In my head, I've taken to calling this story my love letter to Sophie Devereaux. I wish I was kidding!This was written for the Heroine Big Bang over at livejournal. It is five parts total and includes both a back-story and a forward-story that picks up right after 4x17, The Radio Job. Quite a bit of care went into constructing a timeline that reflects canon. However, there were quite a few liberties taken where John Rogers & Company never mentioned specifics. Anything you don't recognize is purely a figment of my imagination.
Happy Reading! Con-crit is both welcome and appreciated. Happy premiere week!
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on. (Henry Ellis)
[ O N E ]
Across town, a warehouse near Baltimore's waterfront burns clear into the night. Sophie looks out the window of the hotel, the sky long-since blackened by nightfall, and sees the smoke billow for miles, the amber light of fire sparkling in the distance. Her hands still shake, just barely as she breathes and turns her neck to watch the gentle rise and fall of Nate's chest as he sleeps, as she counts his breaths one by one just to make sure he is still half-alive. They couldn't start the journey back to Boston after the explosion. Not with Nate in the condition he was in. Not with the lot of them still clearly wracked with shock. In the morning they will start over once more, devise yet another plan to take down Dubenich when their heads are little clearer, when Nate has managed to regain his foothold in this world that has always been crueler to him than most.
Her phone vibrates on the table next to her, and she reaches for it immediately, silencing it before the noise can wake Nate. It's Eliot, again, the text consisting of only two words: any change? Sophie's thumb fumbles over the keyboard as she types her single, two-letter word reply: No.
On the streets below there is a siren, some commotion a block over. Wincing at the intrusion of sound, Sophie moves to pull the window shut before climbing out of her perch on the windowsill. Her head pounds something fierce, her eyes heavy with sleep that won't claim her no matter how much she may want it to. Not tonight. When she turns back around, she realizes her actions to preserve the quiet were to no avail – Nate is awake, watching her every move, and she stills when his eyes catch hers, when she sees the bits of dried blood in the hair at his temples.
"How long have I been out?" he asks, pushing himself upwards on unsteady hands. The mattress creaks with the movement. She sighs heavily and reaches into her bag for the bottle of aspirin she keeps there out of habit. Slowly, she moves towards the bed.
"A while."
Nate holds his hand out expectantly and she twists the top off with a little effort, drops three of the tiny pills into his palm. He tosses them back without water, wincing slightly as he swallows. His eyes are red, his ears probably still ringing from the blast of the explosion. Sophie wanted him to see a doctor, borderline insisted, but Eliot said he was fine. Eliot promised her he would be fine, and Sophie trusted him to know. Still, she reaches for Nate out of what is slowly becoming something akin to habit, her fingers smoothing the curls at his temples, picking at the dried blood there. He reaches for her hand in an instant, shielding himself from her touch. This too is habit and the tiny part of her she tries so often to bury would have been offended if his fingers had not wrapped around hers for just a moment before letting go.
"We need to get back," he says hoarsely. "We need to get home." He winces at the sound of his own voice, the roughness around the edges, and she slides into her place on the bed beside him as he struggles to sit up straighter, the mattress giving under their combined weight.
"We will. Tomorrow."
Pushing himself off the bed, Nate heads straight for the mini-bar. Sophie sighs a little as his feet shuffle against the carpet, his gait unsteady, and she knows his world is completely off-kilter. When he reaches the far side of the room, he has to use his left hand as leverage to hold himself upright as he bends, plucking three tiny bottles of whiskey out of the refrigerator and pouring them all into a paper cup with the hotel's emblem splattered across the front. She raises an eyebrow as he turns around, and he catches it easily, pausing with the rim of the cup resting on his bottom lip.
"Choose your battles," he warns and sounds older, harder. His voice is still rough, filled to the brim with grief and anger and all the things he started to bury with alcohol years before she knew him. "My father is dead, Sophie. I think I'm allowed."
