(no subject)
Sometimes The Best You Can Do Is Change Your Plans
Authors: wingshaped & itcomesandgoes
Universe: Hampton Roads/World Enterprises futureverse crossover. This is canon for both worlds because you can cross World Enterprises over with anything and make it canon.
Flavor(s): rocky road #27: bridge (wingshaped), vinegar #5: authorized personnel only (itcomesandgoes), thyme #20: twenty questions (both of us), triple berry #1: hook, line & sinker (itcomesandgoes), garlic #18: shooting star (wingshaped)
Extras/Toppings: caramel, smoothie (rocky road/vinegar/triple berry/garlic/caramel smoothie? that sounds DISGUSTING)
Characters: Ricky Anderson, Annalee Vetiver-Legrand
Wordcount: 3,282
Rating: PG
Notes: Okay, wow, this is like the whim pairing of all whim pairings. It appeared in my (wingshaped) head out of nowhere when I created Annalee, who is also currently 13, and it ... stuck, and then we wrote it, especially as itcomesandgoes had recently posted a story with Ricky in it and all these prompts lined up to make this scene. We write practically everything together, but weren't planning to do so for RaTs! see what characters make us do. (there are also literally twenty questions, and only twenty.)
Summary: Ricky Anderson, now 22 and proudly sporting a fresh commission in the US Navy, really wasn't expecting to find a stray CIA agent stowaway while doing rounds in the middle of the night, much less to fall for her hook, line, and sinker. Still, that's a lot simpler than the part where she isn't actually CIA, exactly...
Ensign Ricky Anderson was bursting at the seams with pride. He managed to keep that from being literal, but it was sometimes an awfully close call; only the need to keep his uniform up to inspection standards saved him. But he'd made it through Naval Academy, he'd been commissioned and was now serving on a ship that wasn't about to be decommissioned itself. (His father's tour on the U.S.S. Enterprise had left indelible impressions on all their minds.) He didn't even care that, thanks to a mixup, he wasn't back home at NAS Oceana, learning a plane inside out and making her love him - he was serving late-night watch, walking around on deck when there was a fat lot of nothing but the Atlantic around them.
Well, the Atlantic and the stars, anyway.
He didn't mind. The whole universe was beautiful to him, and would stay that way for at least a little while. His family was proud of him; he had siblings and cousins who were going to grow up pretty proud of him, too, so that it wouldn't just be his parents and step-parents (well, aunt, in one case) supporting him.
The deck clear, he walked to the bridge to make his most recent report - and then froze, double-taking and doubling back a few steps down the corridor. There, the officers' ready room - that light under the door should not be on this late.
Later, maybe, he'd stop to think about how he didn't stop to think that maybe a few fellow officers had snuck out of their bunks for a late-night rendezvous before shoving the door open. Later he'd decide whether or not that embarrassed him, that he didn't stop to think that, but back at the moment in question, he was busy staring gobsmacked at the young woman looking at a bunch of papers spread out on one of the tables.
She had... a lot of hair. A lot of hair. Very blonde, beautiful hair that was falling to her waist, and while he wasn't entirely certain anymore what the Navy regulations were concerning the length of a woman's hair, he was absolutely certain that it was not allowed to fall freely in luxurious waves down to a woman's hips.
"What - who are you? What are you doing here? Who told you you could be here? How did you even get here?!"
"What?" The woman looked up at him; she seemed surprised to see him, more than anything else. "Oh. Your Captain Richmond told me I could look through these here."
Don't ask for my badge, don't ask for my badge, don't ask for my badge, she thought at him as hard as she could, but she hadn't gained magic miraculously and couldn't really do anything about what he did.
Ricky felt more helpless than he had since he'd been a kid and his dad had disappeared completely. "But - what - why aren't you answering my other questions?!"
Other questions? Oh, right. In her panic she hadn't actually acknowledged that many of his other questions -- maybe just the fact that he'd spoken them, not what they were. And she should really have been trained better than to panic by now.
Ricky wasn't the only one aspiring to become a lot like his father.
