"I let you out of my sight for 5 minutes and you get into a knife fight." His tone was already grating on her and he hadn't said but one sentence.
"For the record, Lieutenant, I didn't start it, and I would hardly call this a fight," Thea looked at her captive, "and if I were calling it a fight, it was the most pathetic fight I've even witnessed. What would you say?" Thea addressed the once-so-confident-now-nearly-whimpering hitman, who was, to his credit, smart enough to not answer. She continued. "Too bad this guy never had a chance."
She pressed the knives closer to his skin. "Seriously, you think getting me is worth a mere 1,000 gold pieces? You were completely jilted."
"Give me the knives, Thea." He stepped closer, a hand outstretched. "We're on a tight schedule here."
"You may be, but I'm not. I have to teach this idiot a lesson first." She glared at the shaking hitman.
Jim growled, "I said give me the knives, Thea.", raising his voice just a little bit, but just enough for her glare to shift from her pursuer to him.
Before releasing the squirming hitman, she purposefully nicked him under the jaw and pricked him in the back making him yelp pathetically as he jumped away.
Thea walked away briskly towards the Lieutenant as her assailant ran off in the opposite direction, probably on his way to spreading even more unwanted publicity about her current situation. If he had been smart enough to notice the uniform the Lieutenant was sporting, the rumors and the talk were definitely going to be interesting.
As she passed by him, she slipped the knives into two of the many secret pockets that lined the inside of her cloak. "You've been ruining my fun all day, so I'm taking these as compensation."
"Oh, yeah, I've definitely ruined your fun." He jested, giving her a sardonic smile. Well, maybe not-quite-a-smile, but his tone held a note of playful sarcasm that pulled at a corner of Thea's mouth into her own version of a not-quite-a-smile.
She had taken them the back, roundabout, and sideways way to get to her apartment. After the encounter with the single hitman, emphasis on single, Thea was taking almost every precaution to get home without hundreds of weapons weighing down the pockets of her cloak. When they finally reached the front door, she had a mind to make the Lieutenant go first (and he probably would have, given his gentlemanly training) just to make sure that if there were going to be any casualties during this little excursion, it wouldn't of her. But then she reconsidered it, knowing how terribly mean that sounded, even to her. She did have feelings and a sense of decency. At least most of the time, even when it came to certain Lieutenants of the Interstellar Federation.
She inspected the door for any signs of forced entry before removing the key from the heel of one of her boots, all the while trying to ignore the Lieutenant incessant foot tapping.
"You know we have less than half an hour to get you down to the Sector Hall?" He chided.
"Yes, Lieutenant, I know how to keep time."
He rolled his eyes at her instead of chastising her for being snarky. He knew they simply didn't have time for it.
The door sprung open as the locking mechanisms all moved into their designated places, revealing what Jim had expected to be a dark, cold room with sparse furnishings and maybe a few scattered reward postings plastered to the walls, but this place was completely unlike what he had imagined.
"Are you going to come in or stand out there and wait?"
Thea was hanging her cloak on a stand by the door. She looked completely out of place in her worn leather boots, dark pants, muddy green tunic and bedraggled expression. He stepped through the door into a place that looked like it belonged to someone far younger and far more innocent than Thea Wren, what with the room being encased by bright colored walls and almost every surface being overtaken by dozens of little potted plants. All of it further emphasizing the notion that she was far more than she seemed.
Out of everything that filled the small space, Jim was drawn to the far left wall. It was covered from floor to ceiling with drawings and paintings of all shapes and sizes. The ones on the bottom were more childish and abstract with imagination but they got more realistic the higher up he looked. He was probably looking at hundreds of different pieces of artwork of all different mediums, no two the same whether it be because of the subject or the style. There were beautiful canvased landscapes of far off places nestled among rough sketches and illustrations of anything and everything on scraps of old paper.
"Did you do all these?" He asked, his voice almost a whisper. His mind was boggled.
Thea looked at the wall and then at him, her expression so un-Thea-like it made him laugh, which, of course, only made her scowl in return.
"Hey, don't get mad. These are amazing." He stepped closer to the wall to examine a particular painting that had captured his attention.
Now it was her who looked a little star-struck. He thought they were amazing? The only other person who knew of her talent had been Spratt, and he'd never so much as batted an eye at her work. And yet here, again, was the Lieutenant going against her initial judgment of him. Amazing?
"Where did you learn to do all this?"
"I guess I kind of taught myself." She replied. "It was one of the few things I had a natural talent for when I was growing up, besides, you know, my other more utilized aptitudes for pilfering and committing arson." She thought she'd get a rise out of him for that, but he wasn't really paying attention, instead he was looking at one of her more recent paintings. It was a collection of stars scattered among a black sky. Simple really, but if you looked closely, the black wasn't as much black as it was a mix of blues, purples, greens, and oranges, all creating something so vast and mysterious and so undeniably beautiful.
