WHO: Lindsay Colt (491) & Erin Choi (LIMA) WHAT: Practice & even some conversation. WHERE: Target ranges. WHEN: Monday, July 27, evening. WARNINGS: Uh... none? STATUS: Complete!
Erin wasn’t typically active on the Lock’s network regardless of recent events. She was far too private, didn’t feel like snooping through what the residents were talking about, and honestly had much better things to do. It hadn’t helped much that agent reactions to Paul Williams’ death caused her jaw to clench so badly that she had headaches for the next week. There weren’t a lot of people outside of her own team she wanted to associate with. Cait wasn’t bad. Xander and Bell and some of the others were tolerable enough. But everything was annoying - endlessly frustrating.
She was at least glad to be back on patrol, that much was certain. Returning to the field was both haunting and a huge relief. It was good to be back together as a group. But with the slumped shoulders and ghost eyes of the operatives, they bore the weight of feeling incomplete.
Trying not to think about it, she reloaded her pistol and unloaded her mag into the target ten yards away. As a trained sniper, ten yards and a handgun felt somewhat underwhelming, but close range practice was just as vital as long range, her trainers would say. Whatever. It just felt good to shoot things.
Across the room, Lindsay watched the bullets, rapid-fire one after another, hit the target dead-on, and an approving noise escaped her.
“Nice,” was all she muttered, once she realized she’d have been heard, and then moved from the door up to the range; she stopped two lanes next to Erin, leaving space between them to buffer the potential conversation. Her shift had ended, and so had her post-shift training, but she’d still felt wound up after it all, the tension in the building having wormed its way into her shoulders. Training was no help; the majority of her trainers were pushing her onto a melee track for being young and athletic, when Lindsay felt far more comfortable with a gun in her hands. Like now, as she set her own pistol down.
She knew Erin as one of the few other agents with whom she’d had not much in the way of hostile encounters thus far. That wasn’t to say she knew her well, but it was enough to mean she could relax, a little bit, in this space, away from her metahuman ‘charges’. Her eyes were down, focusing on prepping her gun, and she didn’t bother to start with small talk, a how are you or anything like that.
“Good to be back out there?”
Likewise, Erin saw Lindsay as someone whose company she tolerated - versus disliked, as that seemed to be her interpersonal baseline. Maybe there was benefit to that in that they were such withdrawn, closed-off women, barring them from any topic which might greatly alter their opinions of each other. As such, they took each other at face value and it worked in their favor.
She picked up on the notes of tension and weariness caused by Lindsay’s recent shift. Even if she didn’t go out on the field, there was nothing easygoing about shifts. And one of the few things she knew about Lindsay were her intentions with her job.
“It does.” She nodded. “Nothing like taking your mind off of things by being back in the eye of the storm.” Erin began reloading her mag, her next question accompanied with a small, wry smile. “How’s training?”
Lindsay shrugged, and then seemed to realize that the other woman may not have seen her, and tried to think of a verbal equivalent. “It’s…”
She interrupted her own sentence by picking up her gun, aiming to shoot in a straight line from top to bottom of the target, six shots, sequenced one after another. Two and four swayed to the right of the rest, making her grimace. But the pause and the meditative-like mood that shooting put her in helped her find her words. “... fine.” Another pause. “I’m not sure I even want to be in the field. But the skills they teach are useful.”
It would only make sense that a conversation at a shooting range would be punctuated by weapon’s fire and Erin was patient enough - and related well enough - when Lindsay fired a near-perfect column of shots. Impressive.
“They are,” she agreed. “And field’s a fucked up place. Especially right now.”
The Grey and Gold teams had been at every risk of failing if they hadn’t combined forces, and all of the agents were aware of that. They’d taken hits, but everyone came back alive. Logically, Erin knew that wouldn’t always be the case.
“Doesn’t matter how you feel about metas, not everyone’s thrilled about rushing out when the situation’s this precarious.” She slammed her mag back into the grip. “Bet they’re pressuring you extra right now because of it.”
“Yeah,” Lindsay acknowledged, and put her gun down, one hand coming up to massage her knuckles absently. “I’m not afraid. Just think I might be of more use on-site than out there.”
With her background in military police, it just seemed to make more sense to her. Plus, she figured that the metas in the facility all day might need watching over than those out in the field, who at least appeared to be loyal -- though, clearly, that was not always the case.
