AUTHOR'S NOTE: Given my last rant, it should come as a surprise that this one-shot exist. However, this has been banging around in my head for a while now. I wanted to write a One-Shot about the consequences of one's actions. Despite the fact that the show-runner of the show does not find them necessary to explore, consequences are what make life what they are. The decisions we make alter our future, sometimes in ways detrimental to ourselves and I wanted that reflected in some way. Okay. Here it is. Enjoy and hopefully this will be a road back to more inspiration to finish 'The Fourth Act'. Back to my regularly scheduled self-imposed exile. Toodles.
Quinn Perkins stalked down the cold Sloane Square street. Her mind was clear, despite the jeers of drunken professionals indulging their need for soccer (football) and beer surrounding her. She walked with purpose, turning down the corner as her mental rolodex guided her to her desired destination. She came here only two times a year yet she knew how to get her from her hotel room like the back of her hand.
It was funny how life changed. How five years flew by with cool, brusque vengeance. As she pulled the collar of her leather jacket closer, fighting the coolness of the London night, she could only smirk at her current mission and how it had all started.
She had done it all during her time as B6-13 Operative. The data collection, spy-craft and extermination. That is what they once called it. During the good times. When the agency had been alive and running...
Then came the leaks. The story front page of the D.C Sun by a nosy reporter. There were the congressional hearings, the public outcry and then the dismantling. The agents who had given their lives to protecting the republic from domestic terrorists and espionage pimps who sold Intel to the highest bidder were displaced.
President Edison Davis had used the biggest scandal in U.S Intelligence history to become a hero. David Rosen, the special prosecutor had parlayed his way into being Attorney General. The opportunistic pigs had taken away from her what had become her only home.
She bitterly remembered sharing drinks in Charlie's apartment the night they raided HQ. Wonderland was no more...
Now, years later she was...adjusting. She had made friends, found a new home. As a Reports Officer for the F.B.I's Intelligence Division. Life was better. Though she would never be the same. Her father dead, her mother dead. No husband, no children but her work. Good, respectable work that saved lives, slain all dragons and gave her purpose. Lindsey Dwyer was such a far off idea she often wondered if the apple-cheeked girl fresh out of Stanford Law was a figment of her imagination.
Her adopted family, Pope & Associates had fallen apart a long time ago. Abby Whelan had married David, moved into a beautiful home in Fairfax and had two freckled children. She worked for a non-for-profit that brought attention to domestic violence.
Quinn spends holidays with the Whelan-Rosen klan. She was godmother to their children.
Huck, or Javier Hernandez Sr. was found dead of an apparent suicide years ago.
The once piercing pain of losing the only man she had loved so deeply was now a dull throb in her heart. It had taken a while but she had learned to move on. Quinn often liked to comfort herself in knowing that he had found peace in death that he had not found in life. His poor wife and child...
It had been too painful to attend his funeral. Too painful to look into the eyes of a woman who had hurt, who she had caused hurt for.
Harrison Wright had gone off the grid. For years, she was obsessed with finding him, tracing down his whereabouts. However, he could no longer pretend to live in the past. To cling to the hope that he and his bright smile would return and feed her a line about "Gladiators in Suits".
There was a part if her that felt if she had bought the man who had introduced her to this second phase in her life, she could get her family back. Though it never happened. She had asked a colleague at the F.B.I to look into him, but the last anyone heard, he was spotted in Washington D.C just a day after Olivia Pope had disappeared from town.
Olivia Pope...
A name, a mystic that had brought her out to this quaint pub.
"I'll take a pitcher of your darkest ale." Quinn said to the elderly barmaid as she took a seat behind the smoky bar, brimming with patrons.
It was routine. She flew out to London, all expenses paid by her former boss. The two women exchanged niceties as Quinn filled Olivia in on the coming and goings of the D.C scene she had left.
Quinn checked her watch. 8:37pm...
In about three minutes she would arrive. Sad eyed and desperate like a child needing to suckle at her mother's tit.
She kept her eyes on the glimmering bottles of booze behind the bar to avoid the male gaze. To avoid drunken leer.
"Here ya' re ma'am" the barmaid said, her wrinkled hands shaking as she placed two glasses and the foaming pitcher in front of her.
Quinn smiled tightly, pouring herself the brew. However before she could get lost in the rich goodness of her dark ale, the sweet fragrance of Burberry filled her nose.
Taking the empty seat next to her was a petite black woman in her early forties. She was trim, few pounds thinner than she had been that last time Quinn saw her.
Her face, heart-shaped and refine bore no signs of time, the bronze skin as smooth and youthful as ever. The former long black sheets of hair that once framed her face was now a chin length bob. Her eyes, sad and sorrowful eyes, encased behind a chic pair of eyeglasses.
Olivia Pope had arrived.
"Hello" Olivia said warmly. Quinn smiled tightly.
"Hi"
"How was your flight?"
"It was a flight. So let's get down to business, shall we?"...
They awkwardly finished the pitcher of beer, finally making the trek to Olivia's cozy flat.
It was a few minutes walk from the pub. Much quieter and more private. Years working in clandestine fields had made Quinn paranoid. One never knew who was listening.
She watched keenly as her former boss paced with anxiety. She had never lost that unrelenting elegance, even attired in a Georgetown sweatshirt and black leggings.
She was pacing because of what Quinn had told her. The little nuggets of information, the nuggets had smacked hard cruel reality into a woman who had lived a pretend life for years...
"How, when...but there have been no..."
Quinn noticed her accent had become more effected. She clipped her words in that very English way.
She sighed deeply, carrying on with her mission. She did not have patience to watch Olivia fall apart again.
"He's engaged. To her. She's 45, Iranian born, fluent in about three languages, Farsi, Spanish and French. Oxford and Harvard...UN, human rights attorney. She's impressive."
Olivia's mouth fell open. It was as if every word out of her mouth had been a dagger into Olivia's heart. She collapsed on the crème colored couch holding her head. The sobs racked her body a viciously.
It was amazing that news of her Rowan Pope's cancer diagnosis had not elicited such emotion, but the whisper that former President Grant getting married for a second time had done this. Broken her...
Quinn sat there, looking at the shell of a woman. On paper she did not have much to complain about. She was beautiful. Olivia was also successful as consultant for a pristine English Telecommunications company. She owned a country home in Edinburgh.
She married and divorced to Jake Ballard. The details were fuzzy but something about him fucking a 19-year-old in their bed. He had moved back to the states and was teaching National Security courses at American University.
Quinn stared coldly at the sobbing woman. She made no attempt to comfort her.
Olivia Pope had always been the architect of her own, and everyone else misery. Maybe if she had stuck it out, and actually faced her demons...
Maybe if she had not ruined Quinn's life, she would feel some semblance of empathy for this sad woman who had no light or no love in her life. The last visages of hope, the sleazy torrid affair that had driven her out of the country and away from her business and life was now and always over.
There was no hope. The house in Vermont sold. The last rendezvous had been an angry fuck the last time he had been in London for a Human Rights summit.
He had moved on. Over the dream. His kids liked her, he had learned to love this new woman.
Olivia sobbed even more. Because she knew, like Quinn knew this would be the last of these meetings. If Fitz had moved on, there was nothing to keep her tethered to her old life.
Some mission this was indeed...