Stray Dog, tag: Sully

[JACKSON GALLOWS]

He didn't keep track of the days he spent locked up. Marking the passage of time was of great importance to a lot of prisoners, but it meant nothing to a man with no release date. Time was an inexorable march towards death and nothing else. Even if he did get out of that cell some day, what was waiting for him outside?

He supposed he died in Afghanistan and was just waiting for his body to catch up.

He had contemplated suicide in a kind of detached, intellectual way - looked around his cell for ways he could do himself in, calculated the chances of survival and inventoried the materials he had and the materials he needed. He would have to get creative, but there would always be a way. If a man wants to die - really and truly - there are few powers in the 'verse than can stop him.

In the end, all that thinking didn't amount to much. It was a morbid way to keep his mind occupied. But the thought always persisted. A prisoner had control of nothing else but his own death.

When they had shipped him to the lockup in Kandahar, Jax came to the conclusion that if he was going to buy it in a prison then he was going to buy it in a fight. Let the guards smear his brains all over the concrete - there was more dignity in it than hanging by a bedsheet.

They must have known. He still had his bedsheets.

His cell didn't have a window. The only light was artificial - fluorescent - and had given him a headache by the second day that he didn't adjust to until the second week.The walls and ceiling were bare concrete. The door was thick steel a shade darker than the walls with one sliding cover at the top that only opened from the outside. Every now and again a guard would open it and peer in and Jax would ignore them. There was a second window partway down the door that they made Jax stick his hands through so they could shackle him. There was a toilet and a sink and both worked as long as he didn't offend them in some way that he wasn't aware of - like looking at them funny, or attempting to use them in an every day fashion. He passed time with bodyweight workouts that made the stale air smell of sweat. The stink gradually faded from notice like the headaches and just became part of his life.

His life was that cell, except when it was the interrogation room. They didn't like that he didn't talk. He liked that they didn't like it. They wanted to know what he was doing in Afghanistan. Who he worked for. Where he got his training. Where he got his weapons. Why he killed the civilians and especially why he killed three US Army soldiers, brave and dedicated patriots who were a hundred times the man he was. And Jax would answer them with silence or, if he really wanted to make them mad, he'd smirk. They especially didn't like that.

Either way, they made an effort to beat answers out of him. He had to admit, these boys had better technique than the jokers in Bazarak and Kandahar, but they were still used to dealing with angry goat farmers with Kalashnikovs. He wondered when they were going to bring in the big guns, the grizzled Cold War vets they'd use on the Russians. Or surely they had some boys lined up to handle the Chinese spies. It was a matter of time, he thought.

And maybe that time was now.

Jax wasn't sure when 'now' was. His arms were heavy after a set of push-ups and he stood over his sink, washing the dirt off his hands and splashing a few handfuls of water on his face and the back of his neck. They hadn't allowed him razors; his beard was thick and his hair was a sweat-soaked chestnut tangle. He had no mirror. He ran a hand over his beard and through his hair and imagined he must have looked like a homeless man, or Jesus. Christ in an orange jumpsuit.

He heard the muffled tap of footsteps outside. The cover slid away from the window on his cell door and a pair of hard gray eyes peered through. A low grizzled voice grunted for Jax to come to the door. Jax did. They went about the shackling procedure like it was assembly-line. He wondered if it was waterboarding today.

He jingle-jangled in an awkward shuffle down the long hallway, escorted by old gray-eyes. That was the only guard they'd send to collect Jax nowadays. A stern man with no illusions about his job and no ego. He doled out beatings when needed but no more, and didn't seem to take any enjoyment out of it. He was the only one Jax would co-operate for.

Jax wondered if the Texan was back from his medical leave yet. There were scars on his knuckles from the guy's teeth.

Gray-eyes opened the door to the interrogation room, only it was a different room than usual - smaller, cleaner, better lit. Jax didn't allow the confusion to show on his face. He shuffled to the steel table and sat on the steel chair and put his hands up on the table and waited for something to happen. There was a door across from him, opposite the door Gray-eyes had led him through. Jax watched it.

Gray-eyes left. Jax didn't know how long he waited. He had lost his concept of time. The door he was watching opened up, and the person who walked in wasn't anybody he'd seen before. He straightened his spine and stared ahead with a cool analytical stare and a face carved from granite.

