A/N: For Ro, who is amazing in all the ways
A/N2: For the GWBlock Party on Tumblr's end of summer trope fest. I decided to do some fake dating.
A/N3: Badass, Preventers Hilde is totally inspired by Kangofu-CB's amazing fic, Mission: Redacted. If you haven't read it, do yourself a favor and go devour it. This will still be waiting when you get back.
A/N4: Eternal thanks to Ro for support and for beta reading
A/N5: Title from the song by Sylvan Esso
Warnings: language, smut, slight violence
Pairings: 3xS, others - I'm not giving it away yet sorry if that's going to bother you
Just Dancing
Trowa stared at the invitation for what felt like the millionth time.
The card stock was thick, crisp, the color a silvery white that looked like moonlight.
Fitting, all things considered.
Trowa tried not to be bitter. He tried so damn hard not to be bitter. He had been trying for three years to stop feeling… not even bitter. Jealous. Envious. Covetous. Betrayed. He wasn't sure what the right word was, to describe the creeping blackness that seemed to constrict his heart every time he thought about it. About them.
With a sigh, Trowa picked up the invitation.
He had put this off for as long as he could - too long, really. He had, of course, immediately RSVP'd; had, with a grimace, checked the box for a plus one and sent the response off in the mail before his brain had even had time to properly consider that checking a plus one meant he had to acquire a plus one.
Which, in reality, wasn't much of a problem. Trowa had survived this long in life by having a very realistic assessment of himself - his abilities, his weaknesses, his strengths. He knew that, if he needed a date, he could find one.
But he needed more than just a body on his arm. He needed…
He needed to look as far from pathetic and bitter as possible. And a random, attractive date was not the answer. It was, in fact, the surest way to elicit pity.
And Trowa did not want, or need, or know how to cope, with pity.
Trowa sighed again and leaned back in his chair.
He needed…
An idea came to him that was brilliant in its simplicity, the ease of execution...
The catastrophically high chance of failure if Trowa had the wrong partner.
He needed someone skilled in undercover work, someone attractive, someone he would plausibly be attracted to. Someone not currently out on assignment.
Which eliminated Vasquez, Anderson, Brown, Lu and Andropov.
And left…
Trowa sat up and keyed his passcode into the desk computer. He clicked his way through the agent rosters until he was in the field agent file, and then opened the sub file that appeared on only three administrative access points, and accessed the file of agents that were cleared for undercover work.
Hilde Schbeiker.
She was a definite no. She would, if Trowa even suggested his plan, likely punch him in the throat and laugh at him.
Matheus Cardoso.
Not the worst choice. But there was that drunken night eighteen months ago, when Matheus had just returned from an op gone about so pear-shaped it might as well have been a pumpkin, and Trowa had already been drunk at the bar when Matheus walked in. The sex had been memorable only in that it was quick, brutal, and something that neither wanted to speak about ever again.
Trowa could work with him. Had, actually, done a short undercover intel assignment three months ago with Matheus without incident. Except that they had fucked again, and it had been just as unspeakable as the first time.
No. Not Matheus.
Lee Jung-woo.
He was a possibility. Trowa got on reasonably well with him and-
Status: indefinite administrative leave. Pending Director evaluation.
Jung-woo was a no, then. Even if Trowa could convince him to do this, he wasn't about to risk Une coming after him. Or them.
Margaret Simone.
A very hard no. Trowa and Maggie barely made it through briefings without sniping at each other.
Etienne Moten.
Considering the role Etienne had played in… everything, Trowa thought that he was probably the worst possible choice.
Sally Po.
Trowa sat up straight in his chair.
Sally…
He rose to his feet and strode from his office, determined and the tiniest bit hopeful.
If he could get Sally to agree to do this…
She wasn't in her office. Or in any of the briefing rooms. Or interrogation rooms. Or break rooms. Or mess hall.
After doing a second pass by her office, he finally thought to check the gym. He should have gone there first.
