No clever intro. I am amazed I got this much done before college. What happened to that productivity?
"Do I look okay?" Jason fretted, walking into the kitchen even though he had been expressly told not to.
Leo waved a spatula at him. "Yeah, yeah, superman. Get out. I got people to feed and Hazel's still at the damn grocery store." Technically, that had been his fault: he didn't bake a lot, and had bought a brand of cream that would apparently make the frosting lumpy.
"You didn't even look!" Jason insisted, peering at the barely-reflective microwave. Leo didn't understand what the nervousness was about, since Jason and Piper had hit the sweatpants-and-oreos phase of their relationship in the months since they'd started seeing each other. Besides, when did Jason not look surfer-dude/movie star cool?
Leo gave him an appraising look. Hair-combed, shoes-cleaned Jason was dressed in nice jeans and an (ironed!) button-down and tie. "You're making me question my straightness. Happy?" Jason was way too perky and excited about this – maybe he shouldn't have made him chug an entire can of RedBull today.
"It's not long until everyone else arrives." Jason was taking his hosting duties seriously.
"I have a watch." Seriously, there was an entire half hour left. "Go pick a movie or something." He shooed. Jason went agreeably enough, telling Leo he had to get ready before everyone showed up. Leo rolled his eyes. Like he wanted to greet people in this stressed-out state, flour-covered Star Wars apron, and battered work clothes.
The universe had other plans. Reyna had let herself in quietly and made her way to the kitchen. She was wearing a green dress with shiny boots, and her hair was up away from the collar of a fancy jacket. Taller than him in the heels, she looked wildly out of place, and Leo couldn't help but wish he looked less like a scrawny mechanic who couldn't even clean up nice. He grinned and tried not to be too obviously insecure about it. "I was counting on y'all being fashionably late. Hence this disaster zone."
She held up a bottle of whiskey that he couldn't believe had fit in her purse. "Pregame."
"You don't pregame Thanksgiving, querida." He explained with mock patience. Had she done this before?
"Fine, Old Mother Hubbard." She huffed, setting down her things to inspect the food that was already set out. A smile tugged at her lips when she looked at him. "Not gonna lie, I expected you to have a 'kiss the cook' apron."
"Jason wouldn't let me." He sighed, looking longingly at her and considering the possibilities. "Star Wars was the most I could argue him down to. You can still kiss the cook if you want." She laughed without addressing that last bit.
"Could I help with something?" she volunteered helpfully, looking around.
"Go tell Jason that Piper will definitely like his tie." He ordered. "Try not to be too sarcastic about it." Reyna snorted and went to do it. He set the cranberry sauce aside to cool, hollered in the living room's general direction to turn off the oven if they smelled burning, and dashed to his room.
"The Giants are playing the 49ers!" Jason shouted, probably being heard down the street. "Kickoff is in half an hour!" Frank had agreed to watch football since everyone else had wanted to, and Jason was probably ecstatically reliving his high-school quarterback glory days.
"The Giants are gonna win!" Leo yelled back. His team was the Texans, but Jason was a die-hard 49ers fan and hated the Giants, so he obviously had to root for the opposite team.
"I will not have that kind of talk!" Jason returned loudly. "You get out of this house!"
"Maybe later, I'm changing my goddamn pants right now!" He heard a peal of laughter that definitely wasn't Jason. Crap. Reyna was hearing this too. Why did horrible things happen to good people? "And you're the only niners fan here!" That was probably true, anyway.
"There's one more." Reyna yelled. What?!
"Querida, how could you do this to me?" he shouted in mock agony, buttoning his shirt wrong in the process. "You're leaving me for another man's football team?" He could practically feel his roommate gasp in shock.
As he pretended his hair could be combed, he heard the sounds of normal-volume talking in the living room. He winced – he hadn't really caught Jason up on the fact that 'Querida' wasn't a sarcastic or ironic title anymore, and he hadn't planned on him finding out while they yelled across the house and risked the casserole burning down the kitchen.
