Who: Max and Witchy!Dylan What: A visit to a brothel, some confessions, and storytime Where: Era Door, Les Mis. When: Recently Warnings/Rating: Nope
12 rue Chabanais was opulence and decadence and things no one liked to talk about aloud, and that's where the propped open door on the first floor of Passages led to.
There was music in the distance, something tinny and bawdy, and the scent of warm soup and crusty bread filtered in from a kitchen somewhere toward the back of the first floor.
A man came down, too pretty to go unnoticed, and he summoned Monsieur Meffre upstairs. The man - Meffre - displaced the girl on his lap with a pat to her rump, and he made his way out of the sitting room and toward the long and darkly narrow staircase, which could be seen through the open door. The same man, the pretty servant, looked around the room, as if he had been told to expect someone. There was a question on his features as he waited and watched and, after a few moments, seemingly satisfied, he disappeared.
It was moments later that Max came downstairs.
Max had grown up in jeans, and she'd grown older in camo, and she'd grown older still in the sleek black that spooks preferred. Her long hair was her only concession to femininity, and the fact that she never cut it short hinted at something, even if she didn't acknowledge it. Normally this kind of place would be hell for her. She hated sex work, and she hated the idea of having to wear a dress, and she hated anyplace that had to rely on oil lamps instead of a lightswitch.
Or, she had.
Two months. That was how long she'd been off her feet now, and coming through this door meant movement. No pain, no pain killers, no physical therapy, no wheelchair. She was in one of the best moods of her life, and even the location couldn't change that. No, if anything she was perfectly willing to let herself be someone else for once, just this once.
In a room full of nudity and fondling, she was clothed in modesty when she entered, if not for the look on her face, which could never be mistaken for anything innocent.
This really wasn't Dylan's kind of place, although it was a subtle improvement over the bitter shadow forest of all things frost and twilight. Dylan, as a rule, wasn't comfortable in any holding cell that didn't boast some kind of computer chip - be it coffee maker or blu ray player. It kind of went without saying that 12 rue Chabanais didn't harness either of those things. This was a separate slice of time, and although the forest had been as well, that didn't mean that it made him comfortable with the idea of time travel. He'd seen enough episodes of Quantum Leap to know that kind of shit only worked out half the time. But he was here. And even after acknowledging where here was, he stuck around.
Moving through the door didn't offer much in the way of costume changes, but any undercover agent worth their weight in lies knew that you couldn't just storm the bastille without an appropriate costume.
So it was that the nobleman ended up unconscious in an alley, uninjured but stricken against bricks and stripped of his finery two and a half blocks down from the brothel. It gave Dylan the chance to enter the brothel in a top hat and a tall collar. The coat was a little short, with the sleeves capping past the wrist, but it worked. Or not, he didn't really care. The grand fraction of people moving through the lamp lit rooms were dusty around the hems themselves.
While this was definitely the address that Max had given him, it was possible that she'd confused numbers. To her benefit, it was with some reluctance that he even considered that option. But as Dylan made his way through the parlor, it was becoming a very real possibility. He didn't see anything like Max. Not in the flounced lace of pantaloons or the kohl smear smeared eyes of opium queens.
Then just when he'd made his rounds through the parlor, past the drinks and the laughter, past the stairwell, he glanced back and saw her.
She caught sight of him immediately.
She'd only been there a day, but she already knew what the clientele looked like, and even in the hat and tails, he didn't fit the bill precisely. There was something completely modern about him, and it didn't take an agent to realize it. But the way he held himself, that trained posture that was all federal government, the agent in her did recognize that immediately. In fact, she noticed that before she actually looked up to his face, her brown eyes meeting his and a smile gracing her mouth that was more welcoming than the face she usually put forward to the world.
She was in a great mood, and it showed.
She ignored the men who stopped her as she crossed the room, glaring at them in a direct way that men of the time weren't accustomed to. But they knew who owned the place where they were seeking their pleasure. They might not like her directness, but they didn't openly say so. This was the best house on the street, and they were all there for the forbidden pleasures their wives didn't provide. After all, kink wasn't alive and well in the bridal bed in 1832.
Leisurely, she crossed to him, brown hair loose down her back, in defiance of convention, and close proximity making it fairly obvious that she had skipped the whole corset and linen shift part of her dress requirements. The fabric was thin and clung to long limbs gone sleek with muscles beneath barely-there curves. "McKendrick," she said, a smile and a dimple. "Nice hat."
Banter aside, she hadn't seen an updated file photo of him in at least a year. He looked older, and maybe she did too. The pain from the incident in Bangladesh had left little lines around her eyes that hadn't been there before, though here they were hidden by a very genuine smile. "Good to see they let you out from behind your desk, agent."
