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rainbowfic2015-06-27 12:33 am
bookblather) wrote in rainbowfic2015-06-27 12:33 am
Octarine 14, Lapis Lazuli 6: the price is paid in blood
Author: Kat
Title: the price is paid in blood
Story: Shine Like It Does - CIA AU
Colors: Octarine 14 (It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us.), lapis lazuli 6 (cocksure) and paint by numbers (Miranda wasn't too sure about this guy.)
Supplies and Materials: Eraser (CIA AU), acrylic (Making a huge mistake), watercolors (an urgent matter), stain (We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong. - Sir Arthur Eddington), glitter (Bears I have to say/Pretend we are children), glue (You often pull back into your shell when you're feeling insecure because creating boundaries gives you the illusion of safety. However, something is different these days; you're more likely to reach out to others instead of withdrawing away from them.)
Word Count: 2077
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Miranda gets a call in the middle of the night.
Warnings: implications of torture and mention of terrorism.
Notes: I said more CIA AU anon. This takes place in an AU where Miranda accepted the offer the CIA made her in college and became an agent instead of a lawyer.
When Miranda walked into the isolation room, she was nothing less than perfectly composed.
In fact, she thought some of her coworkers might be shocked at the idea that she could be anything less than composed. She went to great pains to keep it that way. With her family, with her husband, she could afford to be relaxed. At work, she had to be polished and perfect, a statue of marble.
It was her comfort that every single one of her coworkers had to be exactly the same.
And so too must their enemies. She was looking now at one of them, a half-sneering man in a nice suit with his hands tied behind his back and an affected air of insociance. She would do much the same in his position, but she was not in his position, and she never had been and never would be.
Miranda was good at her job.
For the moment, she ignored him. There were no mirrors in the room they were in, but the two-way glass had a bit of a reflection on it, enough to adjust her hair and wipe a smudge of lipstick from the corner of her mouth. She'd hardly needed it today, her lips already bitten red and kiss-swollen when she'd got the call.
Peter would not have let her answer if it hadn't been her work phone. Frankly, Miranda wished he hadn't let her answer it anyway. Her work was necessary and important, but when her husband was holding her wrists against the small of her back, there were so many things she'd rather be doing.
She checked her nails. The man behind her was growing restless.
"Did you know that I'm married?" she asked, casually.
She heard him suck in a quick breath of air, and no wonder. It was valuable information. Her giving it up like that, oh, yes, he should be worried.
"I didn't," he replied, his tone a bad attempt at matching her own. "It's a shame, though. Woman like you."
Miranda smirked at her own reflection. "Flattery will get you nowhere," she informed him. "Particularly since tonight was the first time I had seen my husband in two weeks."
There was a pause, and then the man, audibly wondering what this had to do with anything, said, "Was it."
She turned then, and gave him a smile that wasn't friendly at all. "So you'll understand why I'm a little annoyed that I was called into work on account of you."
"You could always let me go," he replied. It wasn't a serious suggestion, or at least it had better not be.
"Don't be silly," she said briskly, and walked over to him, her heels tapping against the floor. "And do try to understand my position. I want to go home as soon as possible." Peter, smiling at her, his hands on her... "And you, I'm sure, would rather not find out what the next level of interrogation is like. Why don't we help each other out, and you can just tell me what I want to know and be done with it."
"Can't tell you what you want if I don't know what it is, sweetie," he said, and winked at her. He probably thought he was suave. What idiot babies they were pulling into the service these days-- all hopped up on dreams of espionage and too many James Bond movies.
She sighed. "You think you're charming. That's rather sweetly naive of you, but you really aren't."
"Just give me a chance, darling."
Miranda ignored that little sally in favor of examining him. On second thought, he wasn't really a man; more a boy wearing courage like his father's overcoat. It explained his somewhat collegiate attempts to seduce her, anyway.
He was also quite definitely American. It wasn't the accent, though that helped pin him down; from his flat vowels she would bet he hailed from somewhere in the Midwest. No, it was the way he carried himself, all arrogance and exceptionalism, a firm belief in the individual's ability to outthink the group. He might have betrayed his country, but he was a product of it through and through.