The doorbell rang, and Jason answered it as Leo gave up on his tie and ran to check on the food. Hazel was back with the right type of cream, and informed everyone that Piper was trying to find parking and Frank would be there straight after work.
The last of the dinner things was set on the counter when Piper arrived in a red dress and matching feathers in her hair. Jason took her coat in the kitchen, asking whether she had known Reyna and Leo were officially a thing.
"That's a recent development?" she shrugged. "I kind of always assumed."
Jason was not happy about being left out of the loop. "He calls her querida." He said emphatically. "That's so cliché, even by my standards."
"It's better than mamacita." she seemed unaffected as she sat down on the couch. "The giants are going to kill the niners."
"THANK YOU." Leo grinned, high-fiving her. Jason looked betrayed, and pointedly turned towards Reyna.
"So, my new favorite person in the room, how was your week at work?" Jason asked. Reyna subtly stuck her tongue out at Leo before answering the question.
"They're crazy. She brought whiskey to Thanksgiving and he pours Capri sun into a glass from the pouch." Leo informed Piper. "We have the moral high ground."
"Whose side are you on, Hazel?" Piper asked.
"Who's playing halftime?"
Reyna tried to delicately extricate herself from the camping/sleepover-in-the-living-room situation that was happening. They had taken the game too seriously (the niners had won), played some basketball themselves, and caught the last two movies of a Harry Potter marathon the night before. Sleeping bags, blankets, pillows, and sheets were swirled and tangled on the floor. She couldn't believe she had been talked into going black Friday shopping.
She had barely rested – the wine, tryptophan, and exertion had put everyone to sleep while she had taken a bag of jellybeans to Leo's shop and sat running traces and coordinating the ops for Kronos's remaining two buyers. Poring over transactions was tedious, but it was necessary to tracing and predicting movements, and deciding how to handle the rumor of an attack on the UN committee expected in Washington in a few months.
Leo's alarm rang minutes after she had opened her eyes. The soft crackle of the radio was advertising a vacation in China and a tour of the great wall. He woke up and ran his fingers through his curls, offering her a hand to sit up. "We should go someday."
"To the great wall of China?" she mumbled, pretending to be sleepy.
"Why not? It's a wonder of the world. Probably on one of them must-see-before-you-die lists." He shrugged, searching the messy floor for a bottle of water.
All she remembered from the Great Wall is being shot in the hip in a firefight against the Triads, but she supposed he was right. It was an important tourist destination. "You have a list?" she asked, yawning.
"Yup. You in the morning is on there, too." He replied smoothly, stretching and cracking his back.
"I better be high up there." She warned teasingly. Frank stirred, accidentally nudging Jason awake.
Leo lay back down. "You're in the top three. Pretend you're asleep, Jason gets cranky if people are awake before him." Leo whispered.
Reyna did as he said, putting her head on his shoulder and wriggling comfortably. "What? Why?"
"Who knows?" Leo lay back down and shutt his eyes. "He gets a kick out of waking people up." He could practically feel her mischievous smirk as she burrowed closer to him and tangled her feet with his.
"He should have fun with this." She murmured. Leo held his breath for some reason, acutely aware of the fact that one of her socks had fallen off at night and that her foot was freezing cold against his calf. The ratty undershirt he had changed into to sleep was balled in her hand.
There was still probably a small concentration of alcohol in her blood, but in the moment she believed she could do without it. Technically speaking, she wasn't conning him in this exact moment; there didn't need to be any concern about his questionable clientele and her lack of honesty. At this exact time, there was only warm blankets and warm bodies.
Jason 'woke' them with a lot of blushing and apologizing and scolding when he had put the coffee on. Leo sat up with impossible cheerfulness; Reyna had drifted back to sleep for real, and glowered at the light filtering through the blinds.
"Morning, Querida." He greeted her brightly, un-sticking a lock of hair that had gotten caught in the collar of her jacket. She leaned to kiss his cheek, and his mouth parted in an 'o' of surprise. Jason looked away pointedly. Her entire team would probably have her head for being so disgustingly Hallmark.