The fact that she looked good was notable in the same basic cursory glance that told him it was Max at all. She looked good in an entirely different manner than all the other patrons and working saints who managed to look good(mostly because they didn't seem to be dying of consumption like a few of the people that he'd passed in the alley outside). Instinct had him looking over her dress, and somehow seeing her in a dress seemed stranger than seeing her here. The examination was respectful, if not a little blatant. Although for a man who spent the grand fraction of his time holed up in dark rooms with glowing screens, this degree of social skill was still deserved a gold star. "Thanks," he murmured while jumping out of his own thoughts and back to the moment. Dylan touched the brim of his top hat in a conscious little tip.
"Actually I'm on the run, figured this was as good a place to hide as any." Considering the alien weird of their circumstances, making jokes was Dylan's default setting. "Are you up for housing a fugitive?" There was a boyish element to his grin that said he wasn't worrying about the situation, even if there was plenty to worry about.
From his left, a drunk man in a dusty coat with ragged tails stumbled while sipping his brandy. The man pivoted and swerved before clipping Dylan's shoulder. It was a harmless collision, but one that jarred his nerves a little nonetheless. At once, the candlelight around the parlor flared wildly, with wicks boasting a foot of flame in a moment's brevity. The house girls shrieked in a chorus of alarm and fanned themselves when the fire dropped a moment later. Half of the candles extinguished themselves with the gallow plunge.
Dylan was quite suddenly super fucking still, and he gnawed on the bottom edge of a bristled lip while trying to assess whether or not he'd just done that. Recalling the fire in the forest, it was looking pretty damn likely. Maybe it was best to get away from people. Shit, was this how Vaughn became such a psychotic shut-in? Glancing over his shoulder, Dylan apologized to the man in French, even if he had nothing to apologize for. Then, stepping closer to Max and keeping a keen eye on all peripheries in order to avoid any new surprises, he tried to laugh it off with a spectator's innocence. "Well, that was weird."
Max's relationship with Dylan was entirely founded on banter. It had to be, seeing as they only saw each other in file photo updates and pictures tucked away in dossiers. Sometimes they were biting, sometimes they were heated, they were always pains in the ass, and Max found some comfort in the fact that their relationship was what it was; never changing. But that didn't mean she didn't appreciate that look over. It was all agent, respectful, blatant, and he wasn't about to start drooling on her or crying about her lack of love for him. Given recent events, it was a nice change of pace. Her brown gaze followed the movement of his hand to the brim of his hat, and she wondered if he had ever dressed up in his life. It was easy, for people like them, to live from assignment to assignment, from purposeful moment to purposeful moment. Even still, she liked the dress, as completely not her as it was, and she thought he looked pretty good in that (obviously) stolen getup.
"That depends on what the fugitive is going to do for me," she joked, and she could be warm honey when she wanted to. All agent, yes, but with plenty of female thrown in with the banter and beer and chicken wings.
But then the lights went crazy, and she didn't even associate it with Dylan. She immediately thought it was an air raid (blame too many years in the Army), and then she reminded herself that there wasn't even electricity here, much less air raids. It was Dylan's stillness that clued her in that he might have something to do with it, and she cleared her throat and spoke in authoritative French, telling everyone to calm down. When he stepped closer her gaze scanned his face, and she took his hand in hers a moment later. It was inappropriate to take a man's hand without invitation, even in a brothel, and she just ignored the looks as she tugged him toward the door, then toward the stairs.
She passed her maid along the way, the one who had come down to see what had happened, and she quickly told her that she was not to be disturbed unless something exploded. Which, of course, left the maid looking even more confused than when she'd begun. A request for strong wine to be brought up left the woman looking at Dylan with a curiously coy expression on her face, which Max also ignored.
Fantine's room was at the top of six long, narrow stairs, darker as the climb went on. There were sounds from all the closed doors along the way, sex and sex and more sex, and Max rounded the final landing and opened the only door on the narrow top floor. Her room was all decadence. Blues, and reds, and pinks; things she would never dream of owning in her own life. The bed was dark wood, raised and large, and a forgotten copper tub sat by the fire, while her dressing table was lined with paints that she didn't have on her face and ribbons that she didn't have in her hair. She closed the door behind him, and then she let go of his hand. "Well?"
Dylan didn't think of his involvement with Max on a level of human relationship. She, like Daniel, was somebody that Dylan enjoyed poking from a great distance of circuitry. Although unlike Daniel, he found that she didn't irritate the fuck out of him in person. For a federal agent, Dylan was remarkably laid back. Although agent was really only a secondary way for him to define himself. There were some people who could only be cops, or could only recycle their way through the military until a bullet or a medal found their chest. Dylan easily acknowledged the fact that if he hadn't joined the bureau, he would have been a criminal. With the kind of abilities he had, one really had to choose if they fought for the light or the dark. Although most of them ended up toeing the line more often than not. With that kind of power, it was impossible not to. If you could influence stock markets and steal back money from crooked investors, why wouldn't you?
