AN: This chapter brought to you by excessive Boxing Day shopping and Star Trek music fanvids.
Disclaimer:
I own nothing you recognise. This is all completely un-beta'd and totally fresh off the top of my brain!
"How old are you?" Phil asks one day as he drops off more reports. She looks up and grins.
"Don't you know it's rude to ask a lady her age?" she replies glibly. Her tongue peaks out between her teeth as she grins him down. He returns to his office, thwarted by his ward's cheerfully secretive manner.
She tells him on their second mission, when all has gone to shit and she is applying a brutal tourniquet to his leg to slow the bleeding from the hole in his thigh, there courtesy of an unexpected bullet. "If I still had my vortex manipulator, I could tell you my exact age. I stopped counting after a while, but I think I'm closing in on half a millennia." She says it in part apology, part distraction as she yanks the tourniquet – her belt – tight enough over upper his thigh to slow the blood chugging through his femoral artery and onto the floor.
"That explains a lot," he grits out around her glove, which she had whipped off and shoved in his mouth so he didn't destroy his teeth. Her mouth twitches into a grim smile.
"You don't get to my age without learning a few things in the meantime. Now, let's get to evac. Stetson's cleaned up." She hoists him up and together they hobble out of the 'abandoned' warehouse in the boonsticks.
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