The days swung by without a call to battle in the way they often did - a fact that made Penny's on-edge nerves settle neatly into the niche of this brand new world like a cat getting comfortable on a window sill. The men she found herself suddenly surrounded by took her in with a surprising lack of pomp and circumstance, and instead of the cold shoulder she had thought to expect from a base full of dead-eyed contract killers most of them accepted her relatively kindly, a camaraderie, she discovered, forming out their mutual abandonment by RED proper. You were hard-pressed to find anyone on the base with a positive word to say about their mysterious employers, and this, she found, formed a bond deeper than any simple hello and a handshake.
In turn she learned their names, their quirks, their tales to tell, and they taught her the tricks of the trade to pass the time, spending sleepy mornings on the base's wooden parapet with dirty automatic weapons in hand. Sniper would slouch into shooting practicing, aiming with that kind of meticulous precision that Penny could only gaze at with an outsider's awe, and with a whip-cracking boom he'd shatter targets and send passing birds plummeting down to earth with an bewildered caw, slowly reloading after each bulls-eye with nothing more than a satisfied nod. Solider stood at attention nearby with a suspiciously watchful eye, raising a heavy eyebrow as his teammate demonstrated how to cock a gun or follow a moving a target, and in-between these unconventional spectacles they would trade battlefield tales, giving Penny a new perspective on the less-than-discrete ruse of Reliable Excavation Demolition. In return she would tell campfire stories of all that had happened in the outside world since their confinement out here in the great wide desert of Wherever, classes clawing to gather round the waifish girl in a kind of childish race to story time, men gasping and hoorah-ing over the news of a new James Bond movie or the prospect of putting a man on the moon. Despite any protests they may have expressed behind closed doors about how childish she was or how she asked too many questions or how she smiled too much, even when there was nothing to smile about, it was moments like these that showed how the boys really felt about Penny - even if they found her daydreaming aloofness disconcerting and her childish tendencies mind bogglingly irritating, they still had to appreciate what she had to offer by way of news.
Meanwhile Scout, tangled inevitably in the flurry of commotion his teammates made about her assimilation into the base, found himself taking her presence in a different way entirely. She made him punch drunk, sloppy, uncoordinated in all ways, and in attempt to avoid askew glances and passed mutters from his teammates he found it best to simply stay out of her way when others were around. Words would circulate around the mess hall like kitchen table gossip, each assassin throwing in their opinion on the unlikely accomplice to their daily grind, and when the train of table talk finally reached him he found himself devoid of a decent answer. How could he explain how her meandering glances, her wistful smiles, made him shiver like a lovestruck schoolboy? How the way she seemed to breeze through the base instead of falling in line with the heavy clatter of combat boots he was accustomed to made his head spin and his heart race? He fumbled for words in those instances, poking intently at his dinner with a mangled fork, and made a careful point to avoid the watchful eyes of those around him.
"She's, um... she's alright, I guess." He would stammer, adding with a hint of honesty: "I'm not used to having a girl around, man."
Spy, breaking from his usual intent silence at the end of the table, shot out a sharp laugh.
"Zat goes without zaying." And with a violent clatter the table would descend back into its usual madness, Scout flinging trays towards his reserved teammate with a slew of "fuck you"'s and "you fucking French rat"'s. They were all willing to admit that Penny's arrival had changed the entire clockwork of the base, but moments like these, the usual harmless fist fights and lash-outs met with unbridled laughter and ante-up betting, were really what kept them all sane. In such an upside down world where girls could fall from the sky and land with a smile and a hello, something had to stay the same.
And so with a harsh stumble Scout would ease around the truth of how he felt, quickstepping past his teammates or ducking out of populated rooms whenever the subject arose. Despite his best efforts, though, his impulses would always get the best of him when, in a tousled fury, one of his teammates would question her arrival suspiciously - a popular topic for the more paranoid members. He always shot to life like a bottle-rocket with a lit fuse, shouting out a string of less-than-eloquent curses at the disbeliever and pointing out how damn dedicated she had been to the whole fucking team since day one, and despite his back alley diction in a way he was right. Since her arrival, Penny had turned into a kind of ethereal backbone to the whole band, dabbling neatly in all of those grey areas that the specialized elects had no experience in. She turned measly rations into actual meals and sewed loose patches back onto sleeves by hand, spellbinding the entire base with the voodoo of half-hearted domesticity. A Snow White amongst nine gun-slinging dwarves, the boys were transfixed and terrified at the same time by her girlish game of House, some watching on carefully while others made a solid attempt to stay far out of her way, and, like cavemen shown fire for the very first time, with a little bit of practice they got along just fine.