"Well, I think I sort of have, actually," she replied, recapping the questions in her head. "Mostly. I told you that I'm looking at these files, and that Captain Richmond told me I could be in here, my name is Annalee Vetiver Legrand, and how I got here is classified, actually."
Classified? That wasn't on the allowable list of answer options! "Classified to what security clearance?" he pursued. Maybe he didn't qualify - ensigns were officers, but they weren't high-ranking to anyone but a five-year-old maybe - but it would at least soothe his troubled conscience if he knew the clearance was way above him, instead of within sight.
"Secret," she replied.
The Navy only had three security clearance levels, and ensigns usually never passed 'confidential' as far as Annalee knew.
"Well - but - why are you here?" he tried. "Why couldn't you look at those somewhere else? What else, very broadly speaking, is classified about you?"
He hated dealing with classification. It made him itch. He was pretty sure he'd gotten that reaction from Uncle Lucas.
"Well, technically, I lied."
He wasn't going to like this. She didn't like saying it. It felt like cheating, even if it was officially true according to the United States Military of this world. And a few others.
His suspicions were going up again - not that they'd gone down, but up from the plateau of what the freaking shit they'd been resting at comfortably.
"Lied about what?"
"'Secret.'" Annalee looked -- and felt -- guilty. Terribly so. "I'm actually part of a Special Access Program."
"I - what -" Helpless. Bewildered. Intrigued - and that was trouble, he shouldn't be bothering her if she was telling the truth now, but now she'd admitted to lying at least once, and she still wasn't in a uniform or anything, and he'd been on deck, he'd checked, there was no freaking way that anyone or anything could have gotten to the ship without him noticing their conveyance. It was impossible. There were no extra planes, and besides, night landings were really noticeable; there were no boats, and it was a fuck of a long way to swim, especially for someone in a herringbone suit with long dry hair. "Can you prove it?"
Ugh, thought Annalee.
This was what she hated about working for World Enterprises, about working for T.H.E.Y., about working the kinds of jobs she worked. She hated lying to people, and she hated using the sort of tools that made themselves the most applicable documents to the situation.
But said item was currently masquerading as a CIA badge, and, sighing, she flashed it at him. Quickly, not because she wasn't expecting him to demand it, but because that's what agents of the CIA did.
"- can you actually prove that," Ricky repeated carefully, "because you're standing sort of the whole room away, over there, and I can tell that you're holding what appears to be a badge, and I'd really like to know that you aren't actually stealing secrets from the Navy that's my whole life, please?"
"I'm not going to throw it across the room," she replied, more harshly than she intended. "If you're going to come over to this part of the room to demand to see it, as is technically sort of bordering on your right, I'm not going to stop you."
"What do you mean, technically sort of bordering?" He was feeling argumentative. He'd seen sci-fi and spy movies aplenty, thank you, there was no reason to just take for granted that something that looked like a badge was a real badge, just because it looked like one, especially not on a military vessel out to sea! And so he stalked over to the other side of the room, and promptly realized that whether or not it was her shoes, she was now taller than him. Fuck. He temporarily hated his genetics for making him so goddamn pilot-sized.
It was her shoes.
They were actually the same height. Annalee realized this quickly.
Still silent, looking annoyed, she held the badge out to him. It was really just an ID card in a laminated clip, the sort one was meant to pin to one's pants, except for how in the CIA you only did that inside the Pentagon and otherwise odds are with a badge like that particular one, you yourself were classified.
He took it, and looked at it, and fuckshitweasels why the hell did this have to happen on his shift?
Eventually Ricky offered it back, giving her a still-suspicious once-over. (Did the CIA have to employ attractive secrets? That just wasn't fair!) "How much longer are you going to be here, anyway?"
Maybe about an hour was the accurate answer, but she couldn't transport out with him there! Letting him know about W.E. would be violating the terms of the SAP agreement! Ugh, again.
"Not sure," she tried, instead. It was true, because now the original plan was all screwed up. Why hadn't Richmond made sure she was clear? "Could you, maybe, just not mention me to anyone except your CAG?"
And then go away?