[LANE 'SULLY' SULLIVAN]

The Worst Of The Best I'm a wall, I'm a fence, I'm a dotted line I'm the land you kill for in the name of your kind You don't know me I'm a storm, I'm a sign, I'm a bleeding heart If I'm the time that got away. It's already gone You, You don't know me When Sully had agreed to take on The Hounds she had no idea that finding viable candidates would be so god damn hard. Apparently Sully's breed was in rare form. There were plenty of hunters out there. Those who worked in the night, didn't go back to the same city twice, and had a purpose that kept them moving forward in this life. Sully wasn't looking for the generic run of the mill hunters. She was looking for something more. The elite. The ones who needed a purpose to continue doing what they do. The ones who were good enough and crazy enough to get the job done, and the ones she knew without a doubt would follow her orders. There was no wiggle room on this. She had to be able to trust them one hundred percent. The file that Alex had given her raised Sully's brows. Military man, was back state side for a while, went back to Afghanistan in search of something. Apparently it was one hell of a bloody fight. When they pulled the soldier out, Jackson Gallows, he wasn't talking. As far as Sully could tell he still hadn't spoke. This man was rotting away in a cell, and most thought he was insane. Maybe he was, but so far everything seemed to fit. Somehow, Sully didn't think that it was human's that he'd gone up against. All the blanks weren't filled in, but Jackson had survived. It took two days for Sully to reach the destination. The MP's went to pat her down, but Sully went to break one of their wrists. She gave them a number to call, got the clearance she needed to walk straight through. Before the explosion Sully hadn't been keen on people touching her. Being abandoned by the one person who swore he would never be like her piece of shit family broke something deep inside Sully. She wouldn't ever let herself get that close to someone again. Hell, if it hadn't been for her biological father, Alex, Sully wasn't quite sure where she'd be at this moment. Probably dead in a ditch somewhere. Like the others she was trying to recruit, The Hounds gave her a purpose. She was lead through a door. The interrogation room was small, clean, and there was a man in an orange jumpsuit who strikingly resembled Jesus sitting on the other side of the table. Inwardly, Sully smirked at his state. Not because of the way he was, but because she knew he was defying them. Otherwise he would have been given liberties such as a razor. The fact that Jackson was in the state he was in, only made Sully want him on the team even more. He wasn't afraid to defy authority. That was good, because while she needed her Hounds to follow her orders, she also needed them to know if something was wrong with her and when to defy those orders in extreme circumstances. Sully was armed to the nines. Something the guards were not happy about, but when you have the right clearance, their happiness doesn't mean squat. She wore wrist sheaths under her long sleeved green shirt with a blank tank top beneath. On her hip was a browning 9mil. There were knives and back up guns in her boots as well as other arsenal that was easily accessible. Sully made no move to show it off to Jax. Instead she moved to sit across from him, watching his gaze, seeing where his eyes would go and how many of the weapons he would detect. Her hair was long, straight and down to her mid back. Sully had given up wearing it in pigtails. Pigtails were for children, and she was far past any illusions in her life. Beneath her hair, on her neck were visible scars - the most prominent being a cattle prod burn mark. Beneath her clothes there were plenty more. Ones that she wasn't ashamed of, not anymore, but walking around with weapons hanging out tended to scare the civies. Reaching into her pocket, Sully pulled out a pack of Marlboro's. She'd picked up smoking again after the explosion. It was still a rarity, but now felt like a good time. A guard was still in the room with them. She lit up the cigarette and looked over her shoulder at him. "Undo the shackles and get out." The guard's brow furrowed. "Ma'am?" "Don't make me repeat myself." Sully turned her gaze back to Jackson. The guard didn't seem to like the idea, and even stepped out for a moment to check with his superiors. Sully smoked her cigarette patiently, waiting until the guard came back in and undid Jackson's shackles. "Now get out." Without a word he did. Sully slid the cigarettes and lighter over to Jackson. "I imagine it's been a while since you had one." She leaned back in her chair and took another drag off her smoke. "I understand that you don't talk much. That's fine. Just listen." She held his hardened gaze, her own gaze never wavering. "I'm here to you offer you a deal. You can either hear me out and make your decision, or you can make that move I know you're itching too just to piss them off, and spend the rest of your days in a cell hoping upon hope that you get into a fight where someone is as good as you are and can gank you putting an end to your misery." She shrugged lightly. "It's your call, but I can promise you if you hear me out, you'll get the chance to hunt down every monster that runs rampant in the night that no one else knows exist." Then, Sully waited. The next move was his.