Yet despite the tiny thrills she inspired when she hand-washed a shirt or sewed on a button, in all actuality her domestic skills hung well below sub-par in comparison to those of most girls her age in the outside world, each well-meant attempt punctuated by innumerable pin pricks and stove burns and other unique battle scars. In high school she had discovered that her lack of any remarkable talents wasn't rectified with homemaking, and despite her masochistically painful hard work she had still flunked out of her Home Economics class, burning soufflés and breaking lamps she was meant to repair with a heartbreaking clatter. The women around her insisted with a hiss that she'd never get a husband with clumsy hands like those, tsking quietly as she swept up shattered glass or bandaged mild burns, yet she discovered now with a self-satisfied smirk that trivialities like marriage weren't on the menu here; living to see the next sunrise was the real battle, and on some strange level that she was reluctant to admit aloud she appreciated that. Unladylike as it was, she found solace in the way the battles played out, how calculated each shot was, how thorough every move seemed to be, and like a chess game in high speed the bases would descend into this perfect choreography of battle that was, even in the eyes of an apathetic pacifist, simply spellbinding. The appreciation each man seemed to have for life was a breath of fresh air, coming from the mundane world where the most remarkable experience seemed to be showing up to work on time or learning shorthand, and the primal and genuine relationship that they had with each coming day made every morning a little more exciting. There was an actual appreciation for being alive here, something so easily dismissed in the outside world, and that alone spun lazy days into grand spectaculars. Even during the most lethargic of days she would still find herself tagging along with Demo to see how he made napalm from sawdust and left-over orange juice or with Engie to watch as he haphazardly drew out equations that she had only seen in the thickest of calculus textbooks, explaining in a low drawl how everything and everyone could be simplified into a number and an equation. The fort was never without its own unique brand of excitement, and even when the boys seemed completely incapacitated by their boredom they would still take to shooting at each other just for some mangled thrill of battle, an action scene which sent Penny's perspective of boredom on a tailspin.
This place, it was a battlefield with casual Fridays - a war-zone where the battle-cries were punctuated with giddy laughter and wild grins - and after a few days Penny had already realized in the back of her mind that the fort was one of the few places on this little planet where she had ever felt truly at ease, despite the newfound threat of stray bullets and an oh-so-close enemy base. There was no sense of normality here, no need to be the rosy-cheeked bride that she had found herself straying from so strongly back in the "real world", no job hunting, no blind dates, no evening cooking classes that her mother had so eagerly signed her up for in an attempt to make her a "suitable" wife. There was only life - pure, undiluted and entirely thrilling. The worries here seemed so incredibly substantial that they weren't even worries at all, a contradiction that Penny was completely content with, and despite having enemies, real enemies with guns and weapons and an assassin's training to boot, she figured that if she did catch a bullet to the chest or a knife to the back then at least she went out spectacularly, dying in a place that had, at least for a few days, made her truly happy.
And so they all lived together in an awkward harmony, forming a dysfunctional family of contract killers and psychopaths with an outsider stuck in between in a fumbled spin-off of Americana. And in the midst of this happy family stood Scout, dazed and jittery by his own slew of emotions and suddenly self-loathing from his inability to hold up the tough-kid sucker punch of machismo that had kept his standing here for so long. Penny's arrival was a bittersweet slice of humble pie - part of him despised the fact that anyone could break his will and shatter his control so quickly, let alone a tiny goddamned fairy of a girl whose crowning achievement on the base so far was that she could stay out of the way when the Boss Lady called, but the other part of him shuddered with the cold shock of knowing unequivocally, indisputably, absolutely how he felt. He fell over himself to reconcile the two worlds - the opposing tops of emotion that spun wildly inside of his already dizzied head - but instead ended up laughing too loud when the boys would make a joke about her or knocking on her door at all hours with nothing more to say than a silly question or an indisputably awkward excuse to see her again. Ironically though he could somehow manage to calm his nerves when they were alone, holding normal conversations about their lives before RED while she peeled potatoes in the kitchen or when she followed him to batting practice, but around his teammates the fear of his puppy love being discovered wreaked havoc on his already fragile social skills.
And so, reluctant to admit it, Penny was happy, content with having found a place to call her own. And, reluctant to admit it, Scout was happy, content with having found a girl that he would have killed to call his own. And though neither of them would say so, both were spellbound with something entirely new, and, unsurprisingly, both would do everything in their power to keep Penny from ever going back.