"I could consider it, maybe," he answered warily, and realized that a large part of that wariness was probably due to the fact that he hadn't had a girlfriend since high school and there was a very beautiful woman standing within arm's reach, not a fellow crewmate, roughly his height and age and all of his favorite attractive features, and the breeze made her hair move just so and she - smelled good. Very good. "Can you maybe finish answering that question you ignored a moment ago?"
"Pardon, what question?" Maybe she really wasn't listening.
"You're the one who said it was 'technically sort of bordering' on my right!" he objected; shouldn't she keep in mind when he was asking her to explain what she'd said?
"If your commander authorizes me to be here," Annalee said flippantly, because at this point she really was getting annoyed, "that's really all you need to know. You should be taking any issue up with him, not with me."
Stupid men. Stupid military men.
She'd spent so much of her life around them, and they never got any smarter.
"I'm - I'm going to ask him," he said meekly. She outranked him, sort of, at least in terms of security clearance. CIA operatives were like that. She was very pretty and he wondered what she looked like covered in machine oil and dog hair, or swimming at the beach, and wished he didn't have a vivid imagination. Maybe he could still rescue the situation a little. "Is there anything I can do to actually help you?"
"Honestly I'm starving" came out of Annalee's mouth before she could stop it. She'd barely even gotten a good look at him, she was too distracted by the urgency and necessity of her work. He was kind of scrawny for a Navy man, wasn't he? Kind of cute, but kind of scrawny.
And she hadn't meant to ask him, in a roundabout way, to feed her. Oops.
The admission made him grin, at any rate - and he had, by nature and chance, the sort of rakish grin that belonged to a fighter pilot, like both his parents before him. "I'll see what I can do," he offered, and - after hesitating a little - decided to snap a quick but very proper salute, as she was a guest here by request, apparently, of the CAG.
The CAG was not in the mess, but Ricky knew how to get at the food available for those poor schmucks who, like him, were stuck on the graveyard shift. He just hoped she'd like peanut butter and jelly, because the only other options only seemed like food if you were used to ship rations and the cook's preferences. At least he found a plate, too - and then, a lucky find indeed, there was milk. Real milk. And it hadn't expired, either. Ricky debated heavily, and then decided that good manners and hospitality dictated that he not hoard all the milk for himself. He'd just... come back, afterwards, and get some for himself.
This time, he tried knocking at the door before pushing it open. "If you're still in there, I brought you something..."
She was.
She was standing over the table, glaring down at what was on it. She'd taken off her jacket, now just in trousers and a white blouse. She was frustrated, angry -- she had nearly slammed her hand on the table and paused in midair. The work wasn't, well, working out the way it was supposed to.
Things were blacked out.
Annalee hated it when things were blacked out. Recovery took forever.
"Yeah," she said, sounding as tired and peeved as she was.
"Peanut butter jelly time," he said mildly, elbowing the door open, careful not to drop or spill anything. "And some milk, although if you are not a fan I am absolutely willing to take it off your hands." He paused next to the table, careful not to look at the documents enough to register even if they themselves bore any security documentation - just enough to notice that some things were blacked out, and that the folder itself wasn't red. "Here, food."
"I can tolerate milk enough it's fine when I'm trying to get peanut butter off my teeth," Annalee confessed, shoving the papers back in the folder (which was also black) and pushing them aside, practically collapsing into the seat.
(It was uncomfortable. Stupid ships. As bad as the men.)
Then she remembered to add, "Thank you."
Normally, she was personable.
This wasn't a normal situation.
"I couldn't get at the pickles," Ricky admitted, and carefully put plate and glass (good-quality china, but not the finest; just the finest he could reach) on the table beside her and away from the folder. "Milk seems to be the next best thing for cutting peanut butter, though, if you don't have or don't like dill pickles. Sorry it's all I could find."
"It's fine." She took a tentative bite. Not bad. It was food. Ergo, it tasted good. Like food.
"Okay." He hesitated. "I'll just, uh -"
Daydream about you in the middle of the night.
"Is there anything else I can help you with?"
Annalee actually felt bad about saying, "No, I don't think so, thank you," and wasn't sure why that was.
