Author: Rhiannon
Spoilers: This probably shouldn't be read unless you've seen all of the series.
Rating: PG if you can translate the Italian, G if you can't.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Except Marco, the whiskered and overweight Italian teddy-bear.
Synopsis: Doujima meets with a contact from SOLOMON, receives some bad news, and does some shopping. The suspicious circumstances surrounding SOLOMON spies.
Notes: I'm not too familiar with the metric sizing system, or even entirely certain if that's what is used in Japan, so Doujima's dress size is my best guess. This is also one of those fics where I woke up the morning after writing it, and wondered what I had been drinking. Literally, since this was written New Years Eve. Wine might maketh the hearts of man glad, but it sure don't maketh the words of fanfic authors coherent.
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We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes...
- Paul Laurence Dunbar, 'We Wear the Mask'.
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It was twenty-five minutes after noon when Yurika Doujima came slinking into the store, almost an hour after they had agreed to meet. Marco Bianchi tried to conjure up a scowl, but he was used to it by now. For one of SOLOMON's most talented spies, she was awfully... Tardy.
"You're late," he informed her, pushing away from the mirror-covered support beam he had been leaning on. The saleswoman behind the front counter was watching him nervously out of the corner of her eye. He really couldn't blame her; he had been lingering at the designated meeting place for a long time, and a fifty-year-old Italian man seemed distinctly out of place among the rows of women's dresses. He could only guess at what the poor woman thought he was doing there.
Not surprisingly, Yurika had been the one to choose the location.
She waved off his reproach with a slender hand, before pulling a dress off the rack and holding it out before her, examining it closely. "I slept through my alarm this morning. It took a little longer than expected to get away from the office for a shopping trip." She glanced at his briefly. "Why are you complaining? It's not like you have anything to do but sit in your motel room and wait for me to call you with information."
Marco tried to formulate a response without much success, and finally just sighed. He would be so glad to get away from this assignment when the time came, passing carefully guarded information between HQ and their bad-mannered contact. Yes, he would be glad to go home to his home and his family and perhaps even a nice retirement. He was getting far too old for this.
"Do you think they have this in a thirty-eight?"
He gaped at her as she waved the dress under his nose.
She caught sight of the expression and smiled pleasantly. "You're right. It is a bit too short." She replaced it on the rack and moved on to the next thing to catch her interest, a pale blue monstrosity that was barely an inch longer than the first one she had chosen.
Soon, he reminded himself. He would be allowed to go home soon.
Clinging desperately to that thought, he finally managed to speak. "Do you have anything for me?"
"I don't know. Do you look good in powder blue?"
He took a deep, calming breath as she shoved the dress she had been looking at into his hands, and firmly resisted the urge to simply let it drop to the ground. "No. I'm more of an autumn. You know that's not what I meant." Helplessly, he trailed after her as she switched racks once again.
"I do have a little something more," she replied, just as he had started to think that she would completely ignore his initial question. She reached into her purse and drew out a slender manila folder, offering it to him without looking up. "No one suspects me of anything, but they also don't trust me with anything really important, so my access is somewhat limited. One of the disadvantages of playing stupid."
He was sorely tempted to ask if she was really playing. He held back; for one thing, no person who was so skillfully managing the delicate position she was in could actually be stupid. For another, she probably wouldn't take the insult kindly, and she wasn't a woman that he wanted to offend. Or rather, he didn't want to offend some of the people she was connected to... Such as her father, who was high-ranking enough within SOLOMON to make Marco's life very, very difficult, no matter how close the man and his daughter actually were. Or rather, how close they weren't, if rumor held any truth.
He had gotten quite good at keeping silent in the time he had known Yurika, no matter how much she sometimes grated on his nerves. Rompicoglioni.
Some of these thoughts had to have shown on his face, because she glanced at him an made a very rude sound in the back of her throat. "Oh, don't be such a bore, Marco. You're stuck with me for now." She gently patted his gut with the file folder, and he flinched. "Suck it up. Aren't Italian men supposed to be all tough and manly?"