When she snatched up his hand, Dylan had to glance down in order to make sure that he was feeling things correctly. Reality was still a little tilted upon realizing that he'd sent a few dozen candles into overdrive, but when Max tugged him toward the stairs, he didn't fight it. He'd made up the decision upon leaving the chilly woods that he would trust her. Getting away from all of these people wasn't a bad idea either.
Inside what was undeniably the room of a prominent madam, Dylan paced so briefly. A couple steps forward and a half turn to acknowledge her before he moved to take a lean against the raised bed. "Well what?" He played oblivious pretty good.
She was quiet while he paced. She was a terrible spook, but that didn't mean she didn't have all the training under her belt. She could avoid the impulse to interrupt or ask questions while he moved erratically around the space, if she needed to. And, given the light display downstairs, she needed to. She was intelligent brown eyes as she watched him, no fear or emotion; this wasn't the time for that kind of thing. This was a time to calculate risk and manage damage. She gave him shit about being in the FBI all the time, but she actually trusted McKendrick more than she trusted most people. His file told her that he was an amazing hacker, his field history told her that was he was good under pressure, and her poke into his social life told her he was a no-nonsense kind of man, and she appreciated those more in her thirties than she had in her twenties.
She waited until he stopped and leaned against the raised bed, and she took the movement to indicate something like trust. Well, as much as they could trust anyone in their profession. She waited to make sure he wasn't going to start pacing again, and then she moved forward. She had a confident, military stride. There was no sway to her hips, no hunch to her shoulders. She climbed up onto the bed beside him with only a hint of a hitch, of relearning, and then she rocked her shoulder against his once she was seated on the mattress.
"The pyrotechnics?" Max asked, a response to that well what? of his. "Can you control it at all, FBI?" She might have been better suited to a life behind the front lines, instead of in deep cover, but she wasn't stupid.
Dylan was still green enough to have some degree of blind faith in the system that had groomed them both. They might have gone by different names, but they could be grouped together beneath the shadowy umbrella of covert America. So yeah, he trusted her. He'd never been double crossed or hung out to dry by a fellow agent. Maybe that made him a little blind, but Dylan at least had to trust that she wasn't going to have him charred at the stake for witchcraft here in vintage France.
"I didn't burn your little house down, did I?" It wasn't exactly an answer, but Dylan had to assume that if he couldn't control it, the fire would have continued unquenched and out of control. The fact that he couldn't really tell if he'd stopped it or not was probably clue enough that he couldn't control it, and he considered that for a moment before running a hand over his face. He needed to be honest with himself, he would only put them in danger with naivete or rootless confidence. Although admitting ineptitude was too new of a notion to be comfortable. Resolved, his hand fell away and Dylan ran his fisted knuckles against the bedspread while staring across the room at a fixed point of absolutely nothing.
"Honestly, I'm not sure."
The not-answer was answer enough for Max, but she let him go through his own shit to get where he needed to go. She was attention as he ran a hand over his face, and she watched his knuckled fist fall against the bedspread with a calm look. She could take him, if she had to, in a fight. She might be out of practice with movement as a whole, but she could do it. It wasn't that he wasn't good, but he was a strategist, a hacker. He had brains, and she had physical training that had started at the age of five. He could think them out of a problem; she could shoot them out of one.
When he spoke again, she gave him a look that was all smug knowing, because she'd known where he was going, even if it took him awhile to get there. "I talked to some people who can't handle their shit either, Dylan," she said, intentionally using his given name for the first time in their long and storied e-history. "I'm one of the lucky ones. You got here without blowing anything up. That's got to count for something," she said plainly, and she pressed her shoulder to his again, thin and capable bone and skin beneath the sheer layer of white.
"Is it safer wherever you normally are?" she asked, because the agent in her was practical. So, maybe she'd asked him there to use her legs while she could, but it was easy to kick into survival mode. It was, if she was honest, easier than dealing with this dress, and the sex everywhere, and the fact that she would probably never again be as complete as she was just then. The thought made her stand, because why waste time sitting when she might end up doing it for the rest of her life? She didn't pace, but she moved around the room with the cadence of someone who'd been too long caged. Part of her wanted to feel the familiar weight of a gun in her hand, but that wasn't an option just then. At least not here.
