Writing Flashpoint fanfic is even more interesting when you hear Sam Braddock advertising cars. :-P
I own nothing!
A/N: Being a secretary is a unique position: you get to see everything that's not being said, especially when everyone else isn't really looking. Ergo, this little plot bunny came to roost in my mind, and developed it. At this time, I am hoping to expand to at least the main characters of Team One (with of course the two love-birds excepted) watching JAM in their fluctuating relationship.
Winnie is the unsung hero of Team One (and Teams Two, Three, and Four). She sits at her desk, day in and out, and watches the teams run, walk, or very occasionally at Christmas-time, crawl past. She likes to keep an eye out for her 'kids' (she was born a Cancer, it's the mothering instinct) as they take on the good, the bad, and the strange of Toronto.
So she's pretty sure she is the first to see the changes in Jules' body language. They're the kind of changes that happen when Jules is seeing someone – her eyes flicker to the door more often, her breath hitches a little more frequently, and as Sam hands her a coffee one morning, Winnie sees the ever so faint touch between their fingers and subsequent shiver.
Sam's body language, on the other hand, gets tenser. Winnie wonders if it's a military thing; he's always been tight and nearly unreadable, but now he's ramrod stiff. The only time she sees him relax is when Jules exits her change room, like he is relieved that she came out the door.
Then Jules is shot.
When the sniper returns, Sam is still stone-stiff, but Jules is even more so. The way she never directly takes the coffee from Sam indicates that it's over to Winnie, and it makes her a bit sad. She'd never admit to being a romantic, but her friends are unhappy and Winnie will admit to caring about them.
Jules doesn't relax at all when Steve starts hanging around, but now her eyes flicker to Sam so quickly that Winnie dismisses it for a few weeks. Once is chance, twice is coincidence, but three times is when Winnie gets the clue, and she watches the tension between Sam and Steve, Sam and Jules, and Jules and Steve, and feels a bit sad for all involved. Then she gets a call from Jules about shots fired in a restaurant, and almost hates to put the call through to Sam et al.
At the end of the day, delivering the note to Sam, Winnie quietly watches him from her post. She curses when he puts the note into his pocket; she didn't really expect to read it, but had hoped for the chance to snoop a little. The little smile on his face as he turns away, though, says a lot to her.
Then HMCS Toth lands in the middle of everything and the ripples (waves, really) threaten to swamp everything. When Winnie gets her own psych evaluation, she manages to pass any nervousness off to the inexperience of being behind a desk and not in the field. But really, she's hoping Toth doesn't ask her anything about two specific teammates. She hopes her status as nearly-secretary removes her from any suspicion of knowing.
As the ripples settle down, Winnie goes back to watching her teams, and has to stop herself from smiling at the body language of said teammates.
Well, what do you think of that? Gentle touches while exchanging coffees that would be hidden from the rest of Team One are pretty plain to Winnie, if she keeps her head down and pretends to be part of the wall.
Winnie knows the rules, she knows this is not permitted, but as she listens over the radio on calls, she never heard anything that would imply that they are putting each other ahead of the job or the team. She tells herself that the moment she gets an indication of that, she'll have a chat with Greg, but as Winnie spies cute Bryan from Team Four walk past, she can only imagine how hard it must be for Sam and Jules.