"-Oh. Okay." After a few seconds he shook himself mentally, and grinned at her again. "I'm the only one moving around on this floor at this hour, so if that changes, I'll be sort of... generally around, at any rate. Uh." Another brief hesitation. "Do you- make a point, I guess, of sneaking onto ships in the middle of the night, by the way?"
Annalee laughed. She couldn't resist. It was just such an absurd question. "A point? No. But I have had to do it before."
Ricky laughed a little, too, and then reminded himself he did have other duties, and probably he should actually get to them pretty quickly. Such as, for instance, reporting to the CAG and double-checking the story of one Annalee Vetiver Legrand. He started to head to the door, but it seemed like his feet were leaden, dragging, slowing him down. "Hey - where are you from, anyway, I mean where are you when you're not in the Atlantic?"
Good question.
At least her city of origin had a version in this world: "San Francisco. Is where I'm from. I move around a lot." She was tempted to ask why, but didn't let herself.
"Oh." Damn. Wrong coast. His father had attempted, once, very drunk when celebrating Ricky's acceptance to the academy, to impart the wisdom that east coast-west coast relationships just never worked out well at all. Ricky was pretty sure this one was doomed by the fact that she worked for the CIA, he was only an ensign yet, and she probably didn't like Virginia much anyway. "Well - I hope - do you think maybe I could see you again, at some point, is all?"
That was not a question she expected, at all.
Annalee turned her attention from her food to stare (up, for probably the last time in a long time) at him, taken aback and not sure what to make of it.
"I -- well -- you might," was the only thing she could think to say. What else could she say? Where had that even come from?
"Cool." He grinned again, sharp and fast and thrilled. Screw his dad's drunken ramblings, anyway, he had a long history of not knowing how to handle women! No reason to listen to him. "Anyway, I'll come by later to pick up the plate - good luck with your stuff."
He was really really late with his report, by that point, but at least when the CAG wandered into the room, restlessly insomniac in the hours before dawn, he managed to straighten things out pretty quickly.
For her part, Annalee only remained another hour. Fed up, she had shoved the blacked out papers into her own shoulder bag, ready to take them back to HQ for extraction. Which took forever. It might take a century, though in a realistic sense of thinking about it she would likely have her results in about a week.
And it wasn't a foolproof process.
Damn the Navy!
(It wasn't until she had already put in the request for transport back, and the codes had already been entered, and she was being deconstructed to be put back together back in her suite, that she realized she hadn't ever gotten that man's name.)
Later on, Ricky tapped at the door of the ready room and, not getting any answer, looked inside. A plate neatly cleaned of crumbs and a glass still marked with the sheen of once having been full of milk sat on an otherwise empty table. No folder. No beautiful, mysterious CIA agent, either.
Later, after going to the kitchen to clean up the dishes of a meal he hadn't eaten, Ricky was back out on deck again, surrounded by the safe familiarity of the ladies who couldn't decide if they were Falcons or Vipers. Dawn was coming, soon. The deck was still completely clear of anyone or anything that shouldn't have been there, clear of any signs that there might ever have been someone or something else. There still wasn't any way a smaller boat could have nuzzled up to the hull without getting noticed. She was still a puzzle, a mystery, an enigma, a worn allegory or cliche, for that matter.
He was pretty sure he'd never forget her, and he might just have fallen completely in love with her for being drowned in mystery, for liking peanut butter and jelly, for being maybe exactly as tall as him and maybe just a little bit taller, or maybe just for how she wore her hair.
Ensign Ricky Anderson looked up at a pre-dawn sky, saw a shooting star, and wished that he could see her again, talk to her longer, maybe actually find a way of talking to her more than once. And he knew that shooting stars didn't wink, but it felt like it, if that was possible - or if maybe it was just that he was surrounded by the sea, and Aunt Sydney had promised that nothing truly terrible would happen to him while he was at sea, if she and the waves could help it, and maybe that could be extrapolated to mean that he'd get his wish to come true.
He desperately needed to ask Annalee what she thought of Dippin' Dots, for one thing. That had always been high on his list of requirements to qualify for him falling in love.