Still, he waits for the shrug of her shoulders, her version of practiced indifference masked as permission, before taking a sip. He finishes the contents in two solid swigs, the flimsy paper of the cup crumbling between his fingers as he searches for another bottle.
His feet are still unsteady as they carry him across the room once again. He falls into a seat next to the windowsill where she had spent the last three hours keeping vigil, places the unopened bottle of something amber and cheap on the table next to her phone. Sophie watches him unashamedly, follows the line of his shoulders as they start to crumble, as he heaves a shaky sigh and lets his head fall into his hands. Sophie watches and says nothing because she knows Nate and recognizes the stages of grief as he plows through them. Sophie knows what he feels now is a fine, dangerous mixture of depression and anger – two things he is intimately familiar with. His shoulders start to move softly and she stands on reflex, making her way over to him. When she's before him, when she is so close to him she can hear his sharp intake of breath as she runs her hands through his hair, he looks up at her and leans into her touch as much as he will allow himself to.
Still, now, in moments like this, he holds himself back with her out of sheer instinct. It breaks her heart even as she welcomes the familiarity.
"Did you know your father?" Nate asks softly, almost out of nowhere.
There are things they don't talk about, as a rule, and her history is one of them. A long time ago, Nate learned that there are questions that are better left unasked, topics that are better to never be broached. Her past has always been one of them. Sophie's first impulse is, and probably always will be, to lie to him. It takes every trained fiber of her being to resist the urge.
Nodding, she murmurs, "Once."
"Did you love him or hate him?"
Her fingers never stop moving, the tips of them running through his hair over and over. Sophie isn't sure if it is for him or simply to give her hands something to do. "I walked a fine line between both. Most children do, I think," she muses.
"Was he a good man?"
She pauses. It is a rare moment when she allows herself to think of her family, when she allows herself to remember the people she left behind all those years ago. These moments never fail to leave a bitter taste in the back of her mouth, a mixture of equal part guilt and regret, and she swallows around the acridness now as Nate glances upwards expectantly. These moments also never fail to unleash a spiral of memories that leave her both wounded and nostalgic, that haunt her for days, weeks afterwards. She fights against them now, uses the movement of her hands, the sound of their breathing to focus her energy, to fight the ghosts of her past.
"Not really, no," she replies too quietly. Her voice gets caught in her throat and her fingers fall from his hair to his shoulders, nails sinking into the skin there slightly. "He was instrumental in making me the person I am today," she tells Nate, a secret she's never shared with anyone before. She laughs a little after the words fall out of her mouth at the irony of saying them now, to him. "You and I are very similar in that regard."
"I'm sorry," he says and the depth of sincerity behind the words takes the breath right out of her.
Out of instinct and habit alike, she pulls back, distancing herself from being the topic at hand. Because Sophie can see the wheels turning in his head, can read the flickers of emotion on his face, she knows what he is thinking, what he needs to hear. So she says, "It's okay to still hate him, Nate. It's okay to love him in spite of everything, too. It doesn't maker you a lesser man. It only makes you human."
As soon as the words leave her mouth, he pulls away from her almost completely. He reaches for the bottle he'd discarded minutes before. His fingers fumble with the cap and the liquid slides down his throat easily as she watches, as he refuses to look at her. Nate pulls away, distancing himself from her and this conversation as fast as he can because he doesn't know how to talk about these things. He doesn't know how to talk to people when it isn't about a con or a mark. He stands, his shoulder brushing hers as he moves past her and back towards the fridge, yet another bottle plucked from obscurity in the process.
When he nears her again, he's struggling with the top, all thumbs as he tries to twist this one off. When he finally unscrews it completely, he tosses it onto the floor, looks right at her as he takes a long, slow swig from the bottle.
"Nate." Her voice is calm and soothing out of practice. At the sound of it, his eyes widen and flick towards hers accusingly. He shakes his head and takes a step back and away from her.