HAI THERE, THIS THREAD IS TAGGED JAX AT The BRIGG. NOTES: Holy Ramblin' Man!. TEMPLATE CREDIT TO MAKEOUTPRETTY OF ATF AND CAUTION 2.0.

[JACKSON GALLOWS]

He had been expecting several things - some old square-headed bruiser, or a thin dead-eyed specialist with a black suit and a steady knife hand. Or even a Good Cop, with a phony sympathetic smile and tired eyes and a cup of coffee for both of them and some nice, neat story about how maybe if he'd talk they could move him somewhere nicer and he'd put in a word with the guards and they wouldn't lay a finger on Jax. Or maybe some brainy psych guy with thin-rimmed glasses and neat hair and a dose of scopolamine. All these scenarios had played out in his head to fill the hours of the day.

In all those hours and all those scenarios he never once would have expected her.

He sized her up from the moment she stepped in to his field of view. Nothing moved but his eyes, starting at the face he didn't recognize and moving to the Browning that he did, on to the bulges under her sleeves that he figured were blades (you'd need bigger sleeves for a pistol on a spring holster, he thought, 'cause it's too bulky. you'd need a big jacket to hide it). He only caught the briefest glimpse of her boots before she sat down. He estimated at least another three or four weapons that he couldn't see. He allowed for a margin of error - after all, he'd been getting rusty, rotting in that cell.

He took in the weapons and the scars and the stance and the stare all in a matter of seconds. The picture it painted didn't make sense to him. She was not JTF or CSIS, he knew for certain, so the Yanks hadn't reached out to the Forces yet. He couldn't think of a US government agency with Brownings as standard issue - Feds used Glocks, CIA used Berettas or SIGs. She didn't have that government stooge arrogance, either.

He maintained his statuesque stillness through her lighting the cigarette and her ordering the guard around. That was some authority she had there. It raised more questions than it answered.

He kept steady eye contact with her while the guard removed the shackles, letting them all clatter to the floor. He rubbed at the cuff marks on his wrists and listened to the guard's retreating footsteps. Then the dull thunk of a closing door and it was just the pair of them having a staring contest across the steel table.

His eyes drifted down to the cigarettes, then back up. He reached for them. The short sleeve of his orange jumpsuit rode up, revealing the tail end of new scars. Zahhak had made a mess of him and the guards' boots didn't speed the healing process along. He slid a smoke out of the pack as she talked. His actions were slow and deliberate. He tapped the end of the cigarette against the table. He took in every word, and when she finished speaking a piece of the puzzle finally slid into place.

Hunter. That's why he didn't get the spook vibe from her. But even that answer only raised more questions. Since when did hunters get authority over MPs? How did she get the intel on him, anyway?

He let silence fall. He put the cigarette between his lips and lit it. He took a long drag and exhaled slowly.

His voice was hoarse from disuse. He rasped, "I'm listening."

[LANE 'SULLY' SULLIVAN]

The Worst Of The Best I'm a wall, I'm a fence, I'm a dotted line I'm the land you kill for in the name of your kind You don't know me I'm a storm, I'm a sign, I'm a bleeding heart If I'm the time that got away. It's already gone You, You don't know me Sully brought no attention to the fact that Jax had spoke. It wasn't important. If he didn't want to talk that was his choice so long as he could hunt. If the reports said anything, he was damn good. That was all Sully cared about. She took another drag of her cigarette and leaned back in her chair, her stance relaxed. That didn't mean she was stupid. If Jackson got a hair up his eyes and moved to attack her, he'd be in for a surprise. "The names, Sully. Judging from the knowing look on your face, you know what I am, and you know what I do." She kept her gaze on his never wavering. If Sully thought he was an idiot she wouldn't have come. Hunter's can tell hunters most of the time. Every so often one that didn't fit the norm would show up and throw off everyone's radar, but right now Sully knew she was in similar company. The haze of smoke began to slowly fill the small room as they puffed on their cigarettes. To be honest, Sully thought this would be better done with a bottle of whiskey in hand. Then she remembered her flask. Reaching into her back pocket, she pulled out the silver container, twisted the top off, and took a sip, before offering it to Jackson. She would have offered it first, but if he was anything like her, he wasn't going to accept a random drink from a stranger without them drinking from it first. "I'm looking for Hunters," She said plainly. "I run a unit, funded by the Powers That Be." She shrugged. "Meaning I have no idea who actually funds us. Here's what I do know. If you choose to join up, all of this," She gestured around them, "Is gone. You're record, gone, full immunity. We do what we've always done. We hunt down the monsters that no one else knows exists, but we have a little more leeway when it comes to repercussions. The health benefits kick ass too." Sully paused letting all of that sink in for a moment. Taking one last drag of her cigarette she dropped it on the floor crushing it under her boot. "Before you give me an answer, this is the bottom line. This is my team. You do what I say. If I'm compromised have the balls to do what needs to be done, but otherwise, you follow orders. If that's a problem, I can have the guards escort you back to your cell."