"I'm curious," she said at last, when the silence had stretched on enough that he began to look uncomfortable. "What precisely did you think you were going to accomplish?"
That clearly took him aback-- he'd probably expected something along the lines of 'who do you work for.' "I... what?"
She went to the wall and leaned backwards against it, folding her hands over her belly. "We knew what you were doing, you know. All along. You aren't anywhere near as subtle as you think you are. So what did you think you were going to accomplish, selling our information to terrorists? You must have known you weren't going to get much at your level of clearance."
"I've done nothing wrong," he said, apparently on autopilot, because the next thing he said was, "And they aren't terrorists."
"No?" Miranda was at a loss for other ways to describe men who murdered innocent people for unclear reasons, but then, she was not this boy. "What are they, then?"
He opened his mouth, then shut it again, without a word.
Miranda sighed. "I thought so. Look, shall I explain to you how colossally you've fucked up? Apart from the fact that you don't think about who you're working for, your operational security is terrible. Espionage isn't like in the movies. You aren't James Bond, and you are not good enough to keep from getting caught."
For some reason, that put a bit of bravado back into the boy. He lifted his chin and grinned at her. "Yeah, but you didn't catch me for months."
"I told you, we knew what you were doing from the beginning," she said, flatly. "Didn't you ever wonder why none of your information was useful?"
Ah, that struck home. Still, the boy kept his guard up as best he could. "You're bluffing."
Miranda closed her eyes. She felt rather sorry for him. Clearly his handlers had found a boy with big dreams and thrown him unprepared into the fire, on the off chance they might get lucky. "This is not why spycraft is about," she told him. "It's not threatening assets, or... or breaking into the CIA building at night, heaven help us. It's careful thought and analysis and cultivating relationships. You're too... noisy, child. There's not an agency on Earth that wouldn't have found you in a heartbeat."
His chin thrust forward, arrogance and casualness a cover now for fear. "I'm not going to tell you anything. Whatever you do to me."
"Yes, you will," she said, gently. "You're going to tell me everything. And I won't need to do anything to do. Nothing physical."
The boy looked at her, and God, he was so young, still baby-cheeked and trembling. "I won't," he said.
"If it helps," Miranda said, "I don't particularly want to be doing this."
She knew it didn't help in the slightest.
Peter had waited up for her, and after she had specifically told him not to. At least he'd settled in bed, a book propped against his lifted knees and his reading glasses perched on his nose.
A wave of helpless love swept over her as she paused in the doorway. He just looked so... she couldn't explain it exactly but he looked like home and safety and all the things she'd never thought could exist before. Her own Peter. She could come to him with blood on her hands and he would only try to wipe them clean.
"I know you're there," he commented, licking his thumb to turn a page. "You don't move half as quietly as you think you do."
Miranda smiled, involuntarily. "I wasn't trying to move quietly," she informed him, moving into the room. "If I was you'd never have heard a thing."
"So you tell me," he said. He shut his book and looked up at her, smiling himself. "So that took a while."
She shrugged, and kicked off her shoes. "I can't talk about it."
Peter gave her a half-smile. "I know. Come here." He patted his lap.
She went, and lay full length on the bed, her face in his lap and her arms around his waist. Peter rested an arm over her shoulders, and ran the opposite hand through her hair, scratching lightly at her scalp.
He danced a hand across the back of her shoulders, his fingers skimming light as a breeze over her skin. "You're tense," he said, an observation.
"The thing I can't talk about was difficult," she said, her voice muffled a little by his thigh.
"Difficult to accomplish, or difficult to do?"
She knew the difference. Someone else might not, but she did. "Difficult to do," she said. "I... I'm used to this, I really am, but it was difficult."
"Hormones, maybe," Peter said, and Miranda shrugged.
"I don't know," she said. "Something. It was difficult. He was so young."
So young, mentally if not exactly chronologically, and now he would be going to jail for the rest of his life. He probably wouldn't be convicted of treason, but espionage most certainly, and no one wanted to let spies out of prison, for fear they hadn't learned their lesson. Poor child, he didn't even have the luxury of repatriation. He was American. All he had not was American mercy.
