Never rode on the plains, never thought I couldn't stay; had a good run anyway. WHO: Olivier Willems and Reid Valentine. WHAT: On one of the mechanics’ slightly-more-than-occasional joyrides, something unexpected pulls up. And it isn’t a fender bender. WHEN: Wednesday afternoon, Sept 22nd. [SLIGHTLY BACKDATED] WHERE: A fictional inlet lake off the Potomac, south of the city.
OLIVIER: “Hey. Can you find your fucking key? Think I’ve lost mine.”
Olivier’s voice echoed strangely in the entrance to the Agency garage, bouncing off the concrete walls before falling flat at his feet. He was patting down his pockets (front right, front left, back left, back right, hoodie, backpack) and turning them inside-out in the search for his keycard. Wallet, keys, phone, paperwork, laptop, Neal Stephenson novel -- it was the same old fucking story. Frustrated and admitting defeat, Ollie paced the small confines in front of the level 5 elevator. He moved like a disgruntled wolf, slinking back and forth across their territory with his tail between his legs.
“Christ, looks like I’ve got to email admin for another replacement. What is this, the fourth time this year already? They should just install my arm with a fucking chip to get me past security or something...”
For all appearances’ worth, he was speaking to empty air -- but Ollie knew the acoustics exceedingly well in their lair. He knew how far a shout or a cry or spoken word could reach, and his voice would easily carry down to Reid in the garage itself, where she was still packing up.
REID: The final bank of industrial overhead lights shut down with a hollow, metallic rush, echoing off the hard planes of the garage for a full two seconds after she flipped the switch and plunged them into darkness. As usual, Reid and Olivier were the final two occupants of the little slice of mechanical heaven, their shared lair and home to their fleet of adoptive chrome children. She looked over the long row of cars, the edges of her face (and theirs) illuminated by the pallid light of the exit sign, before flipping the hood of her jacket up over her head and taking the small flight of stairs Olliewards.
"Yeah, I've got mine," she said, passing a hand over the curve of the back pocket of her jeans to confirm. "What were you planning to do if I didn't, make a camp in the back of the F150?" A hint of a smile grappled for purchase on her face before she turned into the shadow and swiped her keycard through the lock with a practiced ease. The small light next to the slot pulsed once, from red to green, and then a familiar, gearish hum shuddered to life behind the elevator's steel doors.
"Gentlemen first," she said with some exaggerated bravado, gesturing him inside the oversized and reinforced module. "But you're right about one thing: we work at fucking James Bond HQ. When the fuck do we get our retina scanners installed?" She leaned into the corner of the elevator, her shoulders curving. When the doors next opened, it was to a vista of the parking garage, almost completely abandoned for the night. A warm, sticky, city breeze hit her when they stepped out onto the pavement.
"Your car or mine?" Joyriding wasn't exactly a careful science, to be sure, but Reid wanted to be in the right mindset for the night of food and illegal speeds they had in store for them, and make and model played a big part in her mental preparations.
OLIVIER: “We’d blow our way out with the newest bazooka launchers, obvviously,” he chuckled, hands shoved in the back of his pockets as various pulleys and pistons whisked them up the elevator shaft. His head whirled temporarily with the surge in elevation (stars and birds circling his skull--), and then they were suddenly there, stepping easily out into the humid night air. Which settled across his shoulders like a perceived weight. Accustomed to the subterranean chill of the garage, Olivier’s skin immediately started prickling, slicking with a sheen of sweat; he was already starting to crave the rush of wind in his face. This stagnant air was stifling.
After a short pause to survey the tools at their disposal, Ollie answered smoothly, “Yours,” before stopping to wriggle out of his hoodie. After some deft acrobatic movements and floundering around in the shirtsleeves, he dragged it over his head to emerge in his traditional wifebeater, looking rumpled and none the worse for wear. He grinned. “I didn’t bring in my Cobra today, and I can never say no to a fucking Cobra. So yours it is.”
REID: “They’d think we were working for Black, blowing up the fucking Agency like that. We’d be cleaner than the fucking medbay floors after they got done with us.” She looked up at her partner, more than a hint of a smile on her face. There wasn’t any surviving in this place if you didn’t have a bit of a taste for gallows humor, and Reid had learned that long ago.
After he escaped his sweatshirt, Reid fuzzed her hand over Ollie’s short, bristling hair, as was her old custom, and tossed her keys to herself, catching them nonchalantly in midair. For all their differences--in upbringing, gender, language, and so forth--sometimes it amazed her how much they’d ended up alike, two disparate points diverging on the same set of coordinates years ago. Hell, they even dressed alike. If she’d believed in fate, it wouldn’t have made her laugh quite so much that they’d been ultimately brought together by the car now looming out of the darkness before them. The legendary, beautiful, boner-inducing (Olivier’s words), unparalleled vehicular masterpiece that was the 1965 Shelby 427 Cobra. The Super-Snake. A racing car, magnificently fast and notoriously difficult to control. Still rocking the original paint job, natch: teal with black stripes.