HAI THERE, THIS THREAD IS TAGGED JAX AT The BRIGG. NOTES: Holy Ramblin' Man!. TEMPLATE CREDIT TO MAKEOUTPRETTY OF ATF AND CAUTION 2.0.

[JACKSON GALLOWS]

He savoured every drag like she had given him the best cigarette he would ever smoke in his life. It could have been tobacco waste scraped off the floor and rolled in old newsprint and he would have still smoked it like it was a Chesterfield King. He watched her through the dull cigarette haze and there was something vaguely unreal about the whole thing, like the small comfort of a smoke was something relegated only to dying dreams and fading memories. Perhaps the exhaustion was finally creeping in, the kind that sleep couldn't fix. Stay sharp, he told himself, as if that meant anything anymore.

She said her name was Sully and he tried to remember if he'd heard that name before - if he knew somebody who knew somebody else who knew a Sully, somewhere, and his name got passed through the tangled web of contacts and they ended up here, sitting across from each other in a smoky interrogation room in a supermax facility somewhere in America. He would have been okay with that, he figured. But the thought of her being in with the spooks, of there being some government file with his name on it full of information about him from after he left JTF... One hand clenched slowly into a tight fist, then loosened until his fingers were slack on the surface of the table.

He took another drag to calm himself. Outwardly, he was still stone-faced. His hard hazel eyes followed her hands as she went for the flask. Hawk's eyes, sharp and keen and incongruous with his tired vagabond appearance. He instinctively suspected poison and she took the first drink like she could read his mind. He still searched for some sleight of hand as she passed him the flask, but he saw none because there was none for him to see.

He pulled the cigarette from his mouth, holding it between the second knuckles of his index and middle fingers as he took the flask from her. Smoke rose from the cherry in a thin wisp, joining the hanging haze. Jax considered the flask for a moment before he took a drink. She had given him the nectar of the gods and he felt the most sublime burn all the way down his throat and into his stomach. It was only his nigh-on superhuman self-control that prevented him from emptying the flask down the hatch. He handed it back to her with a quiet grunt of thanks; a word uttered rarely, but always with weight to it.

He took a last drag from his cigarette and stubbed it out as he listened to her. Everything she said sounded too good to be true. There had to be a catch, some kind of angle, a price, something. Because good fortune didn't just happen like that. Not to Jax. He did not get handed cigarettes and whiskey and a get out of jail free card and a job and a place on a team. He was supposed to scrape and claw and crawl and sweat and bleed for everything he had and everything he wanted only to see it ripped away so he could start all over again.

He stared at her, considering what she said for a long while before he finally spoke up.

"That's a hell of an offer, Sully," he said in his persistent rasp, "But it seems to me like there ought to be a catch."

He coughed and cleared his throat, tiring of the sandpapery texture to his words.

"Your uh - your benefactors. These 'Powers That Be'. If you don't know who they are, how do you know you can trust them? That they're not playing the long con? That's usually a hobby, with those shadowy puppet master types."