Sally was one of those people who needed to be active, needed to be moving. When Une had slapped Sally with new recruit verbal assessment training last year, it had been awful. She had spent every morning locked in a room with, in her words, the sludge at the bottom of a never-washed oil cannister, trying to teach them how to communicate at a level normally acceptable for toddlers. It had not been a pleasant three months for Trowa, who had had the misfortune of being the only agent dumb enough to simply shrug his shoulders when Sally stormed into the training room and demanded a sparring match.
After three months of letting Sally work out her frustrations on his body in all the ways that Trowa normally didn't rank as high on his list of 'activities involving partners, sweating, swearing and close contact', he was relieved when Une finally rotated Sally back to active status and stuck someone else on rookie babysitting duty. Even if it was him.
It gave him time for his bruises to heal, and for him to try very, very hard - with the aid of a lot of one-night stands and exorbitant beer tabs - to forget just how well Sally's lean, powerful body felt against his when she was trying to break out of his chokehold on her. He tried. And failed.
But then, failure in his personal life was something he had become quite intimate with, ever since…
She was in the gym, but clearly hadn't managed to find a victim and had resorted to the speedbag.
Trowa had seen her last mission debrief. She had, as usual, been successful and, as usual, minimized casualties.
But minimized didn't mean no casualties.
It had baffled Trowa, the first time he had seen Sally react so strongly to one of her teammates getting picked up by med-evac.
He knew, from Wufei and Duo's stories, that Sally was one of the toughest people they had ever encountered - Gundam pilot or not - and that nothing stopped her or seemed capable of slowing her down.
Wufei had been the one to sneer about emotions, about feminine weaknesses, while all Duo did was roll his eyes and tell him that Sally would kick his ass and his dick if she heard him say that.
Trowa didn't think it was that - didn't think it was whatever nebulous insulting symptom of womanhood that Wufei did - but there was no denying that Sally felt loss and failure and showed it.
For Trowa, who had learned very early in life that showing any of what he felt or thought could be dangerous, she was a conundrum.
Sally felt things, was painfully open about her feelings, and didn't let it stop her. In fact, Trowa was fairly certain it was part of what made her such a nearly mythologically successful agent with Preventers.
It also meant that, when he walked into the gym and saw her working over the speedbag, saw the grimace on her face and the sweat staining the collar and back of her shirt, he knew that her last mission was still weighing heavily on her.
He hesitated - she might not, actually, be the best candidate for his mission if she was still this much in her head.
Then again, he didn't have a lot of other options.
Trowa shoved his hands into his pockets and approached, taking a path that put him in her line of sight.
He saw the shift in her body, shoulders tensing and her form just that much off, when she realized she wasn't alone. But she didn't stop until he was only a few feet from her, until she seemed to have finished whatever reps she was counting off to herself.
"Barton."
"Po."
She lifted the hem of her shirt to wipe at her face, revealing her toned belly and the wicked looking scar that Trowa had only seen once, before it had become a scar, when she had earned the wound in the field while dragging Duo Maxwell's unconscious body to safety. Trowa had been on the recovery team for that op, had looked at his two blood-drenched comrades and had had a moment of indecision as to who he should go to first. Wufei, partnered with him, hadn't hesitated at all. He had shoved Trowa aside and gone straight for Maxwell.
"If you're here for a show, admission runs at twenty creds, Barton."
He jerked his gaze up to meet her eyes and Sally dropped her shirt back down, offering him an arched eyebrow as she did.
Trowa swallowed and lifted his shoulders, the closest he was going to come to an apology.
"Did everyone run away when you got here, or should I check the med bay?"
She rolled her eyes.
"It was only the new recruits, working on PT. Gomez took them to run laps."
"Wise choice."
"Was there something you needed?"
Sally - open, honest, painfully direct. She was, in many ways, the antithesis to Trowa.
"The wedding is this weekend."
"I'm aware. Painfully aware."