"Don't," he breathes. His voice is like steel, his fingers tight around the tiny bottle in his hand. He looks at her and she sees his anger simmering below the surface, feels herself prepare for it, her shoulders tensing, the breath she inhales a sharp hiss. She reaches for him, but he swats her hand away. His voice is near yelling when he says, "Don't handle me, Sophie. Don't you dare."
She doesn't back down. "Then don't shut me out," she replies, her voice still even and calm, her lips pressed into the thinnest line. "This team needs you, Nate. I need you." Her voice breaks, just slightly around the words as his eyes meet hers. Sophie watches the anger ebb out of him in an instant, his fingers unclenching at his sides. "And you need us. You can't do this on your own. You don't have to do this on your own. That's the whole point of being a team."
He deflates, falling back into the chair, his hands immediately reaching for her and settling on her hips as he pulls her towards him. She stills, not sure of what he wants from her and what she is willing to give, her breath leaving her mouth in a whoosh as he rests his forehead against her stomach. His shoulders move with a sob that shakes his entire body before choking off into a twisted, gut-wrenching laugh. She watches, concerned, her hands unsure of where to fall at first, before finding home once more between the curls on his head.
"I've spent so much of my life hating him. I've dedicated so much of my life trying not to become him and now that he's dead I…it's like this weight has been lifted but I don't know how to be without it. I don't know how to stop myself from becoming a man like him… " He trails off, and she feels the twitch of his cheek, watches his shoulders tense. She knows he is fighting back tears.
"You aren't your father," she tells him softly, and just like that, he allows himself to break before her.
They stay like that for a long while, Sophie silent as Nate grieves for a father he both wishes he knew better and wishes he could forget.
When they return to Boston, she goes with him as he buries an empty casket into the ground next to his mother's grave. She stands close, just within arms reach as the heels of her stilettos sink down into the earth beneath her feet. Nate mumbles a prayer from memory and crouches down, pressing his fingers first to his mouth and then to the granite, tips tracing the slopes and curves of his mother's name. Sophie stands there and watches him mourn all the people who have left him behind, all the ones that he couldn't save. She wishes so badly to be able to help him, to mend the parts of him that were broken long before she ever knew him.
It would be to no avail, of course, so she helps him plan his revenge instead.
The thing about people, Sophie knows, is that they are all fractured. Some are born that way, carrying their fault lines since birth. Others have the fine, hairline cracks forced upon them by happenstance; they are made imperfect by the hard-fought trials of life. If one took the time to look closely enough, they would find that everyone has points of weakness. Everyone has a single spot where all it takes is just the slightest amount of pressure to break them completely in half.
Sophie has always been better at hiding hers than most.
xXx
She was born in the midst of the coldest spring on record in Chelmsford. Her father was an entrepreneur of sorts – she wouldn't understand everything this entailed until much, much later in life. Her mother was a seamstress, excellent with her hands, and possessed a gentle touch and warm smile that was blissfully ignorant to all that she refused to see. She spent her early years carefree, happy, horribly impressionable and naive. Her mother taught her how to sew, her strong, nimble fingers fitting so over her smaller ones as they threaded the needle and guided it through cloth. Her mother also taught her how to appreciate art. Countless afternoons were spent by the fire, her short, dirty hands turning the worn pages of book after book on famous artists. Her mother's voice was smooth and enthralled as she spoke of the way Monet manipulated color or the painfully gentle strokes of Degas' exquisite ballerinas. Her mother loved Degas. She adored the breathtaking beauty of all art, but she loved Degas above all the rest.
This, too, she passed down to her daughter.
Her father taught her how to hunt on the weekends, how to choose her prey carefully by weighing the risks and benefits, how to spread her feet shoulder-width apart, to brace for the recoil, and most importantly, how to shoot and make it count. They were poorer than dirt, she would realize years later when she had perspective and distance, but she never wanted for anything, never yearned for a different life during those early years because she simply didn't know any better. Her mother never allowed her to know any better. She would hold her tight and never tired of whispering I love you into the soft curls at the crown of her head, never stopped murmuring over and over, you are going to do great things, darling. Great, amazing things.