[LANE 'SULLY' SULLIVAN]

The Worst Of The Best I'm a wall, I'm a fence, I'm a dotted line I'm the land you kill for in the name of your kind You don't know me I'm a storm, I'm a sign, I'm a bleeding heart If I'm the time that got away. It's already gone You, You don't know me Jax had a good point, and to be honest when this first came about, Sully herself was wary. She made it a point not to trust people and put her life in the hands of others. On the few occasions she had her life had for the most part been disregarded. Perhaps that why she didn't think very much of herself. At one point she had begun to think differently, but circumstances had happened and Sully remembered her place. "I never said I could trust them," Sully answered honestly. "Nor do I. I said they funded this little expedition, for whatever reason. My guess is they want to make sure nothing like the apocalypse happens again. Either way, I don't give a damn to be perfectly honest. Even if they pull out on their end of the deal it's not all that hard for us to go underground. We're hunters, that's what we do." Sully looked around at the cell. "Well usually." To be honest, from her end it was odd, sitting here having a conversation like this. Sully didn't usually talk this much, yet with each possible recruit she found herself giving the speech. They usually found it a little odd afterwards when she became reserved and quiet. Sully didn't say much unless she had something to say, which wasn't often. Seeing how much Jax was savoring the cigarette she slid the pack over to him. He was a good hunter. Sully wanted him on the team, but she wouldn't force him. "Two things you should know about me, Jax." Her dark gaze held his. "I don't trust anyone, not completely." She leaned forward, letting him see the truth in her next words. "And I will never lie to you." That was the truth. "I don't know why they fund us, but they do. I don't trust their motives and I will never let anyone own me. You have a choice here. You can stay and rot in a cell for the rest of your life - " She leaned back in her chair and shrugged. "Or you can do what it is you do best." The bare hint of a smirk tugged on her lips. "Kill every evil fucking thing you can get your hands on."

HAI THERE, THIS THREAD IS TAGGED JAX AT The BRIGG. NOTES: Holy Ramblin' Man!. TEMPLATE CREDIT TO MAKEOUTPRETTY OF ATF AND CAUTION 2.0.

[JACKSON GALLOWS]

He leaned back what little the chair would allow and brought one hand up to scratch contemplatively at his jaw, fingertips disappearing into the wild thatch of his beard. He held his steady, assessing stare. She talked a good game and he'd be an idiot to not take the deal. But even as a non-person in an orange jumpsuit in a cage, he still had his principles. Those principles precluded him from ever following a poor leader. And though he only had a brief conversation in an interrogation room to base his assessment on, he still felt confident enough to gauge her leadership potential.

He sized her up against every fresh-faced Lieutenant and by-the-book Major he'd ever dealt with. Leadership was more than giving the right orders and making the right calls. There were plenty of master tacticians who fell apart once they saw real action, or burned all the trust their men would give them. He had seen them firsthand. He was disgusted by them.

Leadership was knowing what made your men tick; knowing how to motivate them for battle, how to make them want to fight rather than to do it out of obligation. It was knowing when to prop them up, knowing how to lift morale without coddling them or babying them, and most of all knowing when to listen to them. It was, through all that, earning respect instead of demanding it.

He thought about all these things as he lit another cigarette from the offered pack. He thought about where she might fit, between Lt. Harper and Maj. MacAuliffe. She certainly talked like MacAuliffe, that no-nonsense honesty. To the point. None of the weaselly deception of Harper, the air of unearned importance.

He took a drag off his smoke and exhaled out of the corner of his mouth and rested the side of his hand on the steel, holding the cigarette pencilwise between his index and middle fingers. He tapped the filter end with his thumb and knocked ashes onto the table.

His skepticism was like a film over every thought. Many people had pledged their honesty to him, and the only ones who had held to their word were dead. The rest were in the wind. They had taken from him and they had run and they were probably only now peering out of their holes at the exaggerated rumours of his untimely demise.

But sitting there, in that prison, he might as well have been dead.

So take the offer, he told himself.

That Sully didn't have cause to trust the shadowy puppet masters still bothered him, but it bothered him about as much as having incompetents in political office. Technically they were in charge, but at a level so remote as to not have any real bearing. Sully would be the one giving the orders and he hadn't yet caught any red flags. He supposed he might, once he was out, once he had the opportunity to see her in the field... but he might not, and the risk was worth taking.

"All right," he said, exhaling smoke with his words.

"Sign me up, boss."