"My breath probably stinks." She groaned as she realized it, rubbing her eyes.
Leo pecked her lips gently. This was impulsive, even for him. "Yup. Booze and Turkey." Reyna was torn between smiling and glaring. She had broken into this man's office. She could end up being the reason he went to jail or a mortuary.
"Get a room." Jason ordered, smiling good-naturedly, calling her back to the moment. "And brush your teeth."
"Sir, yes sir!" Leo barked. Piper, irritated with the harsh noise, flung her retainer case at him, missing everything in the room by a mile. Hazel was sitting up and shaking Piper, looking a bit disoriented. Jason shook his head and marched off, and Leo turned back to Reyna. "So, are we getting a room first, or brushing teeth?"
"How can you be so disgusting so early?" Frank asked, stretching. "What are you, animals?"
"Is he talking about our poor dental hygiene or our inappropriate jokes?" Reyna asked drolly. "Because both those things are arguably disgusting." Frank massaged his temples, sitting up slowly. Hazel was untying the scarf from her hair and watching with great amusement as Piper put off actually getting up as much as she could.
"I ate so much yesterday. I don't think I can move." She tried, turning onto her side.
"I think Jason can help you burn those extra calories." Leo offered.
"Valdez!" Frank checked the time. Half past seven was way too early for this.
"He meant by going shopping." Reyna clarified, her face completely serious. "Didn't you?" Even Hazel grinned at that, and Piper sat upright with her cheeks flushed pink.
After a lengthy argument about the inevitability of forgetting toothbrushes and the effectiveness of finger-brushing, a breakfast of Thanksgiving leftovers, a half-hearted cleanup of the apartment was underway. Leo was lip-syncing to some pop song, and Reyna flipped through store catalogs on the couch with the girls.
Hazel and Piper were engrossed in a discussion about hats vs mufflers. Reyna watched Leo through the corner of her eye, painfully aware that once the next few months were over, she couldn't help him: the protocol was clear.
A bomber jacket on the glossy page caught her eye, and the weapons concealed in her own clothes felt heavier. The jacket on the page had a lot of pockets, it would be a reasonable enough Christmas present, there was room to hide a compass, a knife, maybe some bandages…
There were so many differences between them; between their pasts, their training, their personalities, it was almost funny. Here she was thinking up skin-of-the teeth, against-all-odds plans to keep him safe, and he was insisting he could climb the Rockefeller Christmas Tree.
At least they both agreed rules were for breaking.
Leo had read his fair share of articles on how the government was spying on its citizens, and it had seemed way too tin-foil-hat to believe at the time. He wasn't willing to risk it anymore. He wasn't even sure what the braver option was – going home anyway and dealing with the consequences of his apartment being bugged, or staying hidden and trying to play the game. He had made it from Maine to New York City in about twelve hours, which was respectable enough for a guy who had only about seventeen dollars in cash and little knowledge of the outdoors. He hadn't been chased by a goose to give up now.
Piper trusted technology implicitly, and Piper would be driving Jason back from the airport, putting her faith in the GPS system to get her through the tangle of highways. The GPS was a machine, and he could work with machines. His phone was getting pretty good connection for an alley between a coffeeshop and a hardware store. Rerouting Jason and Piper would be easy enough. If he had to, he could find enough change in the street for a payphone to call Frank or Hazel.
He was breathing unreasonably fast, his palms sweaty. His feet bounced as he sat hunched over on a stoop, trying to concentrate on the phone in his hands. For a hot second, he considered calling Reyna, but he had no doubt she'd flung her cell into the Sound. This was surreal and bizarre, and he wished he could wake up from it. But his face was bruise-colored, his ribs hurt, and he'd only eaten peanuts and funyuns all day; it was as real as the hard concrete wall he was leaning against.
For a minute, he was a boy again, running from everywhere, beaten up and hungry and alone. He tried to calm himself down and focus on the fact that he needed to coherently explain what was going on when Jason and Piper got here. Running around like a chicken with its head cut off wasn't going to help him figure out why this was happening to him, whether it was really over, and where the woman behind it all was.
