancing the laptop in his lap as he seemed to study her features, as if trying to ascertain whether he remembered her the right way and if the mental image he had lived up to the original. She felt entirely self-conscious for a moment.
"The everything."
"The everything?"
"Yes, the everything is funny. You, me, here," she said, motioning around herself and then straightening her round glasses a bit on her nose.
They kept slipping down a little because it was so damn hot all the time. It was better than the alternative though, seeing as they'd kept getting frozen to the bridge of her nose in the Arctic because of the metallic frame. It was funny how easily her brain traipsed off down that particular strand of thought, as if trying valiantly to avoid the very serious, very real problem she had in front of her now.
"I don't think it's so funny," Dice said solemnly, wiping her smile away easily. "Do you want to tell me what happened?"
"Don't you think you should start?" Meredith asked. "The way I see it is you must have known I was here, somehow, right? But I haven't heard from you since that Skype call you did from base camp, when you were going to be out of range for 'a few days tops.' What happened then, Dice?"
The memory was almost too real. She'd kept waiting for the call, calming herself down like every girlfriend of a man in active service, telling herself that everything was fine and if it wasn't then she'd still get a call, so if there was no call, there was no news and nothing to worry about! It was a vicious, maddening circle that seemed to coil around her and frankly drive her a bit nutty.
But the call had never come and there had never been any news. Dice Alderson had simply disappeared.
"I- uh. Okay," Dice started, looking a bit sheepish as he pulled his hand through his hair. "I wasn't lying. I was going on a mission and I was supposed to be back in a few days. But things got sort of lopsided and I ended up getting captured along with half my squad. We spent three months in a dungeon prison somewhere under a metric fuckton of sand, bound and gagged for the most part, until we managed to break out of there."