Author's Note: Originally part of a collection; I'll be posting each of the drabbles separately. The prompt for this one was 'that girl with the blue dress on'.
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Stand-Up Comedy
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He sits at the back of the conference room, arms crossed, eyes narrowed. He wears a dress shirt, tie, slacks… everything he needs to look sort of professional. For once, he is stoic, silent, brooding. Around him, men converse about the nuances of science and progress.
He has no interest in any of that, of course. He's only here for Crystal.
Gold realizes early that all these people here are arrogant. He can tell because they look down at him with cunning eyes, eyes that could easily turn him away starving. They see him as no better than one of the pokemon they experiment upon – though he doesn't know whether that's because he's young or because he's sort of stupid.
Crystal walks out from the back room, notebook in hand.
Gold hadn't known how pretty she would look, with her hair done up professionally and her body garbed in a powder blue dress. She opens her mouth and starts talking, but Gold's too busy staring at her face. That dress brings out her eyes, he decides. Her eyes and her hair.
A murmur of dissent fills the room, and he realizes with a start that something that Crystal has said has upset the arrogant men. She meets his eyes, but then quickly looks away. From this glance, Gold can sense the anger and the hurt that comes from being treated like a child.
And Crystal is not a child.
A bald man raises his hand. "How can you know that these findings are true?" he asks, derision in his voice. "You've given us no clear facts." Gold wishes that he'd been doing a better job of listening, because he knows that standing up and telling the man to shut up would only hurt Crystal's cause, not help.
But then she starts speaking again. Voice clear as a bell, eyes set, back straight. "Because I've been working on this project for almost a year in Professor Oak's lab," she tells him coolly, flipping the PowerPoint to the next slide. "If you don't trust my word, you may speak with him after this presentation; I'm sure that he'll happily oblige."
She goes back to talking, and Gold starts paying more attention. She's told him for so long how hard it is, being a woman in science. But until now, until he's seen for himself, he's written it off as idle complaint. It's hard to think that when she's the only woman in the room, and she has to defend herself from all sides, all by herself.
But he wants to stand by her. That's because she is most beautiful when she proves just how strong she is.