Piper stepped out of the car first, one hand on her pepperspray, and yelled in the direction of her car that they were lost. Jason grumbled that he knew it but she wouldn't listen, getting up from his nap and straightening his uniform. Leo ran at them (which probably wasn't the best idea considering they were in an alleyway in the Bronx) and wrapped them both in a hug.
Jason looked baffled, very concerned, and exhausted, but Piper spurred into action immediately. "What happened to you? You weren't home yesterday, and I assumed you were at work or at Reyna's place, but she shouldn't be home until next week." There was no good way to break this to them; they loved her too. Piper's worry was filling her with nervous energy. "Maybe start with what happened to your face. Please tell me you didn't get in a fight or spend the last two days here."
Jason dragged both of them to the car. "Talk and drive." He ordered, sensing something was horribly wrong. "Use the sprite as ice for your face." Leo lifted the cold-ish can to his cheek, lying down in the back seat. Piper was silent, as if anticipating the worst, while Jason and Leo had an eyebrow conversation via the rearview mirror
"We need to pick up Hazel and Frank and go somewhere that isn't one of our houses. I'd probably rule out the diner too." Leo told them. "And let's pick up some tacos or something."
Jason turned around in his seat to look at him. "What's going on?" Piper stared straight out the windshield, telling Jason to let Leo rest and that he might as well explain to everyone at the same time.
Frank got in the car with wide eyes, almost afraid to ask questions. Hazel told her fry cook to mind the place, guessing only "It's Reyna" as she sidled in next to Frank and Leo. They stopped for gas somewhere in Queens and got out by a hotdog place.
"So, Reyna is not here at this fine establishment." Leo began. "You'd think she's in Mexico like she told us she would be, but that's not it either." He looked around the little table, awaiting a response.
"Uh, are you going to tell us where she is?" Frank pressed after a silence.
"I would, but I don't know." Leo said truthfully. Everyone seemed to think this was a little anticlimactic. "I don't know because it's classified." It came out much more like a sneer than he'd planned.
"This better not be a joke. What do you mean it's classified?" Frank said
"As in Bourne-trilogy-tell-you-and-kill-you level stuff." Leo confirmed. "Which leads me to the story of my kidnapping." He told the story with only a small amount of exaggeration. His friends' faces were tight with fear and anger.
"And you're sure you don't know why you're tied up in it?" Jason pressed for the hundredth time. "She never let anything slide, not even a little hint?"
"She made me believe she was in love with me. She's not bad at her job." He said bitterly.
"And none of the people you talked to? They didn't tell you anything?" Frank pressed. Leo faintly wondered how many interrogations Frank had done, and whether that would be useful. Maybe he would have to learn torture resistance techniques from him in case he was kidnapped again.
"Don't you get it?" Leo half-shouted. "They're spies. She's a spy. A thief and a liar and a killer, and – and – and she – she still has my good Rolling Stones shirt!"
"A very salient point." Piper remarked drily.
"Don't tease him about that." Hazel reprimanded. "What we need to decide is whether to look for her or wait for her to come back." Even her smooth voice barely made anyone settle down.
"How are we supposed to figure out where she went?" Jason asked. "It's not like we can speak to the president or the head of CIA. It might be illegal to try. We're better off waiting and respecting that she has to do her job."
"She might not come back." Leo's voice broke. "She's not obligated to let me down easy."
"She wouldn't be cruel." Frank said gently. "She loved you."
"It could have been pretend." Leo insisted dejectedly.
"She loved you enough to keep you alive." Piper said. Jason raised an eyebrow at her. Piper slung an arm around his shoulder and spoke softly. "If she's as good as you say she is, it's not an accident that there was an inside man and a getaway car for you. She wanted you out of harm's way. There's no way she would want for you to risk your neck running after her."
Leo rubbed his nose a little. "I have to see her. I need to know."