She walked up next to him and asked tentatively, "What do you think?"
Thea had never wanted to know, nor did she usually ever care, what anybody thought of her or anything she did until she saw the way he looked at her painting. She liked to think that she had always been independently minded; perpetually unaware and uninterested in what people thought of her, but seeing the way Lieutenant James Hawkins was staring at something she had created without contempt or condescension made her want to know what exactly was going through his mind. She could see his eyes roam from one edge of the painting to the other, his look unfaltering. "Well?" She urged.
He peeled his gaze away from the stars and looked to her.
"Eh," he sighed, "it's okay."
She could tell he was joking by the way he flashed her a certain smile, but that didn't deter the heat that reddened her cheeks.
"Don't be such a prat." She knocked him in the shoulder ever so slightly, a little conscious of the action when she shouldn't have done it in the first place. The relationship between her and the Lieutenant was complicated enough after spending less than an hour together, she didn't need to feed the fire anymore, but for some reason, she couldn't help it.
"Come on, what do you really think?"
He looked back to her painting briefly before answering in a soft voice, "It reminds me of the first time I saw something like this. The stars all around me making my head swim, but in a good way, I guess. It makes me feel like I'm there again, and how much I miss going out there."
Unable to weather the possibility of looking into his startlingly turquoise eyes again, and chastising herself for using the verb startlingly (really?), she backed up till she reached the door of her bedroom and grabbed the handle. "You don't fly anymore?" She asked quietly.
He stuck his hands in the pockets of his, (wonderfully fitted, Thea just noticed), uniform pants and kicked haphazardly at something invisible on the floor.
"Well, not exactly. Been grounded for the last six months on account of something I pulled a while back." He had wandered over to one of her bookshelves and was now scanning the titles, whether it was because he was truly interested or just snooping, she wasn't exactly sure.
He sighed. "Once you get a taste of recklessness, it's hard not to go back to it."
He realized he shouldn't have said that when he noticed how her eyes narrowed in suspicion.
"Anyway," he added quickly, "escorting that ship to the Coral Galaxy was going to be my first voyage back out there, but something about that didn't go quite as anticipated." He turned and gave her that coy smile again, the way it made his eyes light up had her forgetting all about his minor slip-up.
She leaned against the solidity of her door, grateful for its support to endure that smile. "Teasing me about it now, are you? Does that mean you've forgiven me?"
Was she flirting?
And had he forgiven her?
Jim thought about it. When he had walked onto the RLS Andromeda less than 72 hours ago, he had been furious and hell-bent on finding whoever had stolen those Helium-4 barrels. He had even gone so far as to persist, past the point of irritation on his Captain's part, that he be put him in charge of the investigation. When he had been granted leadership of it, it hadn't taken long for someone to drop the name "Thea Wren" accompanied with some hard evidence, and he didn't hesitate to have a warrant written out for her arrest. But since then? Since he had seen her in the moment her spirit had nearly deteriorated at that table?
Even though he had spent less than an hour with her, so much had been exposed about Thea Wren and her secret life, that his perception of her had changed, in spite of the fading bruise along his cheekbone. Initially, his mental image of her had been of some lawless thieving crook with a sinister smile and an attitude to match. She was still a thief, and basically lawless, and, technically, a crook, but what he had thought her to be when he discovered the missing Helium-4 didn't match who he was looking at now. With her back against a door, surrounded by all her books and artwork and plants, with her pretty green eyes anticipating his answer, she looked like a normal twenty-something-year-old girl, not a wanted felon.
Maybe that was just part of her guise? Maybe she was just playing him. But maybe that wasn't it at all. He was completely confused when it came to her, but he knew one thing at least; that to him she was someone who couldn't be classified by something as superficial as a criminal or a gangster. That barely scratched the surface of what she was and who she was. He knew what the Galactic Code told him he was supposed to think of her, but that wasn't how it was. Whether that was because of what he had seen in her and ultimately recognized in himself, or it was because he was good at getting himself into trouble, he wasn't sure, but he was sure that there was still more to figure out, and he had always been too curious for his own good. He took a deep breath.
"I—"
Thea's eyes had wandered to the clock just to the left of Jim's thoughtful expression. "Holy Stars! Is that really the time!?"
Jim followed her gaze to his right and his eyes bugged. "Are you serious?!" He looked back at to where Thea had been as she now bolted into the room behind her. "Be back, in like five seconds, I swear!" She yelled frantically just before the door slammed.
They had less than ten minutes to get all the way across to the other side of the city to Sector Hall, a trip that, Jim knew, took way more than the time they had.
"I am so dead."