“And,” she added, almost as an afterthought, “they’re training me for melee right now.” That she was there, at that moment, with Erin, said enough about why this might not be desirable than any words. Not that she wouldn’t get her say, but they were making subtle hints.
Interesting how Lindsay articulated that she wasn’t afraid even when Erin hadn’t said anything about fear. Instead of fanning potential flames, she merely nodded, and instead chose to half-react to her comment on melee.
“Well.” Erin nodded, knowing what it meant when Lindsay chose to be at the range after shift rather than anywhere else. “I understand your preference.” She unloaded four shots: two in the head, one in the throat, one over the heart, effectively rounding out that conversation so that Lindsay didn’t have to delve when she made it clear she didn’t want to. “It’s probably better the way things are right now. Don’t quote me on it, but the number of increased attacks? This place might just be in trouble.”
“You think?” The younger woman’s ever-present frown deepened, and her hands paused on her gun. She’d heard some talk like this, of course, but she was cautious to believe it, too used to her parents’ similar decrying of their times as the worst of all times, and such business. Since she’d only been working at 003 for a few months, before that only in training, she didn’t feel qualified to say herself.
Though she didn’t know Erin that well, Lindsay believed her. For a moment she was tempted to ask about her team, about the -- scandal -- incident -- of a month prior, but just as quickly she decided that Erin had likely been asked enough about it. Still, a more experienced agent’s opinion, and one that she trusted, was worth something.
“What do you think we have to watch out for?” she asked, almost mildly.
“At the risk of sounding paranoid? Anything.” Erin shook her head. “People here are reactive. With little to no information and long-ingrained bias? Any information received knocks the pendulum that’s already swinging at full force.”
Erin sighed, realizing that maybe she was saying too much, and the vast majority of it empty speculation and feeble commentary.
“We’ve always had enemies in APEX and affiliates, but...listen. We don’t know for sure what happened with X-Ray and Stonewall. And we don’t know if it’s over.” Her eyes were hard, glossed by memory, but encased in steel. “I think that’s the part everyone’s forgetting. And to be honest, it’s kind of pissing me off.”
To prove that, she fired her final six shots.
In the direction their conversation Lindsay had taken she’d nearly forgotten about the real reason she was there -- to practice -- her handgun lay on the wooden counter, innocuous, forgotten as she’d crossed her arms over her chest to listen and think.
“It’s pissing you off that we don’t know what happened?” she returned once the bullets had been fired, keeping to herself, perhaps wisely, that she felt fairly sure she knew how the results would turn out, knowing that her inexperience in the field would do her no credit in saying so, “Or it’s pissing you off that people think they do?”
"Both, I expect." Erin paused. Everything made her angry recently. She felt less like a black hole and more like a star which had cooled into a brown dwarf, collecting mass and floating dead in a vast wasteland of space, impossibly heavy and void.
"You're smart, Colt." She sighed. "So I know you know you don't have to take my word for it. My feelings are... I have my reasons." Her jaw clenched. It wasn't necessarily a secret amongst agents that her brother was an operative in Portland, but it wasn't something she willingly or frequently addressed, even if she fought with Zeus often about being transferred out there. "Maybe I'm angry because if I had my way, I wouldn't even be here for this." A twist of the lips. "Don't go spreading that around. I'm an argument away from putting Alfa's face on one of these targets."
And that made Lindsay’s frown lighten a bit, her lips twitching in amusement, some of the light tension in the air she hadn’t even known was there dissipating as she looked away.
She didn’t know about Erin’s brother, and she had no way to know that her coworker might’ve been thinking about him, not when she was standing mere feet away desperately trying not to think about her brothers, about whom she did not care, had not thought about in years, had not seen in decades, yet she found herself wondering where they fell in this whole mess, up in Minneapolis.
Instead of letting her think about it any further she nodded once, firmly. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Lindsay said, and shrugged. Once more she picked up her gun.
Erin found the small indication of amusement on Lindsay’s face welcoming, equally at a loss for what was on the other woman’s mind and how similar and dissimilar they were. Her nonchalant acceptance of Erin’s words was also equally refreshing and she unleashed a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
“Are you as competitive as I am, Colt?” She tilted her head, eyes full of the promise of a little one-on-one. “Ten yards isn’t doing it for me.”
Lindsay shot back an appraising look, and then nodded. “We’ll see,” she said, raising her weapon. “You’re on.”