Authors: wingshaped & itcomesandgoes
Universe: Hampton Roads/World Enterprises futureverse crossover. This is canon for both worlds because you can cross World Enterprises over with anything and make it canon.
Flavor(s): rocky road #27: bridge (wingshaped), vinegar #5: authorized personnel only (itcomesandgoes), thyme #20: twenty questions (both of us), triple berry #1: hook, line & sinker (itcomesandgoes), garlic #18: shooting star (wingshaped)
Extras/Toppings: caramel, smoothie (rocky road/vinegar/triple berry/garlic/caramel smoothie? that sounds DISGUSTING)
Characters: Ricky Anderson, Annalee Vetiver-Legrand
Wordcount: 3,282
Rating: PG
Notes: Okay, wow, this is like the whim pairing of all whim pairings. It appeared in my (wingshaped) head out of nowhere when I created Annalee, who is also currently 13, and it ... stuck, and then we wrote it, especially as itcomesandgoes had recently posted a story with Ricky in it and all these prompts lined up to make this scene. We write practically everything together, but weren't planning to do so for RaTs! see what characters make us do. (there are also literally twenty questions, and only twenty.)
Summary: Ricky Anderson, now 22 and proudly sporting a fresh commission in the US Navy, really wasn't expecting to find a stray CIA agent stowaway while doing rounds in the middle of the night, much less to fall for her hook, line, and sinker. Still, that's a lot simpler than the part where she isn't actually CIA, exactly...
Ensign Ricky Anderson was bursting at the seams with pride. He managed to keep that from being literal, but it was sometimes an awfully close call; only the need to keep his uniform up to inspection standards saved him. But he'd made it through Naval Academy, he'd been commissioned and was now serving on a ship that wasn't about to be decommissioned itself. (His father's tour on the U.S.S. Enterprise had left indelible impressions on all their minds.) He didn't even care that, thanks to a mixup, he wasn't back home at NAS Oceana, learning a plane inside out and making her love him - he was serving late-night watch, walking around on deck when there was a fat lot of nothing but the Atlantic around them.
Well, the Atlantic and the stars, anyway.
He didn't mind. The whole universe was beautiful to him, and would stay that way for at least a little while. His family was proud of him; he had siblings and cousins who were going to grow up pretty proud of him, too, so that it wouldn't just be his parents and step-parents (well, aunt, in one case) supporting him.
The deck clear, he walked to the bridge to make his most recent report - and then froze, double-taking and doubling back a few steps down the corridor. There, the officers' ready room - that light under the door should not be on this late.
Later, maybe, he'd stop to think about how he didn't stop to think that maybe a few fellow officers had snuck out of their bunks for a late-night rendezvous before shoving the door open. Later he'd decide whether or not that embarrassed him, that he didn't stop to think that, but back at the moment in question, he was busy staring gobsmacked at the young woman looking at a bunch of papers spread out on one of the tables.
She had... a lot of hair. A lot of hair. Very blonde, beautiful hair that was falling to her waist, and while he wasn't entirely certain anymore what the Navy regulations were concerning the length of a woman's hair, he was absolutely certain that it was not allowed to fall freely in luxurious waves down to a woman's hips.
"What - who are you? What are you doing here? Who told you you could be here? How did you even get here?!"
"What?" The woman looked up at him; she seemed surprised to see him, more than anything else. "Oh. Your Captain Richmond told me I could look through these here."
Don't ask for my badge, don't ask for my badge, don't ask for my badge, she thought at him as hard as she could, but she hadn't gained magic miraculously and couldn't really do anything about what he did.
Ricky felt more helpless than he had since he'd been a kid and his dad had disappeared completely. "But - what - why aren't you answering my other questions?!"
Other questions? Oh, right. In her panic she hadn't actually acknowledged that many of his other questions -- maybe just the fact that he'd spoken them, not what they were. And she should really have been trained better than to panic by now.
Ricky wasn't the only one aspiring to become a lot like his father.