She was the oldest of six children – four brothers and a sister, but despite being outnumbered, despite being gangly and awkward with too-long legs and a crooked smile, when her mother died just shortly after her sister's birth, she was the toughest, the rock, the foundation her family needed to survive upon. She was the one to hold her family together when her father couldn't, when he lost the battle with the bottle and a broken heart. When he became reckless in every aspect of his life.
Her family buried her mother on a warm, sunny day in the middle of the summer. Her youngest brother fisted his tiny fingers in the fabric of a black dress that hung too loosely on her frame – the dress that belonged to her mother six children ago. His cheeks were stained with tears, his throat hoarse from crying. Her baby sister was cradled in her arms, swaddled in the blanket she had crafted with her very own hands; the baby's eyes were wide and bright, her smile so achingly familiar. Her own chin was proud, her eyes hidden behind tinted glasses that blocked the sun and shielded her away from the world. As she listened to the priest speak so eloquently of her mother, as the congregation of their tiny, worn-down church prayed for her mother's soul, her own Amen arrived a beat after everyone else's.
She was barely eleven then.
It was in the aftermath of her mother's death that she learned who her father truly was. There were always rumblings, of course. Aunt Emily never did look at her brother-in-law fondly, always made snide comments and jokes that fell flat, that made everyone shift awkwardly in their seats and avoid eye contact at holiday meals. She couldn't understand it all then, but soon after her mother's death, her father started piling them all into the beat-up, rusted station wagon on the weekends. They would trek all the way to Aunt Emily's, her brothers and sisters always dropped off in a rush, the youngest ones always clinging to her, crying fiercely as she whispered goodbye before she and her father continued on to London without them.
During those long drives she would roll the windows down, allow the wind to drag through her fingers as they drove through the endless countryside, and smile as the sun warmed her face. Her father liked American country music of all things and the sounds of it resonating within their beat-up station wagon made her miss her mother, made her long for the beautiful and soothing sounds of Beethoven and Vivaldi, the warm tones of the blues.
On the radio a man with a gravelly voice sang, If you're gonna play the game, ya gotta learn to play it right, and her father turned to her, every single time, his fingers thumping out the beat to the song on the steering wheel and said gleefully, "Listen closely, love. This song contains everything you need to know about life."
He taught her many things during those weekends: the art of the two-finger pick-pocket, how to read a situation like a novice, how to survey her surroundings in a short time span and take in everything they had to offer – the people, their positions, their mannerisms. He taught her when to push forward and, most importantly, when to walk away.
It was her father who taught her how to spin the truth.
On her twelfth birthday, he decided she was ready. They sat in a café near Buckingham Palace, dressed in their Sunday best, fitting in amongst the classy, beautiful people surrounding them, but not so much as to make a lasting impression on any onlookers. This, her father taught her during their very weekend in London, was the art of blending in. Her father scanned the crowd, his fingers tight around the teacup in his hands. He reached into his jacket and pulled out his flask, pouring a bit of amber liquid into the contents of his cup. She could smell it from all the way across the table and her face must have given away her disapproval because he caught her attention with a smile, nodded to an older man across the way – his version of an expertly placed distraction.
"Now," he began, his voice warm, his smile stretched too tight. "I want you to go over there and bring me back that man's wallet. Just like we've been practicing."
She preened, her neck craning just slightly to get a look, but not in an obvious, overt way. She shook her head as she settled back in her seat. "But isn't that dishonest?"
His laugh was both simultaneously crooked and warm. "It isn't dishonest if it's how you make a living."
There was a moment where she reconsidered, where she shook her head and adamantly refused, but then his smile started to falter, his eyes hardening, and she didn't want to disappoint him. After a moment, she rose from her chair and made her way over to where the older man was now sitting. She waited in the shadows for the waiter to pass by, for the exact right moment, planning it all out in her head: the faltering step, the gentle push, the fall of the tea against the man's crisp, white jacket, and, as a result, his indignation and distraction. All of which gave her the smallest, most fragile time frame for her to reach in and claim his wallet as her own.