Reid walked to the other side of the car, running her fingertips along the smooth ridge running from the right headlight to the windshield before looking up at Olivier, her grin now progressed well into a dangerous level of mischievousness. On a whim, her hand darted out and released the keys, sending them on an arc into Ollie’s chest before she vaulted nimbly over the passenger-side door into her seat.
“Since I’m such a generous host, you can drive first.”
OLIVIER: He instinctively bowed his head under the attention, jerking slightly away as her fingers raked through his hair -- afterwards, he looked even more mussed and tousled than before. With a grin, Olivier mirrored her movements a moment later: he snatched the keys before they could clatter to the cement, and leapt over the driver’s door to land inelegantly in front of the steering wheel. His weight hit the seat with an audible thump. A minute later, he could feel the familiar power thrumming its way through the engine, pulsating through the leather interior and jarring his bones. There was just something about cars which rumbled their way to them from the ‘60s; Olivier’s eyes glazed over with disinterest at modern vehicle ads, but if given a whiff of a '66 Aston Martin DBR1 or Jaguar 420, practically gave himself whiplash. Cruising for classic car listings during off-time at work always made his fingertips itch, wanting to take what he had no moral qualms in making his own. He was burgeoned by years of engineering and mechanic work, which had given him a few priceless talents: a creative yen for pranks, a certain daredevil recklessness, an iron liver, and, of course, the ability to hotwire anything. Anything.
But at least they had this baby. Ollie and his dragon shuddered its way into gear, purred down the ramp, past the security doors, past sensors and card-readers, and finally roared out into the muggy streets of D.C.
________
REID: Now, some time after they’d taken their collective lead foot off the gas pedal and wound their way out of the city and down the Potomac, Reid’s heart had finally receded, contented, from her throat. Her pulse had slowed by the time they whisked through a favorite drive-through for burgers, but her smile still persisted, as though pressed into her face by the wind. She hadn’t spoken since the grub pick-up, her usual smokescreens--of comedy, of self-deprecations, of evasion--all unnecessary now. Twilight was approaching, and everything was taking on a thin blue cast, a bittersweet tint that signalled the approaching end of summer.
Speed had whipped the air into a chilling froth, a bracing rush that froze away the sweat and left her shivering with excitement and temporary cold, putting her hair in disarray and only letting up when they’d pulled over to switch turns behind the wheel. The cheeseburger in her hands now was just typical roadside fare, but now every bite she took burned its way down like some necessary, life-sustaining force. She had to wipe the juice from her chin.
It was safe to say Reid was addicted to these regular joyrides, as she was anything to do with a finely-made automobile. Sharing them with with the gentleman whom she considered to be what was proverbially called her BFFL was icing on the cake. They’d pulled up alongside a cloudy inlet near the main river to enjoy their meal and watch the sun set over the treeline, coming to a halt on an elevated bluff overlooking the milky green water. Reid hoisted herself up on top of the seats, headrest-free, foil unwrapped over her knees. A heron stalked across the shallows on the far side of the lake.
“We should do this more often.”
OLIVIER: The sound of the radio, tuned to Reid’s favourite station, had gradually disintegrated into meaningless static as the car drifted into a small pocket out of reception, the space between the cracks. He’d instinctively turned the volume dial down as classic rock nostalgia traded spots with the buzz of dead space.
Reid was all vertical lines perched on the seatback, her thin outline silhouetted against the dusk. To contrast, Ollie had gone horizontal; his stocky, squared figure was sprawled out sideways in the interior, legs splayed across the wide space in the middle. For a minute, the occasional contemplative slurp from his Big Gulp was the man’s only response. If you were going to play hooky from work, do it right -- and by god, they’d honed the art of doing it right.
“Agreed. Add it to the calendar, gekkie, and we’ll call it, I dunno, road testing,” Ollie’s voice floated out from his slump against the passenger door. Full, hands-on access to all of level five’s souped-up machines was one of the greatest benefits on the job.
REID: “I could live with that.” Her grin was wrapped around the bright pink straw in her drink as she stared out over the horizon. Things at the Agency had hit a new low on the shit-o-meter, sure, and it’d be a lie to say she hadn’t flirted with fantasies of how she’d escape if the worst ever came to town, but days that reminded her how much she loved her new place in life came along more often than she cared to admit. Days like this, usually with Ollie, whether on exotic road trips or simply hanging out beneath a tricky undercarriage on the garage floor, passing a flashlight back and forth and cracking jokes, brought her back to the reason she’d stuck around in the first place. She had respect here, and friends. Authority, even while being her typical scandalous self. And London had started to officially convince her that the compliments he sent her way outside their regular rendezvous weren't just jokes. It was something to get used to.