She sighed abruptly, and sat up. Peter's arms fell away from her like leaves.
"Am I doing the right thing?" she asked him.
"How so?" Peter sat up straight now, folding his legs to the side. "In life or in work?"
Miranda paused, thinking about it. She wasn't actually sure what she'd meant. "In... work, I suppose," she said, "but in everything, really."
"Well, yes," he said. "I'll be the first to admit that I don't trust the CIA, but I trust you. Do you think what you did was necessary?"
"Yes," she said, immediately. What that boy had said, what he'd overheard from his masters, oh yes, it had been necessary. "People will live now who might have died otherwise."
Peter nodded. "Then, yes, what you did was the right thing."
It was reassuring, but somehow not enough. Miranda leaned forward and tucked herself into her husband's side. Of course, Peter didn't know what she'd done, and what she would still do, what she would do over and over and over again for her country.
"He was so young," she found herself saying again, murmuring it into Peter's shoulder. He hummed, thoughtfully or just soothing. "Jack's age, maybe younger. He was so young and he was so stupid and I just wanted to send him home." She stopped a moment, swallowed it back. "But I didn't."
"Of course not," Peter said. He wrapped his hand over the back of her neck again, big and warm and comforting. "You did your duty." And there was the strange thing; he said that with no condemnation at all, only understanding and a warm sort of approval she had never expected from him.
He hated what she did. She knew that, had known it since the moment she'd first told him what she really did for a living. He hated it and yet he still loved her and approved of her, still put his arms around her and cuddled her close even when he knew she'd just come from an interrogation.
Even when he didn't know what she'd just come from, he still loved her.
"You don't know what I've done," she blurted.
His hand paused for a beat, then resumed massaging her neck, his thumb digging hard into the tight muscles at the base of her skull. "I think... I'm not naive, love. Someone has to do the things you do. I wish no one did, but that's the way the world is. If someone has to do it, I'd rather it was someone like you. You think about what you're doing. You think about why you do it, and how."
There was nothing she could say to that, and so she didn't try. Instead, she closed her eyes and nuzzled her face further into his shoulder.
"I love you," Peter said, softly.
Maybe in the morning it would be enough.
Title: the price is paid in blood
Story: Shine Like It Does - CIA AU
Colors: Octarine 14 (It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us.), lapis lazuli 6 (cocksure) and paint by numbers (Miranda wasn't too sure about this guy.)
Supplies and Materials: Eraser (CIA AU), acrylic (Making a huge mistake), watercolors (an urgent matter), stain (We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong. - Sir Arthur Eddington), glitter (Bears I have to say/Pretend we are children), glue (You often pull back into your shell when you're feeling insecure because creating boundaries gives you the illusion of safety. However, something is different these days; you're more likely to reach out to others instead of withdrawing away from them.)
Word Count: 2077
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Miranda gets a call in the middle of the night.
Warnings: implications of torture and mention of terrorism.
Notes: I said more CIA AU anon. This takes place in an AU where Miranda accepted the offer the CIA made her in college and became an agent instead of a lawyer.
When Miranda walked into the isolation room, she was nothing less than perfectly composed.
In fact, she thought some of her coworkers might be shocked at the idea that she could be anything less than composed. She went to great pains to keep it that way. With her family, with her husband, she could afford to be relaxed. At work, she had to be polished and perfect, a statue of marble.
It was her comfort that every single one of her coworkers had to be exactly the same.
And so too must their enemies. She was looking now at one of them, a half-sneering man in a nice suit with his hands tied behind his back and an affected air of insociance. She would do much the same in his position, but she was not in his position, and she never had been and never would be.
Miranda was good at her job.
For the moment, she ignored him. There were no mirrors in the room they were in, but the two-way glass had a bit of a reflection on it, enough to adjust her hair and wipe a smudge of lipstick from the corner of her mouth. She'd hardly needed it today, her lips already bitten red and kiss-swollen when she'd got the call.
