(Untitled)

[darbyfield]

The door of Dick Maynard's flat shuts firmly, solidly, irrevocably behind her. Tessa sighs, leans back against it, stares up at the ceiling; her hands are trembling, and she's aware in a very cold way that the feeling sweeping up from the pit of her stomach is halfway between fury and sheer bloody humiliation, and it's a few deep breaths before she

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[darbyfield]

Definitely not an agent, although the speed and the disdain with which he rattles off his little speech is enough to call to mind the entirely incongruous image of a younger Harry.

If Harry had been American, or an interesting bit of rough, or at least hadn't given quite so strong a first impression of having been born in a suit.

The content of the speech is so flatly nonsensical that she nearly decides to dismiss it altogether, either as lunatic ramblings or as a painfully transparent bit of manipulation, but under these particular circumstances --

"I'd advise you against a career in tourism brochures," she says, ignoring the pounding of her heart and the sinking feeling that something absolutely out of any rational experience is going on; as hard as she tries to remember, there are no gaps in her memory whatsoever. The transition from the doorway to the beach had been absolutely seamless, and she'd be feeling the aftereffects of drugs even if someone had managed to knock her out and snatch her.

Whatever the hell is going on, she'd be wisest not to turn her back on the only native guide who's presented himself; she shrugs neatly out of her coat, draping it over her arm along with the scarf, and turns to follow him, at a perfectly controlled pace.

She absolutely refuses to chase after him.

[dichotomos]

Snooty but not stupid, then. I didn't glance back to confirm she was following me, but I knew she was there. I pushed both hands through my sweat-damp hair and then made a show of scratching my crotch just to fuck with her.

"Welcome to the main path," I called, and stretched my arms out at my sides as I stepped up onto the boardwalk. "You're going to want to stay on the paths. If you wander off, a dinosaur might get you," I added with a smirk, and finally tipped a look back to Miss Priss so that I could snap my teeth at her.

[darbyfield]

He's far from the first young man ever to try and offend Tessa's presumably delicate sensibilities with a display of rampant masculinity; she's run agents for going on two decades, from nearly every extremist faction of any note, and the vast majority of them had little respect for the Service and even less for a female handler. She's seen every variety of attempted male dominance behavior known to humankind, up to and sometimes including tacitly threatened violence, and she is something less than impressed by the majority of it.

She's rather less certain about the dinosaurs, but she files it, for the moment, under "Fucking With Me" and moves on.

"Very handy," she says dryly, smiling a thin, edged smile and making every effort to keep her nerves off her face. "Shall I take this as a sign of human civilization?"

[dichotomos]

"What, I'm not civilized enough to be a sign?" I asked, and slid her a sidelong grin. Not that I cared about being fair, but I did have to admit that she was handling me with admirable aplomb.

"I don't know if you'd call it civilization or not. We don't have a Starbucks, but most of us don't live in caves."

[darbyfield]

"One swallow isn't a summer, Mr, ah." Tessa acknowledges the smile with an inclination of her head, and mentally chalks up a point in her own column. Christ knows she can use all of those she can get, at the moment. "And one young man isn't a civilization. However --"

She lets the pause stretch out, a hair longer than would be tactful -- riding the edge of outright rudeness, and letting him know she knows she's doing it.

"-- charming," she finishes, perfectly deadpan. "But that 'most of us' sounds promising."