She executed it flawlessly.
On a side street a few blocks over she met up with her father and passed him the heavy, leather wallet with excitement. He pocketed the abundant notes and tossed the rest in a nearby trashcan. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close to him. She breathed in his warmth, allowed it to envelop her completely. She was so excited she could barely stand still. The intoxicating thrill of adrenaline settled in the base of her spine and lingered, setting her nerves and fingertips on fire.
That feeling didn't fade for a long, long time.
xXx
At the airport bar in O'Hare, she sits on a stool next to Nate. The glass of water between her hands is cold and sweating all over her fingers. Nate's drink sits off to the side, untouched for now, his eyes wild, fingers twisting around the napkin crumbled in the palm of his hand. His hands are shaking, only slightly, and he covers the movement by folding his fingers into a fist, by reaching for his whiskey and curling them tight around the tumbler. He steels himself by taking a long, thick swallow and motions towards the bartender for another when the glass turns up empty.
Sophie watches him closely, sees the wheels turning over and over in his head. She knows he's plotting and planning and devising plans A through Z without nearly enough information and too much emotional investment. It never leads anywhere good. Firsthand experience has taught her this.
On instinct and without thought she reaches for him, her fingers brushing against his shoulder barely. He recoils out of impulse, pulls into himself, and Sophie sighs heavily, almost too tired to begin the daunting task of pulling him back out, to keep him from retreating fully.
"Nate," she starts softly, just the one syllable of his name because she hasn't quite figured out what to say to him yet. She hasn't quite figured out how to fix this yet. He turns to look at her just as the bartender replaces the whiskey in front of him. His eyes are open and honest, red with grief and it's taken them so long to get here, to get to the place where they are starting to let the other in, where they don't trust each other fully out of instict and reflex, but the foundation is there – even if it is shaky at best. She doesn't want to backtrack, to push too hard, so she opens her mouth to speak and is not at all surprised when nothing comes out. After a moment, she tries again. Says, "Tell me what you're thinking."
Nate turns his attention to his hands, to the tumbler full of amber liquid between them. He raises the glass, takes a smaller sip. "I want him dead," he tells her, voice steady. If Sophie were a better person, if she weren't a liar and a thief, she would be scared for Dubenich's safety. But then she remembers that Dubenich tried to kill her friends, he tried to kill her family, and if life has taught her anything it is that everything evens out in the long run.
Still, the way Nate laughs after the words leave his mouth – cold and maniacal – makes her skin crawl.
Her drink continues to sweat all over her fingers, but she doesn't let go of the glass. She doesn't want to show him the slight shake of her own hands, the weakness it signifies. "Do you honestly think that will make you feel better? Do you think that will solve all of your problems?"
"Probably not." He finishes yet another drink, winces, and turns to face her. "But it might make me feel better."
"I can assure you that feeling does not last long."
The look he gives her is pointed, full of question. Sophie stiffens on reflex, shifts in her seat to get more comfortable, to hide how unnerved she is under his watchful gaze.
"Sounds like you're speaking from experience."
"Perhaps I am." The bartender makes his way over to them once more, another drink of whiskey in hand, but Sophie cuts him off with a look. The younger man stops dead in his tracks and re-considers; Sophie is more than thankful. "Still, Nate, there are better, different ways. I don't care who you may think you are. You are not that man."
Nate actively refuses to look at her as he says, "You don't know that."
It's Sophie's turn to laugh and she does, the sound short, without mirth, and borderline annoyed. She shifts in her seat, rests her weight on the back of the stool. She's tired today. Her bones are tired. Her reserves are beyond exhausted and she honestly cannot remember ever feeling this old before, this so incredibly worn down by the world around her. This isn't the time to have this conversation; she knows this. Nate is angry, grasping at straws, trying to push her away and test her loyalties all in one breath because that is how he copes, that is how he blindly navigates the five steps of grief.