He couldnt help a small smile at that, as he took the file with his free hand. "Sí. But everyone knows that we're terrified of our women. Rightfully so."
She laughed delightedly at that, and ran her fingers over the front of a silky-looking red dress before handing that to him to hold as well. "When should we meet again?"
Marco cleared his throat, suddenly uncomfortable. Doujima actually looked up from her shopping, one pale brow rising above the frame of her sunglasses. When he still didn't speak, she prompted him impatiently. "Yes?"
The word was dragged out over a full three syllables, and he fought another wave of sullen irritation. He remembered a passing comment she had once made, about how her boss was always yelling at her, and suddenly found himself in complete sympathy with the man.
All the same, he kept his voice even when he broke the news to her. "We won't be meeting again, Yurika."
"What?"
He sighed, and felt a gentle pang of guilt. She seemed so confused, and in spite of her confident airs and annoying habits, he suddenly recalled that she was only about as old as his youngest daughter. How would he feel if someone put his little Marianna in this position? "SOLOMON is pulling me out. I leave the country tomorrow night. Things are starting to get heated here, and..." He forced a little laugh. "You know as well as I do that I'm far past my prime, but I'm still useful, and I'm not going to be able to protect my own hide should things go bad. Headquarters would rather that this not be my last mission. I'd rather that it was, but not because I got caught in the crossfire. I want out of this business."
She wouldn't look at him. Her head was tilted to the side slightly, and there was a peculiar little smile on her lips. "Like rats bailing out of a sinking ship," she mused, her voice bright yet humorless, then shook her head as if to clear it. "They won't let you go, you know. They won't ever let any of us go. Not even me, and I'm sure that my father would pull some strings if I really wanted out."
It took him a moment to realize that she was responding to his last comment, having skipped over his leaving Japan entirely. "You don't know that," he replied quietly, even though the sinking feeling in his gut told him that she was correct.
That peculiar little smile again. "Perhaps you're right," she said, and he was surprised that she hadn't argued. The woman standing before him seemed different from the Yurika Doujima that he had come to know, older and more solid, and he suddenly wondered if he had known her at all.
It was a foolish thought. Of course he hadn't, and he was probably the one who had known her best. It made him sad, and he wished idly that he could still conjure up the frustrated irritation that he had felt only a few minutes earlier.
"Yurika...," he started, even though he wasn't certain what he could say. There was nothing for him to say. He hadn't known her, but he had known some of the truths behind her lies, just as she had known some of his. Surely that was something?
And now he was pulling out, and she would be the only liar left.
He cursed himself for a coward and remained silent. In the end, there was no truth between liars.
"How does SOLOMON intend to contact me?," she asked, interrupting his thoughts. It was an interruption that he was grateful for.
He shifted the dresses on their padded hangers to the same hand with the file, and fished into his pocket to pull out a card. The only thing written on it was a number; no name, nothing to identify who it belonged to. "This is a secure line," he told her, and reached out to tuck the card into the front pocket of her jacket, "They'll give you more information when you call. It's not as good as passing information through me, of course, but it will have to do."
"It will," she agreed. Then the strange seriousness that had come over her seemed to disappear, as abruptly and startlingly as it had come. She laughed a little, and leaned forward to place a smacking kiss on his whiskered cheek. ""Goodbye, Marco. I hope your wife beats you when she finds out that you've spent your time away from home consorting with beautiful blonde spies." She took the two dresses from his hands, and hooked them over her shoulder in a practiced movement.
"With a rolling pin," he assured her, and he smiled with stiff lips, because if she could pretend then so could he. "While using words on me that no man ever wants to hear from his wife's lips."
"Good," she said, with a bit too much glee for his comfort. She turned on one of her ridiculously high heels, heading not towards the door but deeper into the store.
"What are you going to do?," he said to her retreating back, and even he wasn't certain if he was asking about her current plan or the situation at large.
She turned back to him, hiking her brows in a manner that made it clear that she thought the answer to his question was glaringly obvious.
"Shoes, Marco. I need shoes."
And that about seemed to sum it up.