Three things: 1. This is my favorite chapter that I've posted so far, so please enjoy it.
2. It's nearing the end of the semester for me, and while I have a fair number of chapters written for this fic, I don't want to post more frequently than I can finish new ones. I won't have any time to write for the next week or so, so I'll probably only post once or twice within that time.
3. It is my birthday today, so you are all morally obligated to post a review, subscribe, favorite this, etc. (Just kidding. (No I'm not.))
With a quiet groan, Matt threw the cheap ballpoint pen down onto his desk and rubbed at his tired eyes.
He had finally—finally—finished the paperwork from his mission in Quito, which had gone south, and gone south quickly. He had even more paperwork to complete than after his mission in Ho Chi Minh City, which, if you had asked the Matthew Morgan that had just returned from the mission in Ho Chi Minh City, he would have told you that would be impossible.
It didn't help that as he wrote about the absolute disaster of a mission, he was distracted by thoughts of his impending vacation.
It wasn't an exciting or exotic trip, but Matt needed to use up his mandatory vacation days, and it was his dad's birthday next week, so why not go home? His flight from Dulles to Omaha would take off tomorrow just after noon, and then he would be spending more than a week on the family ranch.
Matt stood from his desk and stretched. His coffee had gone cold, so he decided he would take a victory lap in the nearest employee breakroom and refresh his mug.
The breakroom was a sad and dreary little room a little way down the hall, lit entirely by glaring fluorescent lights. Most employees tried to avoid it, because even people trained on what to do when they're being tortured or held in an enemy prison didn't want to spend more time in that miserable room than they had too. But that's where the coffee was, so they couldn't avoid it entirely.
Matt was a little surprised to see Joe standing in the breakroom, casually leaning against the wall with a coffee cup in hand, his back turned to the door. Joe was talking to someone that Matt couldn't see passed Joe, but as he silently stepped into the room, his surprise grew when he saw that it was Rachel Cameron. She was wearing a flowy, floral print dress that she looked lovely in, but Matt had a hunch that Rachel Cameron was generally a lovely person and looked lovely in everything. As she talked to Joe, she was absent-mindedly pulling at the string of the tea bag that was steeping away in her mug.
"Oh, Matt." Joe said, turning sideways to watch as Matt topped off his own mug of coffee. "Have you met Rachel Cameron? Rachel, this is—"
"It's fine, Joe. We've met." Rachel said, interrupting gently. "It's nice to see you again, Matt."
"You too, Rachel." Matt stood a little straighter and smiled gently. "This savage isn't bothering you, is he?"
Joe rolled his eyes.
"He's perfectly civilized."
"Well, I live with him, so forgive me if I have a different opinion on the matter."
"And how do the two of you know each other?" Joe asked before either one of them could say anything more about himself.
"Classified." They answered together.
"Of course it is." Joe rolled his eyes again. "Don't you have a hundred pages about your mission to Quito to write?"
"I finished it two minutes ago."
"What happened in Quito?" Rachel asked, turning toward Matt. Her eyes gleamed.
"I'd rather not go into detail, but it involved a poorly made pipe bomb, a litter of kittens, and a dumpster full of rotten vegetables."
"Oh." Rachel's perfect nose crinkled as she imagined the horrifying possibilities. "Were the kittens alright?"
"They were fine. The dumpster, on the other hand…"
Before Joe could say something irritating, they were joined by a fourth person, a young woman in jeans and baseball jersey.
"Now this is a fun crowd. Shirking your desk job duties, are we?"
Abby Cameron had the look of someone who had just come back from a mission. Her eyes were bright, her posture perfect. She'd only been tailing a foreign operative around DC, but she looked alive.
"Just talking." Rachel replied, finally tossing her teabag into the trash. She and her sister—the two of them, Matt had known, looked very similar, but seeing them next to each other was startling—busied themselves by pouring cream and sugar into their drinks.