Her smug expression was met with a grim twitch. "I can handle it." The squaring of a cacti prickled jaw denoted a kind of irritated grumpiness that he was usually immune to. Of course, as a man of infinite keystrokes, he was also typically immune to this kind of blindsided cluelessness. He'd built his professional life around being the most informed guy in the room, and now he couldn't even figure out what was going on in his own head. "I'm going to handle it." The evidence was there in his voice, Dylan really believed that. It was the only option, because failure sure as hell wasn't.
When she nudged his shoulder, he glanced over at her. The tight seriousness in his eyes actually waned a little, it went against his wiring to be a grouch of melancholy for long. "Safer for who?" He smiled, turning his eyes to the ceiling while he envisioned the vast emptiness of fairytale woodlands. "Its got a fraction of the population, less bystanders." Not that he got all warm and fuzzy at the thought of returning. He honestly didn't think he had to.
"Besides everything seems normal now, doesn't it?" Aside from the complexity of their untimely location, but that went without saying. Nothing was on fire, plus. "I'm an agent, remember? Just got to keep my nerves of steel in check." That seemed to be the unexpected trigger, and now that he knew what to monitor, maintaining couldn't be that difficult.
"Of course you can," she said of him handling it and, "of course you are," she repeated a second later, when he repeated it with more conviction. It gave her some insight into what he must have been like on a job. It was reassuring. Maybe normal people weren't reassured by someone's capableness in a lethal situation, but they weren't normal people. They could pretend all they wanted, but they weren't normal people. Spooks never were. "It's just like a covert with unexpected parameters, FBI," she said, all CIA for a second, before her expression softened to something that was better suited to the dress she wore. "I wish they'd sent you to Bangladesh instead of your co-worker," she said bluntly. He always hacked into her files; she had no doubt that he knew exactly how everything had gone down there, resulting injuries and all.
"Less targets," she concluded, as she watched him turn his gaze toward the ceiling. "But you didn't blow us up with the oil in the lamps. As your senior officer, I say we have cause for optimism. Let's wait it out." She actually stopped her movement to laugh when he said that his nerves of steel were in check. She shook her head, brown hair fanning across her cheek, and she walked toward him with a determined approach, no weeks of immobility in the way she carried herself, and nothing that even looked like insecurity in her gait.
She stopped in front of him, and she put both her palms on the mattress, outside of his thighs. "Deep down, we're just people, McKendrick," she assured him. She was softer beneath the surface than she should be, and she knew it better than anyone. Sure, she wasn't a sap. She didn't cry at movies, and she wasn't into poetry. But she was still soft. She tipped her head curiously. "So what's under that surface?" she asked, which she never asked of other agents. Quite frankly, knowing what made agents tick was a liability, but they were in a 18-something brothel, and it hardly seemed to fucking matter.
In any other situation, Dylan wouldn't have needed that kind of reassurance. Right now it was appreciated, even if the most integral part of him knew that her confidence in his confidence was unfounded. There was no reason for it. Banter sure as hell didn't cement the image of professionalism, not for the grim caricature of intelligence operatives. A background file could only give you a glimpse of a person, and for shadows like them it barely even did that. Dylan tended to forget that as a man walled up mortar-tight behind nightglow strings of code. There was no reason for Max to believe that he could handle this. And even if CIA agents were notorious for lying through their teeth, he didn't think she was. She'd gain nothing from misleading him. He was gullible enough that there wouldn't have even been any sport in it, too damn easy.
His eyes were uranium blue, and they focused on her with grave sincerity when she mentioned Bangladesh. "Yeah," he murmured. "Me too." He thought of her injuries and of the agent lost, all because of some stupid mistake. Dylan watched her with that same solemn stare when she glided closer, all svelte lines that her file hadn't exactly prepared him for. He actually leaned back a little when her palms found the bedspread. Was this some kind of CIA interrogation tactic? He gave her a crooked expression, a contemplative narrowing of the eyes.
"You're looking at it." Hell, if there was an agent in the world that could be bought at face value, it was probably him. "But I get the feeling that my skin is thinner than yours." Her surface was practically opaque with all of the secrets attached to her name. Gaining access to parts of her blacked out file had been a reckless feat, something that could have easily cost him his job and his badge. The risks he took for morbid curiosity would have given anxiety strokes to lesser(see: responsible) men.
Max had been doing this too long. Since her father had started dragging her from this base to that base at the age of five, she'd been an oddity. Her childhood had been comprised of tests to see how much attention she was paying to minutiae, drilling in weapons usage, and hours of tutelage in distancing, in handling a life with a gun on her hip and a smile on her face. She hadn't been suited to it, and she'd been terrible at first, but time had worn her down - on the outside, at least. She had no reason to trust him, he was right about that, but there were parts of her that just weren't suited for this job and this life. McKellar had hit the nail on the head when he said she cared too much, and that she trusted when she cared. A good spook never trusted, a good soldier did. She had trouble shaking off the latter, and even more trouble adopting the former.
