MTF!Sam, double-drabble, written 5/25/09.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Sam hadn’t been following in his dad’s footsteps when he went into the army – or if he had, he’d had decidedly different reasons.

Certainly not any sense of duty or honor or patriotism, not really.

Sam had been running from himself. Herself.

She’d hoped she could escape, hoped the Special Forces would make her into the man everyone wanted her to be, but machismo wasn’t an airborne contagion. Comfort in his body wasn’t something that would just rub off from the others, as much as Sam wanted it to.

So instead she used Afghanistan to forget. There, there were plenty of other things to focus on. Many more immediately deadly than how depressed and uncomfortable and wrong she felt playacting at being a man.

She focused on survival, though sometimes she didn’t know if it was worth it.

She focused on his friends, because she didn’t want to be the weak link that got anyone killed. (She tried not to focus on the one time that hadn’t been enough.)

And she focused on getting damn good with a gun.

Because that was something she could do.

And just maybe, if her dad was proud of her, things would be okay.

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MTF!Jules, double-drabble, completed 5/31/09.

Security

Their relationship had been safe. The rules and regulations of the SRU had kept it that way. They couldn’t get too close, or they’d get in trouble, they’d lose everything. And it had been easy to pretend that was the reason she’d never let things get too far.

But it looked like there wasn’t going to be any more pretending for a while.

“Jules, how could you not have told me?” Sam asked, real confusion and – was that sadness? – clear to be heard.

She looked at him, and then away. “I don’t know,” she answered truthfully. “It was never – ” Was never the right time? Before certain conversations got overheard would sure have been a better time than now. “I didn’t want to ruin everything.”

Sam’s eyebrows went up. “Jules, I love you. You couldn’t ‘ruin everything’ if you tried.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

And when Jules looked at Sam again, there was laughter in her eyes. “You could, you know,” she said.

“I could? How’s that?” Sam sounded amused, curious.

She leaned in toward him. “You could stop kissing back.”

He broke away from the kiss just long enough to say, “I don’t think we have anything to worry about, then.”