"How? How would we even begin to narrow it down? The CIA is international, and we don't exactly have a shortage of bad guys in the world." Frank reminded him, trying not to be too pessimistic.
"Not to mention we're not exactly James Bond." Jason pointed out. "Leo, I would steal a plane and take you to her, but Frank's right. We don't even know where to start."
"I could file a missing person's report." Frank offered. "But they'd search her apartment and someone higher on the totem pole would tell them it was above their pay grade and that would be it."
Leo's heart sank, but he tried to be upbeat. "It sounds like a bad movie, doesn't it? 'A pilot, a chef, a cop, a mechanic, and a lawyer decide to get involved in the military intelligence game despite having literally no background in the criminal underworld." He had to laugh.
"I grew up in New Orleans." Hazel said very slowly. Frank held her hand tight. "There's a thing or two I understand about the criminal underworld."
Everyone's eyes bugged out. "I didn't know." Jason said, almost apologetic.
"It doesn't come up in daily conversation." Hazel shrugged. "I wouldn't have brought it up, but it seemed relevant."
"Were you in the mafia?" Leo asked, unable to help himself. "Wait, does New Orleans have a mafia? Is that just New York or are there regional branches?" He was making the mafia sound like the boy scouts. He was so not qualified for this.
"If I was in the mafia, I'd be in New Orleans or six feet under." Hazel said, almost nonchalantly. "I was more, ah, independent."
"A thief." Piper said. Her tone was not in the least accusatory; she seemed to be smiling sympathetically.
"Jewels and paintings." Hazel confirmed.
"She didn't want to do it. It was a bad neighborhood, and bad schools, and her home situation was – " Frank jumped to her defense.
"An explanation, but not an excuse." Hazel said. Leo was impressed by her dignity. She had started over from that; she was a respectable businesswoman now.
"Hey, I stole a BMW or two in my high school days." Piper said almost jokingly. "Bounced around juvie, whole nine yards." He was impressed with that, too: a former delinquent now handling court cases for kids who had gotten mixed up. Maybe he could be impressed with himself as well. He'd rebuilt himself too. Reyna had been impressed – or at least she had said she was.
"I'll steal you the Kohinoor in return for a really nice gold Lamborghini." Hazel offered, her face deadpan. Piper chuckled that she would see what she could do. Leo wondered what Reyna would think of the girls' pasts. (The Reyna he thought he knew had worked at a hair salon when she was younger.)
"So we can hotwire a car, steal a plane, set off a really big fire bomb, and use some expensive antiques to leverage Reyna out of wherever she is." Leo decided. "That seems to match our skill set."
"Frank, please tell me you used to be a computer hacker or something and you can hack into the pentagon." Jason pleaded.
"I scored the winning goal in a game of hockey and I survived breaking my grandmother's ashtray. That's the most badass things I did as a child." Frank put his hands up as if to apologize. "Without that information, we're out of luck."
"Jason, I love you very much." Piper stated suddenly. Everyone gave her identical looks of puzzlement. She took a deep breath to continue, fiddling with her lawyers' ring, which she wore around her neck. "And you've seen this ring before in case you were doubting I graduated."
"I love you too. And I know you're a lawyer." Jason's goofy grin was replaced by confusion. "Unless you're not a lawyer, because – Where was this going?"
"I am a lawyer." Piper reassured him. "The ring is real. So is the fact I love you." Was this a proposal? Because the timing was crap. Piper reached into an inner zipper packet in her purse and opened a small billfold, handing it across the table. "It's just that this is real too."
Jason's big hands were blocking pretty much everyone else's view, so they all leaned across to try to see. Wordlessly, he dropped the thing, stood up, and walked out. Frank and Hazel glanced uneasily at each other, then at Piper, asking permission to peek at whatever it was. Leo stood to follow Jason, grabbing the billfold off the table. He was standing next to Jason against the hood of the car before fully comprehending that he was holding a CIA badge.
Piper McLean's CIA badge.
Second to last chunk I have written. If you haven't noticed, there is literally zero rhyme or reason to where the chapter breaks are.