"Well, I think I sort of have, actually," she replied, recapping the questions in her head. "Mostly. I told you that I'm looking at these files, and that Captain Richmond told me I could be in here, my name is Annalee Vetiver Legrand, and how I got here is classified, actually."
Classified? That wasn't on the allowable list of answer options! "Classified to what security clearance?" he pursued. Maybe he didn't qualify - ensigns were officers, but they weren't high-ranking to anyone but a five-year-old maybe - but it would at least soothe his troubled conscience if he knew the clearance was way above him, instead of within sight.
"Secret," she replied.
The Navy only had three security clearance levels, and ensigns usually never passed 'confidential' as far as Annalee knew.
"Well - but - why are you here?" he tried. "Why couldn't you look at those somewhere else? What else, very broadly speaking, is classified about you?"
He hated dealing with classification. It made him itch. He was pretty sure he'd gotten that reaction from Uncle Lucas.
"Well, technically, I lied."
He wasn't going to like this. She didn't like saying it. It felt like cheating, even if it was officially true according to the United States Military of this world. And a few others.
His suspicions were going up again - not that they'd gone down, but up from the plateau of what the freaking shit they'd been resting at comfortably.
"Lied about what?"
"'Secret.'" Annalee looked -- and felt -- guilty. Terribly so. "I'm actually part of a Special Access Program."
"I - what -" Helpless. Bewildered. Intrigued - and that was trouble, he shouldn't be bothering her if she was telling the truth now, but now she'd admitted to lying at least once, and she still wasn't in a uniform or anything, and he'd been on deck, he'd checked, there was no freaking way that anyone or anything could have gotten to the ship without him noticing their conveyance. It was impossible. There were no extra planes, and besides, night landings were really noticeable; there were no boats, and it was a fuck of a long way to swim, especially for someone in a herringbone suit with long dry hair. "Can you prove it?"
Ugh, thought Annalee.
This was what she hated about working for World Enterprises, about working for T.H.E.Y., about working the kinds of jobs she worked. She hated lying to people, and she hated using the sort of tools that made themselves the most applicable documents to the situation.
But said item was currently masquerading as a CIA badge, and, sighing, she flashed it at him. Quickly, not because she wasn't expecting him to demand it, but because that's what agents of the CIA did.
"- can you actually prove that," Ricky repeated carefully, "because you're standing sort of the whole room away, over there, and I can tell that you're holding what appears to be a badge, and I'd really like to know that you aren't actually stealing secrets from the Navy that's my whole life, please?"
"I'm not going to throw it across the room," she replied, more harshly than she intended. "If you're going to come over to this part of the room to demand to see it, as is technically sort of bordering on your right, I'm not going to stop you."
"What do you mean, technically sort of bordering?" He was feeling argumentative. He'd seen sci-fi and spy movies aplenty, thank you, there was no reason to just take for granted that something that looked like a badge was a real badge, just because it looked like one, especially not on a military vessel out to sea! And so he stalked over to the other side of the room, and promptly realized that whether or not it was her shoes, she was now taller than him. Fuck. He temporarily hated his genetics for making him so goddamn pilot-sized.
It was her shoes.
They were actually the same height. Annalee realized this quickly.
Still silent, looking annoyed, she held the badge out to him. It was really just an ID card in a laminated clip, the sort one was meant to pin to one's pants, except for how in the CIA you only did that inside the Pentagon and otherwise odds are with a badge like that particular one, you yourself were classified.
He took it, and looked at it, and fuckshitweasels why the hell did this have to happen on his shift?
Eventually Ricky offered it back, giving her a still-suspicious once-over. (Did the CIA have to employ attractive secrets? That just wasn't fair!) "How much longer are you going to be here, anyway?"
Maybe about an hour was the accurate answer, but she couldn't transport out with him there! Letting him know about W.E. would be violating the terms of the SAP agreement! Ugh, again.
"Not sure," she tried, instead. It was true, because now the original plan was all screwed up. Why hadn't Richmond made sure she was clear? "Could you, maybe, just not mention me to anyone except your CAG?"
And then go away?