"Hey, Morgan. I heard that HR forced you into taking a vacation. Where are you going?" Abby asked, her back turned.
"Nebraska." He and Joe answered together.
"The hell are you going to Nebraska for?"
"It's home. My dad's birthday's next week, and since I was working on Christmas, I'm a little delinquent on my visits."
Abby laughed, and then turned around and said, with a shrug, "Hey, speaking of birthdays." Her eyes were still sparkling. "Do you know Alan Morrison? There are some people getting together to celebrate his birthday at a bar tonight. It's a casual thing, everyone's invited, and—" She paused, and looked over Matt and Joe's shoulders to check that the door was clear. She mouthed the words he's going to propose to Jennifer.
She said the last part with a significant look at Rachel. Matt knew that Rachel and Jennifer were a part of the same graduating class at Gallagher, but he didn't know if they were actually friends or not.
"Oh, I'll go." Rachel said immediately.
"Yeah, sounds great." Matt answered before he could even stop himself. He had never had a conversation with Alan that hadn't been about work, and he barely knew Jennifer, but, well.
Interoffice fraternization was important. At least, that was Matt told himself.
Two minutes later, he watched the Cameron sisters depart from the break room, and had no choice but to confront the smirk on Joe's face.
"What?" He snapped, before turning on his heel and leaving the room.
Hours later, Matt was sitting at a table with Joe and the Cameron sisters in the middle of a bar. It was a Thursday night, and it was fairly quiet in the dark, wood paneled room. It was filled with about two dozen of the CIA's youngest employees, all of whom were talking and laughing in hushed tones.
When they'd arrived at the bar, Joe sprang ahead to claim a table, and Abby followed a step behind. They sat next to each other, leaving Rachel and Matt to sit next to each other.
It was not the most covert setup that either Joe or Abby had ever engaged in.
As soon as the four of them were halfway through their drinks, Abby and Joe disappeared. They both had co-workers that they simply must talk to, about very important things, in the middle of a bar, without performing a bug sweep beforehand.
For ten whole seconds, Rachel and Matt were silent.
"They're not very covert, are they?" Rachel asked quietly. She wasn't looking at him—she was swirling the little straw in whiskey and coke.
"No. I thought they were supposed to be better than this."
"I've seen them be better than this."
Matt took a deep breath. Clearly, Rachel knew what was going on just as well as he did, and clearly, Joe and Abby had noticed that there was something between them. Matt realized that he had engaged in riskier operations so he decided to take the chance. He opened his mouth, and with the smile he'd been using to get out of trouble his entire life, said,
"We could… disrupt their mission."
"How?" She asked abruptly. There was a faint smile on her lips, and her eyes were bright, but Matt could tell she wasn't entirely certain where he was going with his suggestion.
"Well, I would propose one of two options. Either I ask you out on a date, and you agree, and we tell them immediately so they stop looking like amateurs, or, I ask you on a date, you agree, and we keep it a secret from my best friend and your sister just to see how frustrated they get. After all, at this very moment Dave and Christine are blocking their view of our table, so they can't read my lips and see I'm confessing to you that I really enjoyed working with you in Paris, and that I'm interested in taking you to a nice dinner that doesn't end in the discovery of some bloated corpses."
Matt watched as a wolfish smile spread across Rachel's face. She turned away from him for a moment to take a sip of her drink—a rather more dainty and flirtatious sip then Matt would expect from a woman about to reject his offer of a date, so he wasn't discouraged as she turned back to him and said,
"Matthew Morgan. I want you to know, that I never pass up the opportunity to mess with my sister's head. So the first option is good, but the second option is better."
"That's the one I preferred too. I'm going to be in Nebraska until the Sunday after next. Is the Tuesday after that good for you?"
"Unless something very unexpected comes up, I'm free."
"Then I guess I have something to look forward to."
"Me too."
And then they struck up a totally innocuous conversation about baseball.