She wondered, when he agreed about Bangladesh, how he would have held up under that torture. She wondered if he ever had been tortured. She hadn't gone very deep in his file, content to banter and flirt without learning about the things that made him real. Letting other agents become real was a big mistake, especially when a job could end up with one of them at the end of your weapon, with a secret important enough to shoot them in order to keep. No, nobody should trust them, that was for sure.
But then he leaned back, and she laughed. "Relax, agent, I'm not going to bite," she promised him. "And you'd be amazed at how thin my skin is," because all those secrets weren't actually her. "Why did you look into my files?" she asked, because she'd seen his markers. He'd gone deep, and he'd gone there more than once. She'd been willing to let it go before, but there weren't any distractions here, and she was feeling the need for something true.
Dylan wasn't a lifer, not like her. Wealth and privilege didn't exactly hone the kind of personality needed to fit into that government issued mold. Hell, the only reason he'd pursued this professional avenue in the first place was out of rebellion.. and that kind of thinking didn't sit well in a neat little federal box forever. Everything had its expiration date. Dylan already pushed the limits of acceptable agent behavior. He might not have cut corners when a case was at stake with lives on the line, but he didn't live and breathe the rules of the bureau either. One day playing by those rules wasn't going to be enough and he'd have to make a fortune with pilfered investments and electronically lifted stocks. It was entertaining to think about, even if his moral compass was a little too strict to truly advocate that kind of thing beyond wry brainstorming.
Her question actually surprised him and he thought about it for a moment before taking the words for a test drive. "I wanted to know who I was talking to." It was a safe answer.
Max didn't want to be a lifer, but she'd spent almost half of her life on the job at this point, and a clean getaway seemed unlikely. She didn't know his thoughts, but she thought he was in it for the long haul too. It was his personality; that distant thing that was all agent. Plus, he was always so defensive about the agency, and she interpreted that as a love for the job that few agents had. She didn't hold it against him, and she wasn't like Silver, who had hated the life enough to blackmail his way out of it and put everyone in danger along the way. She still believed in what they did, while understanding that all agents were expendable in a way the federal government would never admit. Him, her, none of them really mattered at the end of the day, not when country was at stake.
But his response, safe as it was, didn't connect all the dots for her. Wanting to know who he was talking to was all well and good, but not when someone looked that deep. "Do you check into all the woman you talk to so thoroughly?" she asked, straightening and letting her hands slip slowly off the over-opulent bedspread. She looked down at him, dimple in her cheek and something knowing in her features. He acted like he hated her at times, like he wanted to fuck her at others. She had nothing better to do just then than figure out why.
"Most of the women I talk to don't have a file with third stage security clearance." There was a slight smile drawing on the left side of his mouth. Dylan could have taken the easy way out by giving her a compliment, something scripted, but that wouldn't have been him. He rarely sought the easy way out of anything. Not to mention that for a gman outlined in shadows and deception, he had a strangely hypocritical boyscout investment in honesty. Maybe thats why he'd never really been fond of undercover work. Dylan never was that great of a liar, his heart just wasn't in it.
Anyway, baristas didn't have nearly the kind of interesting back stories and secrets that a government agent was bound to hold. People like themselves were just more fascinating, and Dylan didn't bother explaining to Max that he dug into everybody's past, not just women, and not just hers. Admittedly most of those late night searches for information were born out of a pillager's pride rather than a truly scientific need for discovery. Getting to know the forbidden was always more interesting than reading some worldwide headline in the Times. "And just to be clear, I didn't read everything in your file. I left you some mysteries." He grinned, it was boyish with amusement. "As a gift, from one spy to another."
She laughed at his admission and the slight smile that drew at his lips. "You know, being addicted to mysteries can be dangerous," she told him, a smile of her own accompanying the words. It was unnecessary, of course. Everyone knew a good hacker was an intel junkie. Most of them could care less about the government or the job. Most of them were just chasing the thrill of breaking into the most impressive things they could, and the federal government usually caught them hacking into some federal database somewhere and brought them in-house to work for the team. Max appreciated a good intelligence voice in her ear when she was in front of a console on a job, one she needed to crack. She didn't trust them in the field, as a rule, because they broke under pressure faster than any dedicated agent that was putting it on the line for love of country. But, and she had nothing to go on but gut instinct, but she was sure she would have been better off with him in Bangladesh. That was the long and short of it.