"I could consider it, maybe," he answered warily, and realized that a large part of that wariness was probably due to the fact that he hadn't had a girlfriend since high school and there was a very beautiful woman standing within arm's reach, not a fellow crewmate, roughly his height and age and all of his favorite attractive features, and the breeze made her hair move just so and she - smelled good. Very good. "Can you maybe finish answering that question you ignored a moment ago?"
"Pardon, what question?" Maybe she really wasn't listening.
"You're the one who said it was 'technically sort of bordering' on my right!" he objected; shouldn't she keep in mind when he was asking her to explain what she'd said?
"If your commander authorizes me to be here," Annalee said flippantly, because at this point she really was getting annoyed, "that's really all you need to know. You should be taking any issue up with him, not with me."
Stupid men. Stupid military men.
She'd spent so much of her life around them, and they never got any smarter.
"I'm - I'm going to ask him," he said meekly. She outranked him, sort of, at least in terms of security clearance. CIA operatives were like that. She was very pretty and he wondered what she looked like covered in machine oil and dog hair, or swimming at the beach, and wished he didn't have a vivid imagination. Maybe he could still rescue the situation a little. "Is there anything I can do to actually help you?"
"Honestly I'm starving" came out of Annalee's mouth before she could stop it. She'd barely even gotten a good look at him, she was too distracted by the urgency and necessity of her work. He was kind of scrawny for a Navy man, wasn't he? Kind of cute, but kind of scrawny.
And she hadn't meant to ask him, in a roundabout way, to feed her. Oops.
The admission made him grin, at any rate - and he had, by nature and chance, the sort of rakish grin that belonged to a fighter pilot, like both his parents before him. "I'll see what I can do," he offered, and - after hesitating a little - decided to snap a quick but very proper salute, as she was a guest here by request, apparently, of the CAG.
The CAG was not in the mess, but Ricky knew how to get at the food available for those poor schmucks who, like him, were stuck on the graveyard shift. He just hoped she'd like peanut butter and jelly, because the only other options only seemed like food if you were used to ship rations and the cook's preferences. At least he found a plate, too - and then, a lucky find indeed, there was milk. Real milk. And it hadn't expired, either. Ricky debated heavily, and then decided that good manners and hospitality dictated that he not hoard all the milk for himself. He'd just... come back, afterwards, and get some for himself.
This time, he tried knocking at the door before pushing it open. "If you're still in there, I brought you something..."
She was.
She was standing over the table, glaring down at what was on it. She'd taken off her jacket, now just in trousers and a white blouse. She was frustrated, angry -- she had nearly slammed her hand on the table and paused in midair. The work wasn't, well, working out the way it was supposed to.
Things were blacked out.
Annalee hated it when things were blacked out. Recovery took forever.
"Yeah," she said, sounding as tired and peeved as she was.
"Peanut butter jelly time," he said mildly, elbowing the door open, careful not to drop or spill anything. "And some milk, although if you are not a fan I am absolutely willing to take it off your hands." He paused next to the table, careful not to look at the documents enough to register even if they themselves bore any security documentation - just enough to notice that some things were blacked out, and that the folder itself wasn't red. "Here, food."
"I can tolerate milk enough it's fine when I'm trying to get peanut butter off my teeth," Annalee confessed, shoving the papers back in the folder (which was also black) and pushing them aside, practically collapsing into the seat.
(It was uncomfortable. Stupid ships. As bad as the men.)
Then she remembered to add, "Thank you."
Normally, she was personable.
This wasn't a normal situation.
"I couldn't get at the pickles," Ricky admitted, and carefully put plate and glass (good-quality china, but not the finest; just the finest he could reach) on the table beside her and away from the folder. "Milk seems to be the next best thing for cutting peanut butter, though, if you don't have or don't like dill pickles. Sorry it's all I could find."
"It's fine." She took a tentative bite. Not bad. It was food. Ergo, it tasted good. Like food.
"Okay." He hesitated. "I'll just, uh -"
Daydream about you in the middle of the night.
"Is there anything else I can help you with?"
Annalee actually felt bad about saying, "No, I don't think so, thank you," and wasn't sure why that was.