Sophie doesn't allow it, but she is too incredibly exhausted to argue with him about the misplaced ideologies behind seeking revenge for any and all wrongdoings.
So instead, she merely takes a long sip of her now lukewarm water and says, "I do. I do know you, Nate. I know that right now, in this moment, you want nothing more than to be that guy because you think that guy has all the answers." She reaches for him again, her fingers solid, certain against the crook of his arm, lingering over the bone of his elbow. Her fingers leave damp spots in their wake. He doesn't recoil, but instead leans into her touch, just a fraction of an inch. Sophie takes it as a personal victory. "But you aren't. You never have been."
Overhead their flight is called. Nate moves to stand, throwing a few bills on the bar top and pushing his stool in with the toe of his foot. She watches as he stills, as he turns to face her, his face ashen and stoic.
"You're either with me or you're not," he says, and his tone is curt, clipped, but his eyes give him away.
It says entirely way too much about who they are to one another that she doesn't hesitate before nodding, before moving to stand and following him back to Boston.
xXx
School was easy. Lies were easier.
With time, effort, and experience she learned how to invent a version of herself that almost everyone found irresistible – she was smart, talented, revered. She had a gift for reading people, for knowing the intention, the truth behind every quirk of an eyebrow, every shift of fingers, and every single word chosen to speak aloud. She had an even greater gift for categorizing and compartmentalizing every thing she read, every thing she saw. She was beyond brilliant, but she never allowed it to show. Nobody, she quickly discovered, liked a know-it-all, a show off, so instead she played her card close to her vest. She toned down her brilliance for those who needed to feel superior, and used it to command attention from those who would appreciate it, who would understand it.
Most of all, however, she was a wonderful artist. The feel of the paintbrush in her hand reminded her of her mother. The soft, barely-there sound of the bristles sliding across canvas reminded her of the way her mother would whisper iI love you/i over and over, and how deeply she felt the truth in the words. How much she missed the affirmation now that her mother was gone.
Her life as a con artist started with a Degas, of course. It was only fitting. She spent an entire evening, from dusk to dawn, replicating every stroke, every color, every slope and curve of the ballerina's stature. The replication was so utterly flawless that to the untrained eye, to even some of the better-trained eyes, it could have passed as the real thing. Her father, of course, saw this as an opportunity, and as she watched gleefully as he stared at the painting the next morning, she saw the emotions flicker across his usually guarded face – the excitement, the indecision, the awe.
And then, of course, she saw the plan forming, the caveats coming together perfectly.
It all started simply enough. Her father would scope out a target – a target so wealthy he probably wouldn't even bat an eye at a missing masterpiece – with an exquisite art collection and she would replicate whatever piece from the collection that caught her father's attention, a piece that wasn't the most expensive, but, instead, just expensive enough. Her father would make the switch using means she was not privy to, and then he would pass the original to a trustworthy fence, and pocket quite a bit of money. The plan was practically foolproof. They repeated it so often and so well that it became routine and with that routine, with the success, her father changed into a different man – he became greedy, careless and because of it, because of his recklessness and his obsession with the bottle it all took a turn the day before her sixteenth birthday.
Long gone were the weekends spent in London with her father. Now, she only found her way to the city on Friday afternoons. She spent her time in museums, cafés, collecting wallets and appreciating art, admiring the masterpieces of others, tracing lines and colors and shapes with her eyes, categorizing them for future use. After, she usually found her way to that very same café, the one her father took her to years before. She drank tea paid for with money that belonged to somebody else, a book on Matisse or Rousseau spread out before her, fingers turning the page meticulously.
