"I can't keep waking up to these reminders of who I am / A failure at everything / Eighteen going on extinct / I know my place / It's nowhere you should roam" -Reinventing the Wheel to Run Myself Over, Fall Out Boy
~xXx~
"We need to stop meeting like this," Nico says, when he finds her a sobbing, messy wreck.
"Last time you did not meet me, you called and I was crying," Thalia snaps, anger all she has left, the leaking, hissing life raft she is stubbornly clinging to amidst an ocean of tears. She spits the word crying like it is a swear, a foul word, and it is; weakness is forbidden in her line of work.
And then they have said enough words, filled enough silences, made enough conversation, pulled enough skeletons out of closets, because he is holding her, hanging onto her like if he doesn't he'll fall apart, instead of the other way around (instead of what shouldn't be, because she ought to be self-sufficient) (ought to be a thousand things she isn't)
They fill all the cracks in their souls with touches instead of mortar, and she kisses him, savours the pleased look on his face because rarely, so rarely is she making anyone happy, and she lets the feeling linger, lets it hold her together, chase away her demons long enough to ask him, "Do you want to come to my place?"
{~xXx~}
The lift doors open, and they tumble out, a tangle of limbs into an empty hallway.
"I want you," she breathes against his neck, looking up at him to remind herself who she is with. She doesn't need to, really, not with his scent clouding her senses, blooming in her mind. Without high heels on, her forehead tucks under his chin in a romance novel worthy moment where someone ought to think, like they were made for each other but she won't kid herself.
"All the way?" he whispers back, his breath a wisp like dandelion seeds against the shell of her ear before he scrapes his teeth against the lobe in contrast, making her shudder. He is measured, deliberate, careful, like he is scared of her leaving, like she might leave a gap that he can't fill. (too far too far shut up)
"Not yet," Thalia murmurs, fishing her key card out of her bag, opening the hotel door for them to stumble into but not onto the bed. "Other things, though...?"
"Sounds good," Nico tells her, breaking away.
They spend the afternoon- or what is left of it- watching old black and white movies, and an action one thrown in there, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Thalia's pick, to remind her of who she is, what she does- and what she can't.
They spend half of the movies making out on the couch of her penthouse suite.
Her shirt comes off, and so does his.
Her phone rings.
It is her dad's assistant, reminding her you have an appointment tomorrow with your father at eleven. Like he is a dentist. (root canals might hurt less)
Nico says that he should go. She ushers him out, pulls a shirt on, stealing his. He laughs at this, zips up his jacket with nothing on under.
She wonders what she's gotten herself into.
As she rides the elevator up, up,up, Thalia reflects on her life. She's been a rich girl, a party girl, a spy. A liar, an assassin, a traitor. Loyalties always in question; lonely, lonely, lonely.
Being a spy isn't all leather catsuits and glamour and secret trapdoors. It isn't oodles of money and top-secret gadgets and grenades disguised as lipstick, or whatever the James Bond movies say. It's not.
Here's what it is, in three simple words: pain, guilt, and fear.
The first one was the simplest: the physical, from an injury, a bullet, a laser, a broken leg from leaping out a window. The emotional: grief -despite what you'd been taught- when someone died, when life happened, at the general implications of what you were doing caught up with you.
Then came guilt, trickier, craftier. Guilt snuck up on you; you couldn't use it the way you could pain -as a distraction- and it refused to be ignored, refused to get easier to deal with. The first stab of guilt (an ache, really, but she prefers sharp pain to long dull pain, prefers things that hurt like heck and end really fast) was just as painful as the last.
And finally, fear. Fear kept you alive on a mission, spared you so it could play with you some more. Fear made you cautious, paranoid, a survivor. It helped you get the job done. But fear after the mission met up with guilt and threw a party in your head, asked you what have you become? while the guilt whispered you liked it, they screamed/cried/bled and you liked it.
That, Thalia thought, as the richly lacquered elevator doors opened, was the worst of them all.
Fear.
{~xXx~}
She needs to leave.
The luxurious, old fashioned top floor office that Zeus Grace occupies is sprawling and manages to -despite the dark mahogany wainscotting and eighties light fixture- feel spacious. But right now all Thalia feels is claustrophobia, like the walls are caving in and this lifestyle, this line of work, is a corset, with stays yanked to bone-crushing tightness.
"Your behaviour has been unacceptable. Jason never would have done something like this," her father continues, ignoring the fact that Jason has forsaken his family to go to Princeton and become a lawyer instead of being the heir to Grace Enterprises, Inc. Leaving them, leaving her, to her father's mercy- and he only has mercy for strangers.
"Jason isn't even here, " She pointed out. "Surely you didn't keep me here to do what you always do, which is scold me. "
"I do have a motive for your presence here. We discovered some startling footage back in New York, which I want you to look at."
Shifting forwards in her seat, Thalia drops her bag onto the floor and peers at the monitor that her father turns to face her. A fair-haired man wearing a black ski mask, black everything, really, punches in the override access code, and then enters the high-security vault. The screen shows him speaking to someone on an earpiece, and Thalia jabs pause.
"Wait! The only possible place you could be speaking to someone with an earpiece in the high-security areas is in the control room! Where's the control room footage for..." She squints at the date- "August fifteenth, five-fifty-five pm?"
Her father turns the monitor back towards himself, types in a few things, and then swivels it back to her. "There."
The man in the control room is not masked, but she doesn't recognize him, even though something niggles at the back of her mind, insistent. Around him, the normal control-room operators are tied up and unconscious in their seats; he is standing up. "Do you recognize this man?" She demands.
Zeus Grace frowns, stroking his jaw in thought, then looks pained... betrayed? "That's Winston. He tutored your brother when you were young... and Luke."