"The good stuff isn't in my file, FBI," she told him. She liked that smile, though, the boyishly amused one. "Why were you so pissed a few weeks ago?" she asked, because they always bantered, but he seldom bit; he'd bit then. She moved away, rounded the bed, and flopped down on it. There was nothing seductive in the movement, nothing intentionally attention grabbing. It was pure hedonism, and the fact that she didn't need to ease herself out of a wheelchair to do it. She patted the pillow beside her. "Lie down. It's not like you're going anywhere, and I don't bite." A smile. "Lose the hat."
"I think not solving the mystery fast enough is what tends to be dangerous." That's what intelligence was all about, unveiling the enemy before they unveiled themselves. Dylan turned where he sat in order to watch as Max rounded the bed. He didn't even notice the magic anymore, he couldn't feel it. It was just that adept at sinking beneath the surface, a virus absorbed soundlessly by the host. Far across the room, versicolor shadows bounced off of warped walls. Dylan didn't notice that their dark shapes told a story, an outline of his thoughts broadcast across patterned paper. The shadows didn't look like the two of them sitting on a bed at all, but rather resembled the ghostly stretch of barren trees. A dead, cold forest where the magic had been born. The place it called home.
Dylan liked that they were up here, away from the fracas and debauchery of the downstairs. They might not have been in revolutionary France at all.. although he couldn't imagine any place in Vegas that sported a satin bed coverlet and candlelight, but maybe he just didn't have a good imagination. "Okay," he conceded to her assumption with a deadpan stare. "First of all, I wasn't pissed.. and second, what's wrong with my hat?" Dylan pried the black brim off in order to examine its sturdy craftsmanship. "It doesn't make me look dashing?" That's the word all those Jane Austen movies mentioned, right?
Max wasn't whimsical enough for shadows and stories on the wall, and so she didn't notice them. Since Amanda was born, she'd gotten used to fairy tales, zombies, and invisible friends, but she'd never been that kid, and even watching Amanda be normal was something she had trouble understanding. She accepted it, and she was happy that the little girl got to be a little girl, but it was a distanced knowledge. Something understood in theory, but not in practice. "Spoken like a true hacker," she said of his logic about mysteries being solved. "Spooks don't solve anything," she told him, though he already knew that. She killed people, extracted intel, and generally put herself in a lot of trouble, hand-to-hand, and without the benefit of a computer screen.
She folded her hands behind her head as she watched him, her knees bent and idly swaying together and apart beneath the white fabric that draped down to her toes as she reclined. "You were acting pissed," she said, defiance without the need to yell, "and your hat is just going to fall off when you lie down." His question about looking dashing made her laugh, and she snaked out a hand from beneath her head and pulled on his sleeve. "Lie the fuck down, FBI. Dashing isn't my thing."
It would have been difficult for Dylan to understand the kind of upbringing she'd had as a child. Although what other harsh climate could ever turn over the rune stone and reveal the kind of woman before him today? Dylan was the exception to the rule, and he took relish in it. Most good little boys and girls with gold letter alumni legacies just didn't throw down the gauntlet in the fruitless pursuit of public service. It just didn't happen. Benevolence was properly reserved for the yacht club's annual charity fundraiser, not major life decisions. His mother was a woman restrained by her value in buttercrust society, and Dylan knew that she might never get over what he'd done with his life. It'd been nearly a decade since he'd gotten a Christmas card, and in these kinds of matters, he just wasn't optimistic enough to assume his perennially changing address had anything to do with it. Maybe he kind of resented agents like Max - and this line of thinking came out of absolutely nowhere as he watched the shadows on the wall with momentary distraction. He doubted that her career path had disappointed her father at all.
Drawing a breath, he finally glanced over to her when she reiterated the fact that he'd seemed pissed on the forum. "Well, I'd just found out how bad everything went. A fellow agent was dead, he'd gone in over his head on an assignment that I could have easily qualified for if I'd pushed on it." The past couldn't be changed, and part of being a good agent was knowing how to walk away from outcomes and scenarios that were over. Sometimes Dylan had a problem with accepting that.
He finally conceded to lying back when she tugged on his sleeve. Carelessly pushing the hat off of his head, he tossed its sturdy construction onto a nearby chair. Dylan gave her an amused side glance while settling back on a propped elbow when she said dashing wasn't her thing. Not a surprise there. "What's your thing? Hockey and beer?"
She would have laughed at his assumptions about her life. The General had been a taskmaster to grow up with, and she'd been moving from base to base from the age of five. Instead of dolls, she had guns to assemble. Instead of books, she had logic puzzles. And she had expectation on her shoulders from the beginning, no mother in sight, and the expectation that she would happily grow up and blow people's brains out. She'd never been suited for it; she'd failed the psych multiple times, only to have her father brush it under the rug. And she was supposed to retire from the Army. The CIA was never supposed to be part of the picture. It was an act of defiance, and not a good one. She was even less suited to being a spook than she'd been to being a soldier. But she'd grown into it, and it was like a second skin now. He was right about her being a lifer; there just wasn't another life for her anymore.