But of course, there were risks.
It was the moment she took her eyes away from the road, trailing her gaze back along the way they came, that the car came around the bend. By the time Reid turned her head back to scan the details of the automobile, a man in a black hood was already leaning out of the passenger-side window, drawing something from inside his coat.
“Ollie--”
She didn’t have time to tell him to get down. The first shot echoed with a dry crack off the distant scenery, and something molten-hot tore through her gut, exploding as it went. The second one followed close on its heels, and toppled her from her perch, driving through her shoulder a milisecond after, though even time itself felt sluggish. Things sped up again as she fell, diving backwards into a graceless pile in the grass. A few more shots rang out, but she couldn’t tell if they were still being fired on or if her mind was simply echoing what had already happened. Tires squealed on neglected pavement, and things were quiet for a moment. Only the birds, startled from their own perches, voiced their concern.
Finally, Reid found her breath. All she could do was gasp.
OLIVIER: He was the lucky one: slouched in the interior, his head barely poked up over the edge of the curved car doors. The unnaturally loud crack-bang of bullets had him instinctively worm down even further in an attempt to get away from the intimidating noise, clapping his hands over his head. In the ringing silence afterwards, with his heart doing its best to scrabble its way up his chest and into his throat, Olivier felt his system flooded with genuine fear. And worry.
It had been a long, long time since he’d gotten such an effective dose of adrenaline -- Ollie had gotten his cheap thrills where he could, edging over speedlimits and racing down deserted roads in the dead of night. But it’d even been a good six months since his last streetrace on Indian Head Highway, since the last time he senselessly risked his own life and limb in squealing rubber and illegal racing -- a long shot from his earlier years, in other words.
And nothing like this.
“What the fuck,” he gibbered, one hand pawing at the car door; it unlatched, springing open, and he tumbled out onto the grass, crashing to the ground beside Reid. He squirmed closer on elbows and knees, feeling twigs and pebbles scraping his arms until he was by her side. “What the fuck, what the fuck--”
REID: One of her legs was propped clumsily against the side of the Cobra, the other folded awkwardly beneath her, the macabre angles of a broken marionette. A dome of blue sky expanded dizzyingly over her head, edged in with trees and, a moment later, with Olivier’s concerned face. Her eyes widened as the pain blossomed outward, her lips trying to make their way around a familiar curse and failing, leaving her gulping like a fish on the dock. The edges of her vision went white.
When she finally managed words, they burst out of her, air rushing from a bellows.
“Jesus cunting Christ--” Her left hand instinctively grasped at where the first bullet had plowed through her, just nicking the bottom of her ribcage; her other arm didn’t seem interested in responding to her pleas for movement. Reid rolled her eyes back in her head and bit her lip. She’d been in shootings before--had even sent a few bullets flying herself, back in her days in the auto wars of south central--but never had she ever been on the receiving end of a dose of lead. It already ranked fairly low on her list of favorite things, with a bullet, even as things started to blur.
“Ollie--was that--”
OLIVIER: “It was,” he confirmed, hardly even knowing what he was confirming. But it didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it was. And it had happened, and there was no denying it -- and there was nothing left in Ollie’s head to wonder who/what/when/where, because now his hands were running up and down her side, checking and pressing and investigating. There had been the occasional stricken accident amongst his circle, especially as a hooligan in Rotterdam or sidling through a community of shady underground racers on the west coast -- but never like this. Not one of his loved ones, not in front of him for fuck’s sake--
“Calling the fucking medics. C’mon. I’m driving you back. Fuck, Reid. Fuck!”
There was blood on his hands, her hands, on her shirt, his shirt, blurring them together. He didn’t know if it was better to move her or to leave her motionless (should I stay or should I go--), but his panic and his innate trust of the Agency’s medical service won out. The city hospital would ask questions about a gunshot wound. Their coworkers wouldn’t. Maybe this was even connected with their fucking workplace.
So without a second thought, Olivier had slipped his arms under her and hefted Reid up; he stumbled against the side of the Cobra for a moment before regaining his balance. He was surprised by how light she was, how slight and tiny. Matchstick girl in his arms.
Swiftly, ungainly, he eased Reid into the passenger’s seat and leapt into the driver’s side, his shaking fingers reaching for his phone (usually he was so steady--he was proud of his goddamn steady grip, for fuck’s sake, like a surgeon but for cars--). He was dialling the number even as his other hand (slicked with blood, slipping on the metal) twisted at the ignition, cranking the machine back to life.