Peter would not have let her answer if it hadn't been her work phone. Frankly, Miranda wished he hadn't let her answer it anyway. Her work was necessary and important, but when her husband was holding her wrists against the small of her back, there were so many things she'd rather be doing.
She checked her nails. The man behind her was growing restless.
"Did you know that I'm married?" she asked, casually.
She heard him suck in a quick breath of air, and no wonder. It was valuable information. Her giving it up like that, oh, yes, he should be worried.
"I didn't," he replied, his tone a bad attempt at matching her own. "It's a shame, though. Woman like you."
Miranda smirked at her own reflection. "Flattery will get you nowhere," she informed him. "Particularly since tonight was the first time I had seen my husband in two weeks."
There was a pause, and then the man, audibly wondering what this had to do with anything, said, "Was it."
She turned then, and gave him a smile that wasn't friendly at all. "So you'll understand why I'm a little annoyed that I was called into work on account of you."
"You could always let me go," he replied. It wasn't a serious suggestion, or at least it had better not be.
"Don't be silly," she said briskly, and walked over to him, her heels tapping against the floor. "And do try to understand my position. I want to go home as soon as possible." Peter, smiling at her, his hands on her... "And you, I'm sure, would rather not find out what the next level of interrogation is like. Why don't we help each other out, and you can just tell me what I want to know and be done with it."
"Can't tell you what you want if I don't know what it is, sweetie," he said, and winked at her. He probably thought he was suave. What idiot babies they were pulling into the service these days-- all hopped up on dreams of espionage and too many James Bond movies.
She sighed. "You think you're charming. That's rather sweetly naive of you, but you really aren't."
"Just give me a chance, darling."
Miranda ignored that little sally in favor of examining him. On second thought, he wasn't really a man; more a boy wearing courage like his father's overcoat. It explained his somewhat collegiate attempts to seduce her, anyway.
He was also quite definitely American. It wasn't the accent, though that helped pin him down; from his flat vowels she would bet he hailed from somewhere in the Midwest. No, it was the way he carried himself, all arrogance and exceptionalism, a firm belief in the individual's ability to outthink the group. He might have betrayed his country, but he was a product of it through and through.
"I'm curious," she said at last, when the silence had stretched on enough that he began to look uncomfortable. "What precisely did you think you were going to accomplish?"
That clearly took him aback-- he'd probably expected something along the lines of 'who do you work for.' "I... what?"
She went to the wall and leaned backwards against it, folding her hands over her belly. "We knew what you were doing, you know. All along. You aren't anywhere near as subtle as you think you are. So what did you think you were going to accomplish, selling our information to terrorists? You must have known you weren't going to get much at your level of clearance."
"I've done nothing wrong," he said, apparently on autopilot, because the next thing he said was, "And they aren't terrorists."
"No?" Miranda was at a loss for other ways to describe men who murdered innocent people for unclear reasons, but then, she was not this boy. "What are they, then?"
He opened his mouth, then shut it again, without a word.
Miranda sighed. "I thought so. Look, shall I explain to you how colossally you've fucked up? Apart from the fact that you don't think about who you're working for, your operational security is terrible. Espionage isn't like in the movies. You aren't James Bond, and you are not good enough to keep from getting caught."
For some reason, that put a bit of bravado back into the boy. He lifted his chin and grinned at her. "Yeah, but you didn't catch me for months."
"I told you, we knew what you were doing from the beginning," she said, flatly. "Didn't you ever wonder why none of your information was useful?"
Ah, that struck home. Still, the boy kept his guard up as best he could. "You're bluffing."
Miranda closed her eyes. She felt rather sorry for him. Clearly his handlers had found a boy with big dreams and thrown him unprepared into the fire, on the off chance they might get lucky. "This is not why spycraft is about," she told him. "It's not threatening assets, or... or breaking into the CIA building at night, heaven help us. It's careful thought and analysis and cultivating relationships. You're too... noisy, child. There's not an agency on Earth that wouldn't have found you in a heartbeat."
His chin thrust forward, arrogance and casualness a cover now for fear. "I'm not going to tell you anything. Whatever you do to me."