She couldn't fault his explanation for why he'd been a shit on the journals. It was an agent's response, and she got it. It made sense to her. "Can't change the past," she finally said, once his answer had settled. She got it, but there wasn't any point in guilt, not in their lives. She'd learned the lesson about disassociation early, and it had stayed with her forever.
She watched him lie back, and she turned her body toward his when he propped himself up on his elbow beside her. "Country music and beer. I could give hockey a try though. Are you a hockey man, FBI?" she asked, dimples and entertainment at the very idea of him on the ice. Her expression only flickered for a moment when she remembered that she wouldn't be going near any ice once this was done, not if she wasn't sitting on the sidelines in a wheelchair. It reminded her of opportunities, and the fact that she was wasting one. "So, agent, interested?" she asked, a hand moving to his chest, fingers splayed on white. She wasn't the kind of woman to beat around the bush, and she hadn't had a hook-up that wasn't with an agent in years. Subtly wasn't her thing, not any more than dashing men were.
"I'd like for us not to repeat the past either," he clarified. Perhaps it was a scientific-survivalist mentality, but wasn't that the whole point of reflecting on memories? To prevent the same unfortunate circumstances from happening all over again? Some people held onto memories for sentimental value, but the Darwinian function was to extend survival. Recall that this berry was poisonous, this path was thick with wolves, etc. Suggesting that they couldn't change the past when they were quite literally flung into revolutionary France was only a little ironic. For a man who spent most of his late nights watching rerun episodes of disco-era Doctor Who, the idea was at least momentarily entertaining. But time travel without a Tardis took the glamour out of it. A DeLorean might have been easier to gain access to, but it just lacked the space.
He was drawn out of those misplaced thoughts when Max's hand found his chest, focus sliding away from her dimples and onto her fingertips. "Interested in what, hockey?" She was laying the signals a little too thick to be missed, and Dylan didn't need his super secret spy vision to notice it. Government level observancy came in handy for other things though, like taking notice of hesitation and pain in another agent's eyes just before they buried it under all their professional training. "Hey, where'd you go?" His tone was light, all but ignoring the trek of Max's hand in favor of uncovering what she was worried about.
It was a logical desire, to not want to repeat the past, though Max wasn't sure how realistic it was. In her experience, it was particularly hard to avoid loss in their line of work. Everything seemed to be about future jobs, and never about focusing on what had been done wrong in previous ones. Even now, the agency had already moved past what had happened in Bangladesh. It had been unfortunate, but they liked to sweep things under the rug and put a good face on it, rather than dwelling. They'd stuck her behind a desk, given her live cases to a green agent that was sure to fuck them up, and that was that. The CIA moved on, and so did life. Recovery time wasn't in ample supply for a spook, and she didn't get any of the irony in her own statement. Revolutionary France wasn't real, and she was too practical a woman to really give any credence to much of anything that happened in Passages.
"Is that what you call it?" she asked of his question about hockey, shameless. She could take a no or a yes with equal carelessness, and she wasn't the type of woman to try to get a ring from him in the morning. But his follow up question, that tripped her up slightly, and her hand slid away. "This is going to end eventually, and once it does I won't be riding in any rodeos," she said, plain and without any self-pity, at least not on the surface. There was something in her voice that said it bothered her, though. She'd always been more physical than cerebral, more doer than thinker, and now that was all in the past. "Wheelchairs don't make for good sex, FBI."
To Dylan, information was mined gold. In his field, one had to be equal parts adrenaline junkie and an eternal seeker of obscure truth in order to get anything more beneficial than a (weak)paycheck out of signing a contract with the FBI. So when secret spies started churning out honesty, Dylan tended to shut up and listen.
He'd read enough of her medical files after the incident in Bangladesh to know that the injuries had been serious. Serious enough to require some surgery and a hospital stay. Serious enough that she was out of the field and sitting behind a desk, which was something that had to of stung worse than any of the lingering scar tissue managed to. But up until this moment, he'd just assumed that such things were protocol for a healing agent.. he certainly hadn't suspected any kind of permanent disability on her end. He went still with mention of wheelchairs. "Is that their prognosis?"
Admittedly, he didn't retain that much hospital jargon beyond anything he'd picked up in the first season of ER. But that isn't why he knew so little about her condition. While he'd skimmed through her medical file after learning about her injuries, the investigation had been primarily localized to ensure that she was okay. She'd gotten touchy about him digging into her background in the past and as a testament to gentlemanly behavior, Dylan tried to avoid doing it. Respectfully, he'd decided that she could have her secrets.