[LANE 'SULLY' SULLIVAN]

The Worst Of The Best I'm a wall, I'm a fence, I'm a dotted line I'm the land you kill for in the name of your kind You don't know me I'm a storm, I'm a sign, I'm a bleeding heart If I'm the time that got away. It's already gone You, You don't know me To be honest things had gone a lot smoother than when Sully had anticipated. That was technically a good thing. Jackson Gallows seemed to be all for being a Hound. Of course, who could blame him. It was a step up from his current living arrangements. The fact was Sully found her best men not out and openly hunting, show boating, and drawing attention to themselves, but more sitting in cells, psychiatric wards, and by their kill count. She didn't want the flashy people. Sully wanted the people who knew how to do their job. "Welcome to The Hounds." Her voice was even, there was no smile on her face. This was business, plain and simple. Getting up Sully went over and knocked on the door. Alex had sent someone in uniform with Sully who was currently holding all the paperwork to get Jax out of his current predicament. The little weasel knew how to do his job, and the only time Sully met up with him was when she was recruiting. The door opened and she nodded to Corporal Simms. "Give them the paperwork. Mr. Gallows is coming with us." The faces that were standing outside the door, perplexed as to what was going on looked shocked. "I want his restraints off, his belongings returned, and I want to be walking out of here with him in thirty minutes." She held up a hand before anyone could protest. "I assure you gentlemen, this is all legitimate as the papers Corporal Simms is giving you will attest too. You will also be getting a call from your superiors." As if her saying so made it happen, their phones rang. With a sour look on his face the Colonel sent one of his men to release Jax from any bonds he may have had left on his person. Sully looked over her shoulder at the brawny, mountain man looking person in the orange jumpsuit. "First order. Get your shit, don't cause a problem, and meet me out by my jeep in twenty minutes." With that, Sully walked out of the holding room and headed for the elevator.

HAI THERE, THIS THREAD IS TAGGED JAX AT The BRIGG. NOTES: Holy Ramblin' Man!. TEMPLATE CREDIT TO MAKEOUTPRETTY OF ATF AND CAUTION 2.0.

[JACKSON GALLOWS]

He matched Sully's demeanour with his own lack of expression and flat voice. He offered a reflexive "Thank you," and nothing more. He lapsed into the silence he was so comfortable with and observed his new CO as she went about handling the administrative bullshit that was always the burden of officers.

That was why he had never bothered to go on that track. Mountains of paperwork and red tape. Let him hump a hundred pounds of gear forty miles uphill in the scorching heat and save the forms and protocol and phonecalls to brass for other minds than his.

He put his cigarette to his lips, took one last long drag and exhaled, watching the smoke drift upwards to the ceiling in shifting shapes. The dust plume of an IED blast. A smoking mortar crater. He stubbed out the butt as one of the guards came to him and dealt with the shackles at his ankles. Click of keys, sound of metal scraping the floor. He caught sight of the guard's face and they stared each other down for a hanging second, the guard with his barely suppressed frustration and Jax with nothing at all.

"Lucky son of a..." Jax heard the guard grumble under his breath.

Jax had no reply for the guard. He simply stood up, clasped his hands behind his back and awaited the orders with which Sully swiftly obliged him.

"Yes ma'am," he replied with reflexive obedience, and departed the room soon after his new CO, following the guards down a different corridor.

None were happy to see him freed, but none dared lay a violent hand on him and Jax wondered how much of it was because they feared retribution from the top and how much of it was because he was no longer shackled.

The proceedings were held with a kind of tense order, each party waiting for the other to make one stupid mistake. But there was no spark to ignite the powderkeg. No more words were spoken than necessary. Jax was handed a folded pile of clothes and given a minute to change. An olive drab t-shirt and still-bloodstained BDU pants. The t-shirt had been given to him in Bazarak after the medicos had to cut his own away to treat him. His jacket had been thrown in the trash somewhere along the way to Kandahar.

They listed off his accouterments as he took them and returned them to his person, one by one. Belt. Watch. Flask. Multi-tool. KA-BAR with sheath. SIG P226 plus two magazines. They were hesitant about the weapons and Jax couldn't blame them. But he was under order not to start trouble. They needn't have worried.

He left the prison with no more fanfare; felt the angry stares on the back of his neck all the way out. When he finally stepped outside and took his first breath of free, fresh air, all he could do was squint and grimace against the icepick-stabbing of natural light through eyeballs too used to artificial. He shielded his eyes with his hand as he walked to meet Sully by her jeep, and his eyes were too long adjusting. When at last he could finally see he lowered his hands, stood at parade rest and awaited further instruction.