It was his turn to arch an eyebrow. He'd always wondered about Sally and…
"Do you have any idea how much I'm not looking forward to parading around in a dress and heels all night on Saturday? And eating awful, cold food and drinking watered-down cocktails?"
Trowa, who had been forced into just as many Preventers formal receptions as Sally, well knew the pain of cold food and watered-down cocktails. Too well.
"You always clean up well," he pointed out, thinking back to the black dress she had worn to the fifth Eve Commemoration a few months ago. It had been sculpted to her body, clinging to her torso and thighs, and ending somewhere above the knee that was far closer to inappropriate than appropriate. He remembered seeing her ease off the black pumps she had worn whenever she was seated at her table and didn't think anyone was looking.
"Thanks for the glowing commendation, Barton," she snorted derisively, and leaned down to pick up her water bottle. "I know how to dress like a civilian. Just like you know how to get to the point. Doesn't mean either of us likes to do it."
Despite himself, Trowa felt his lips twitch at the jibe. He bowed his head momentarily to acknowledge the point in her favor.
"I need a date."
She raised both eyebrows.
"So you are going."
Trowa scowled.
"I sent in my RSVP two months ago."
"Sure, I know. Wufei told me."
Trowa nodded. Of course. Aside from Duo and Trowa, Sally was the closest thing to family Wufei had.
"Then why the surprise?"
She shrugged noncommittally and sipped from her water.
He stared her down.
"Sizeable betting pool among the other agents," she finally admitted. "Odds are that you won't show."
Trowa rolled his eyes.
"And that's why I placed a fifty cred bet on me attending."
Sally looked momentarily baffled, but then she laughed.
"O'Cochran?"
Trowa smirked himself and nodded. Sally laughed again.
"Oh, fuck you. Of course you did. O'Cochran."
It was a running joke, of sorts, between them.
Both Sally and Trowa had been among the first agents that Une commissioned. It had only been three months after the Barton rebellion, and Trowa, who had decided to keep his name, didn't actually have any real documents to support his identity. His fakes had been fine, during the wars, when the Earthsphere had been in a state of constant turmoil and migration for almost three decades and shoddy, forged or non-existent documents were a routine headache.
And so, for six months, while Une waited to see what the fallout would be and if the former Gundam pilots would be rounded up with the other extant rebels from the wars for trials, Trowa had used a new fake identity: Jim O'Cochran.
Sally had called him Cocky, barely even able to say the name without laughing, and no amount of silent glaring from Trowa would make her stop.
After six painful months, Trowa had dropped the identity and resumed his previous alias. Une had classified all information regarding Jim O'Cochran, and Sally, the only agent to have worked with Trowa during the transition period, had sworn not to reveal the connection, tears of mirth in her eyes as she did so.
In the years since, whenever something awful or annoying happened at Preventers HQ - the septic flooding the men's locker room; the encrypt system going haywire and locking everyone out of their email accounts; misfiled leave paperwork; misfiled resignation papers - Sally, and later, begrudgingly, Trowa would mutter fucking O'Cochran.
"Good thing I haven't placed my bet yet," Sally decided.
She tossed her water bottle back to the floor and started to stretch.
Trowa forced himself not to pay too much attention to the way Sally's muscles shifted, or the way her t-shirt clung to her back and chest, or the tendril of blonde hair that had escaped from the ponytail at the back of her head.
"So you wanted to ask me if I was going to the wedding? Why? You want a drinking buddy?"
Trowa shrugged nonchalantly.
"Something like that."
Sally snorted and looked up at him even as she bent over and touched the floor with her palms.
"Barton, tell me what you want or I'm going to tell Ernst that you've rigged his betting pool."
"You wouldn't."
"I'm annoyed, and you're being even more mysterious and constipated than normal."
"Constipated?"
She smirked at his outrage.
"Sorry. You're being even more oblique and verbally repressed than normal. Better?"
Trowa snorted and crossed his arms. It was definitely not better.