"My ex's doctors insist I can fight it, but that's because he told them to give me hope. I know him," she said, knowing he would have already heard about her father and Brandon, and how they defied the agency to get her out of Bangladesh. "My physical therapist says it's unlikely, and I believe her more than I believe Brandon's high priced doctors."
She sat up, and she looked down at him, figuring getting laid wasn't happening. "I figured you would have poked into my file deep enough to realize that," she said, and there was something distinctly uncomfortable about it. She wouldn't have told him, if she'd realized he didn't know. She'd been hiding it from everyone that mattered for almost two months now, and it had been impressively easy. The people in her life didn't push. They thought her self-sufficient enough that they took the slight in not seeing them too mean she didn't want to see them. She scoffed, her thoughts translating into the sound. "I haven't told anyone I know. Just the woman I'm rooming with, so keep it quiet?" Not that he knew anyone she knew, but it was worth saying it. She didn't want to be viewed as a weakling or an invalid, not when so much of her relationships revolved around her being capable. She wasn't going to break down after therapy around the kid, and she couldn't stand the idea of Corvus treating her like glass, not any more than he already did.
The truth was that Dylan kept his eyes out of her file for the most part these days, but admitting that kind of thing to Max wasn't really beneficial. People tended to let little things slip when they naturally assumed that the person they were talking to already knew everything. "I would have known eventually," he offered in consolation to the crease of discomfort in her voice and the stoic cool that overtook her expression. He drew his hands back for a fold across his stomach, watching as she rose from their shared recline. It was fairly obvious that he'd ruined the mood, but that too was something that Dylan excelled at. Sometimes being a friend was more important than rolling around in antique sheets. Not always, but sometimes. If he wasn't so overly familiar with just how bad he was at this kind of thing, it might have otherwise been disappointing.
"Hey, I'm not going to tell anyone, alright?" If her secrets were safe with anyone, they were safe with the person who stole them in the first place. He was a collector of information, not the guy who auctioned it off to concerned families or highest bidders. "Your secret is safe." He even crossed his heart with the drag of an index finger.
She swung her feet over the side of the bed, but she didn't stand immediately. She knew he was right; he would have realized eventually, when she didn't go on any of her assignments. There weren't many high-clearance terrorism agents in the States, and radio silence on her end would have raised a flag. She had a feeling he flagged all kinds of things; it made him good at what he did. As for being a friend, she hadn't done that in years. Her relationship with Luke was parental, and her relationship with Corvus was something that even she couldn't define. But she realized this had gone beyond poking each other on the internet, and she wasn't sure she knew how to do that, not when there wasn't sex involved. She looked over her shoulder, and she considered telling him to go, but then he was crossing his heart like they were teenagers in some public school nightmare, and she couldn't help but laugh.
"You're wheeling me out for a beer once we're home," she told him after a second, capitulation, and she flopped back on the bed. She couldn't remember when she'd last been on a bed with a man without sex being part of the plan, but maybe it was alright. She tucked an arm beneath her head, and she looked over at him. "Tell me more about your witch," she said, resisting the urge to drag him out into the Parisian night and just walk. There was still time for that, right? It's not like this showed any signs of ending anytime soon. "Let's see how good you are at stories, FBI." She grinned, and she looked over at him. "And make it good, so I can recycle it and tell it to my kid, while pretending it's mine."
At least Dylan was aware of how dysfunctional he was with women. The irony was tangible, thick like self-ridicule on the tongue. Max might have gotten a few good jokes in about him being a romantic or lothario, but it was moments like these when it became painfully obvious that he just didn't know how to let a good thing be. He was more interested in solving problems than pretending that they didn't exist. He actually kind of envied people that could just sweep logic out the back door and act out their emotional savageries with another naked person. It had to be cheaper than therapy.
Dylan gave her a sideways grin at the prospect of getting some beers when they got home. At this rate, who knows when that was going to be. "If I'm buying the brews, you've at least got to meet me halfway. Walk in, I'll carry you out." He wasn't going to wheel her anywhere, and he wasn't going to accept that as her only mode of transport until it absolutely was. They were growing ears on the back of mutant mice and installing robotics in heart valves.. there was no way that she was going to be in a chair for the rest of her life.
Stretching out with an exhausted groan, Dylan settled into the plush bed in preparation for the witch's story. He'd never been much of a storyteller, so he wasn't sure why it felt so natural to slip into the role now. The candlelight dimmed on cue, "I guess they always start these things the same, huh? Long ago, in a land far, far away.."