It was on one of those afternoons that she met Gabrielle – young, beautiful, elegant Gabrielle. She was older, of course. She was the picture of class with a Parisian accent that was both practiced and impeccable, her blonde hair long and full of waves. Gabrielle smiled through her teeth in lieu of a greeting, the curl of her lips worn and dangerous but her tone was smooth, like money. The creases that were just barely beginning to form at the corners of her mouth and the center of her forehead gave her away, however. Her life had not always been easy, was definitely not the picture of perfection she tried so hard to exude, but she wore the reminders proudly, and made them work to her advantage.
One afternoon just before her sixteenth birthday, Gabrielle noiselessly slid into a seat across from her at the café and did not hesitate to tell her a story about how somebody had stolen her newly acquired La Fougere Noire while she was out of town and replaced it with a remarkable forgery. A forgery, she said, that probably would have made Matisse proud. At first, the woman explained, she was angry. Absolutely livid. The woman didn't take kindly to being stolen from and she definitely didn't take kindly to being fooled. Then, after she had taken a step back and reevaluated the situation, she realized there was a greater matter at hand: somebody had managed to fool her, even if it was just for a little while, and she just had to meet that person, had to compliment them on a job well done.
"Don't bother to deny it, dear," Gabrielle said, lips quirking upwards slightly. "The twitch of your mouth when I complimented your work gave you away," she explained. "Besides, I am not here to question you. I'm not even here to turn you into the police – especially since the painting wasn't exactly in my lawful possession. I am here to offer you a job."
"A job?"
Gabrielle laughed, her shoulders shaking just slightly with the movement. "Yes. You see, I am what you could call… an expert at persuasion. My friend over there," she pointed somewhere in the back of the café where a man sat comfortably, his nose was buried in a paper, "Is a retrieval expert. I need somebody who excels in replications. It's a very big job and it means a very large amount of money." She paused, waiting a calculated beat before continuing, "You could buy a pair of these shoes that you've been eyeing since you noticed I was sitting across from you."
She shifted in her seat and wished her father was there. It was easier when it was him calling the shots. It was easier when she didn't know the sordid details, when all she had to do was paint, blending colors and recreating slopes and curves and angles until they formed something beautiful. She trusted her father. She trusted that her father would do right by her no matter what – even if that trust was naively misplaced. Still, as she glanced at the woman sitting across the table in her expensive shoes and suit and wide-rimmed sunglasses, she couldn't help but envy the grace and elegance she possessed. She couldn't help but yearn for that thrill of the chase, that rush of adrenaline that came after a good lift, or a seamless bait-and-switch.
She just couldn't help but want more.
"What would this job entail?" she asked quietly. She reached for her cup of tea to busy her hands.
Shaking her head, Gabrielle's lips curled. She slid her sunglasses off her face and placed them to the side. It was the first time she was able to meet her eyes, was able to read the inferences between the words. There was the tiniest bit of honesty there that absolutely floored her.
"I can't tell you that. Not until you've agreed."
Years down the line, she still wouldn't understand why she did it, why she decided to trust this woman she knew nothing about, to trust this woman that seems too exuberant, too dangerous. Still, the iokay/i slid out of her mouth so easily it nearly surprised both of them. Only one of them, however, allowed it to show.
"Okay," the woman said slowly. "But just so you are aware, just so you are absolutely certain, this agreement right here, right now, is as good as a binding contract. There are absolutely no defaults."
Nodding, she cocked her head to the side and raised her cup of tea in a mock toast, exhibiting an amount of confidence no sixteen year old had a right to have. "Okay," she repeated firmly. The woman just smiled an amused, predatory smile that set her nerve endings on edge.
"What should I call you?"
She thought of her mother then for some inexplicable reason, her father, too. Random memories flowed back in spurts – her mother's smile, her mother's laugh, her father's fingers against her cheek, his touch warm and tender, his voice thick with cheap whisky as he murmured hopelessly, you look just like my Sophia, my perfect, lovely Sophia.
Clearing her throat, she set her cup to the side and sat up straighter, squaring her shoulders and pressing her lips into a thin line.
"Sophie," she lied. "You can call me Sophie."