But, she was right - he should just get to the point.
"I need a date for the wedding."
She straightened up and considered him.
"How many people shot you down before you came to me?"
"I do not get shot down, Po."
She lifted her eyebrows.
"That's because you exactingly calculate your chances of success before even thinking about approaching someone."
"And?"
She rolled her eyes.
"And that's not exactly a good way to meet people, Barton. It's a good way to end up in boring, dead-end one-night stands."
"If your one-night stands are boring, you aren't doing it right. Want me to give you a few tips?"
"There's the sassy Barton I know and love. No, I don't want or need your tips. I do just fine on my own, thanks."
Trowa could well believe it.
Sally kept her personal life private. In all the years he had worked with her, she hadn't once brought a guest to a Preventers function - whether it be official or casual. She hadn't even brought a guest to Heero and Relena's wedding last year. Had simply shown up alone, dressed in an eye-catching lavender jumpsuit, and spent the entire reception idly shooting down one guest after another until Trowa had asked her to dance and they had spent the rest of the night racing each other to empty the free bar.
So, while he had never met any of Sally's conquests, he found it nearly impossible to believe that she didn't have a string of broken-hearted lovers still worshipping the ground she walked on.
Sally's very private private life also, of course, made her perfect for Trowa's plan. If he and Sally had been dating for months and were wildly in love, no one would know - and no one would find it suspicious that they didn't realize the two of them were dating.
Bad, drunken mission and post-mission sex aside, Trowa generally kept his own affairs as far away from Preventers as he could. He had, after all, learned the very painful of lesson of having to work alongside an ex.
"I haven't asked anyone else."
She looked him over consideringly.
"Alright. Better you than Dubois."
Trowa stared.
"Alex Dubois asked you to be his date?"
Sally shrugged.
"Not really. He didn't get an invite. He just oh-so-casually mentioned that he didn't have plans this weekend, in case I wanted some company on the dance floor or in my hotel room."
Trowa snorted. That sounded very much like a line from the Internal Affairs agent.
"So is this a 'we drive out to the coast together' kind of date, or am I just supposed to sit with you during the rehearsal dinner, ceremony and reception?"
And here, of course, was the moment when he needed to lay out all of the parameters for her.
And, likely, it was the moment immediately preceding Sally calling him an idiot and telling him no way in hell.
"I was thinking it would be the kind of date where we'd actually been dating for a few months."
Sally stared at him with a frown for a moment, but the expression cleared and her eyebrows raised as she put together his intention.
"You want me to be your fake date. Your date-date."
"Yes. My date-date," he echoed the term distastefully.
"Why?"
She was looking at him with what Trowa was uncomfortably forced to admit was concern.
"I can't go alone. That would look pathetic."
Sally shrugged, but the set of Trowa's jaw prevented her from arguing the point.
"Okay… if you don't want to go alone, there are dozens of agents who would be thrilled to have the chance to spend an entire day getting ignored by you. Plus, there's that brother and sister who run the coffee shop two blocks down. You could have your pick between them. Hell, you could probably take both of them. Except then we get into the incest thing and that's-"
"Sally."
"Too much? Incest not your thing?"
"No," he ground out. "It is very much not my thing."
She smirked.
"Really? Because Relena and Zechs-"
"They weren't at the same time. Not even the same month."
Sally's lips twitched as she fought back a remark about the very, very lame distinction.
"I need it to look like I've moved on. Like I'm happy."
"And have you? Are you?"
"Have I moved on from ruining the best thing that ever happened to me by sleeping with Etienne fucking Moten and having to just watch while they fell in love and realized how perfect their world was without me in it? No. I haven't moved on. And no, I'm not happy," he added unnecessarily.
The expression on Sally's face made it clear that he had said way too much.
How's that for verbally repressed? he thought bitterly.
"I wondered why you and Duo stopped… being you and Duo. He never said anything."