"-Oh. Okay." After a few seconds he shook himself mentally, and grinned at her again. "I'm the only one moving around on this floor at this hour, so if that changes, I'll be sort of... generally around, at any rate. Uh." Another brief hesitation. "Do you- make a point, I guess, of sneaking onto ships in the middle of the night, by the way?"
Annalee laughed. She couldn't resist. It was just such an absurd question. "A point? No. But I have had to do it before."
Ricky laughed a little, too, and then reminded himself he did have other duties, and probably he should actually get to them pretty quickly. Such as, for instance, reporting to the CAG and double-checking the story of one Annalee Vetiver Legrand. He started to head to the door, but it seemed like his feet were leaden, dragging, slowing him down. "Hey - where are you from, anyway, I mean where are you when you're not in the Atlantic?"
Good question.
At least her city of origin had a version in this world: "San Francisco. Is where I'm from. I move around a lot." She was tempted to ask why, but didn't let herself.
"Oh." Damn. Wrong coast. His father had attempted, once, very drunk when celebrating Ricky's acceptance to the academy, to impart the wisdom that east coast-west coast relationships just never worked out well at all. Ricky was pretty sure this one was doomed by the fact that she worked for the CIA, he was only an ensign yet, and she probably didn't like Virginia much anyway. "Well - I hope - do you think maybe I could see you again, at some point, is all?"
That was not a question she expected, at all.
Annalee turned her attention from her food to stare (up, for probably the last time in a long time) at him, taken aback and not sure what to make of it.
"I -- well -- you might," was the only thing she could think to say. What else could she say? Where had that even come from?
"Cool." He grinned again, sharp and fast and thrilled. Screw his dad's drunken ramblings, anyway, he had a long history of not knowing how to handle women! No reason to listen to him. "Anyway, I'll come by later to pick up the plate - good luck with your stuff."
He was really really late with his report, by that point, but at least when the CAG wandered into the room, restlessly insomniac in the hours before dawn, he managed to straighten things out pretty quickly.
For her part, Annalee only remained another hour. Fed up, she had shoved the blacked out papers into her own shoulder bag, ready to take them back to HQ for extraction. Which took forever. It might take a century, though in a realistic sense of thinking about it she would likely have her results in about a week.
And it wasn't a foolproof process.
Damn the Navy!
(It wasn't until she had already put in the request for transport back, and the codes had already been entered, and she was being deconstructed to be put back together back in her suite, that she realized she hadn't ever gotten that man's name.)
Later on, Ricky tapped at the door of the ready room and, not getting any answer, looked inside. A plate neatly cleaned of crumbs and a glass still marked with the sheen of once having been full of milk sat on an otherwise empty table. No folder. No beautiful, mysterious CIA agent, either.
Later, after going to the kitchen to clean up the dishes of a meal he hadn't eaten, Ricky was back out on deck again, surrounded by the safe familiarity of the ladies who couldn't decide if they were Falcons or Vipers. Dawn was coming, soon. The deck was still completely clear of anyone or anything that shouldn't have been there, clear of any signs that there might ever have been someone or something else. There still wasn't any way a smaller boat could have nuzzled up to the hull without getting noticed. She was still a puzzle, a mystery, an enigma, a worn allegory or cliche, for that matter.
He was pretty sure he'd never forget her, and he might just have fallen completely in love with her for being drowned in mystery, for liking peanut butter and jelly, for being maybe exactly as tall as him and maybe just a little bit taller, or maybe just for how she wore her hair.
Ensign Ricky Anderson looked up at a pre-dawn sky, saw a shooting star, and wished that he could see her again, talk to her longer, maybe actually find a way of talking to her more than once. And he knew that shooting stars didn't wink, but it felt like it, if that was possible - or if maybe it was just that he was surrounded by the sea, and Aunt Sydney had promised that nothing truly terrible would happen to him while he was at sea, if she and the waves could help it, and maybe that could be extrapolated to mean that he'd get his wish to come true.
He desperately needed to ask Annalee what she thought of Dippin' Dots, for one thing. That had always been high on his list of requirements to qualify for him falling in love.