"No, he wouldn't." Trowa couldn't help but feel bitter about that too. Of course Duo wouldn't say anything, wouldn't sell out Trowa for the asshole that he was. Because, despite everything, Duo still loved him. He didn't trust Trowa, not anymore - and it turned out that Duo's trust, once irrevocably broken, pretty much put the kibosh on any kind of romantic relationship - but he still loved him. At least, that's what Duo had said when he packed his duffel bag that night, after telling Trowa that Moten hadn't been able to keep his mouth shut about what a great lay Trowa had been while Duo had been away on a deep undercover assignment for thirteen months.
"And Wufei - how did Wufei not murder you?"
Trowa offered her a bitter smirk.
"Duo didn't tell him either. He threatened to feed Moten his own balls if he kept running his mouth, and he dumped me." Trowa shrugged. "He didn't want to take away my friendship with Wufei."
Except, of course, as soon as Trowa had realized he wasn't going to be able to get Duo back, as soon as he had seen the signs of Wufei's years of silent longing for Duo evolve into actual overtures, overtures that Duo tentatively accepted, Trowa had known he had lost them both.
And then, of course, there had been the mission, nine months ago, when Wufei had nearly died, and Duo had had a shouting match with Une in his lover's hospital room that had ended with the pair of them resigning their commissions and moving to La Rochelle and buying some crumbling farmhouse to live in and accepting a loan from Quatre so they could buy a bookstore.
Trowa hadn't seen either of them since the shouting match, which he and Sally had witnessed from the hallway outside of Wufei's room.
The expression on Sally's face had changed. It was still concerned, but there was another emotion there, and one that Trowa didn't care to examine too closely.
"So you want me to be your date so you can… what? Rub their noses in the fact that you aren't alone and miserable?"
"No." He didn't want that, at all.
Frustrated, Trowa ran a hand through his hair.
"Wufei is… concerned about me. He feels guilty about him and Duo."
"I know."
Trowa raised an eyebrow, and Sally shrugged.
"I was his drinking buddy when he still worked for Preventers, and I've visited them a few times in La Rochelle."
Trowa was very proud of himself for not asking Sally how they were, what their life was like. He knew a little, from what Quatre had told him unsolicited, what Hilde had sneeringly informed him of - he didn't know if Duo had actually told her what had happened or if she just knew the two of them well enough to have worked it out for herself - and what Wufei vaguely referred to in the letters he sent Trowa every few weeks.
"I don't want him to feel guilty. He shouldn't. I'm the only one who has something to feel guilty about."
"And so, what… showing up with me at their wedding is going to convince Wufei that he shouldn't?"
Trowa shrugged.
"Hopefully. If we've been dating for - six, seven months - maybe all I needed was for them to move away so that I could put my life back together. Maybe Duo will stop thinking he's consigned me to a life of one-night stands and Wufei will stop thinking he's betrayed me."
Even though, if Trowa was honest with himself - and the one person he was consistently honest with was himself - betrayal was exactly what it felt like. And maybe he had earned the knife in his back, but that didn't change the fact that it fucking hurt.
Sally was silent for several long, tense moments.
"I've already booked a room at a bed and breakfast. It's… cozy."
"I booked a suite for us at La Villa Dolce - it's on the third floor, has a private terrace with an outdoor jacuzzi, and a couch that looks long enough for me to sleep on."
Sally looked a little impressed.
"Hm. And you're going to foot the bill?"
Trowa nodded.
"I'll pay for everything."
Sally snorted.
"Slow down there. If you want to make anyone think we're dating, or that you even know me, you'll let me pay my own half."
"Fair." He too-late remembered that Sally always insisted on paying her own bar tabs, no matter how many dreamy-eyed agents or would-be suitors offered to pick up the tab for her.
"But you can definitely pay for the hotel. I looked at La Villa Dolce. It's not cheap."
No, it most definitely wasn't.
But what was ten years of hazard pay for if not frivolously expensive weekends on the coast of France with your fake girlfriend?