"Yes, you will," she said, gently. "You're going to tell me everything. And I won't need to do anything to do. Nothing physical."
The boy looked at her, and God, he was so young, still baby-cheeked and trembling. "I won't," he said.
"If it helps," Miranda said, "I don't particularly want to be doing this."
She knew it didn't help in the slightest.
Peter had waited up for her, and after she had specifically told him not to. At least he'd settled in bed, a book propped against his lifted knees and his reading glasses perched on his nose.
A wave of helpless love swept over her as she paused in the doorway. He just looked so... she couldn't explain it exactly but he looked like home and safety and all the things she'd never thought could exist before. Her own Peter. She could come to him with blood on her hands and he would only try to wipe them clean.
"I know you're there," he commented, licking his thumb to turn a page. "You don't move half as quietly as you think you do."
Miranda smiled, involuntarily. "I wasn't trying to move quietly," she informed him, moving into the room. "If I was you'd never have heard a thing."
"So you tell me," he said. He shut his book and looked up at her, smiling himself. "So that took a while."
She shrugged, and kicked off her shoes. "I can't talk about it."
Peter gave her a half-smile. "I know. Come here." He patted his lap.
She went, and lay full length on the bed, her face in his lap and her arms around his waist. Peter rested an arm over her shoulders, and ran the opposite hand through her hair, scratching lightly at her scalp.
He danced a hand across the back of her shoulders, his fingers skimming light as a breeze over her skin. "You're tense," he said, an observation.
"The thing I can't talk about was difficult," she said, her voice muffled a little by his thigh.
"Difficult to accomplish, or difficult to do?"
She knew the difference. Someone else might not, but she did. "Difficult to do," she said. "I... I'm used to this, I really am, but it was difficult."
"Hormones, maybe," Peter said, and Miranda shrugged.
"I don't know," she said. "Something. It was difficult. He was so young."
So young, mentally if not exactly chronologically, and now he would be going to jail for the rest of his life. He probably wouldn't be convicted of treason, but espionage most certainly, and no one wanted to let spies out of prison, for fear they hadn't learned their lesson. Poor child, he didn't even have the luxury of repatriation. He was American. All he had not was American mercy.
She sighed abruptly, and sat up. Peter's arms fell away from her like leaves.
"Am I doing the right thing?" she asked him.
"How so?" Peter sat up straight now, folding his legs to the side. "In life or in work?"
Miranda paused, thinking about it. She wasn't actually sure what she'd meant. "In... work, I suppose," she said, "but in everything, really."
"Well, yes," he said. "I'll be the first to admit that I don't trust the CIA, but I trust you. Do you think what you did was necessary?"
"Yes," she said, immediately. What that boy had said, what he'd overheard from his masters, oh yes, it had been necessary. "People will live now who might have died otherwise."
Peter nodded. "Then, yes, what you did was the right thing."
It was reassuring, but somehow not enough. Miranda leaned forward and tucked herself into her husband's side. Of course, Peter didn't know what she'd done, and what she would still do, what she would do over and over and over again for her country.
"He was so young," she found herself saying again, murmuring it into Peter's shoulder. He hummed, thoughtfully or just soothing. "Jack's age, maybe younger. He was so young and he was so stupid and I just wanted to send him home." She stopped a moment, swallowed it back. "But I didn't."
"Of course not," Peter said. He wrapped his hand over the back of her neck again, big and warm and comforting. "You did your duty." And there was the strange thing; he said that with no condemnation at all, only understanding and a warm sort of approval she had never expected from him.
He hated what she did. She knew that, had known it since the moment she'd first told him what she really did for a living. He hated it and yet he still loved her and approved of her, still put his arms around her and cuddled her close even when he knew she'd just come from an interrogation.
Even when he didn't know what she'd just come from, he still loved her.
"You don't know what I've done," she blurted.
His hand paused for a beat, then resumed massaging her neck, his thumb digging hard into the tight muscles at the base of her skull. "I think... I'm not naive, love. Someone has to do the things you do. I wish no one did, but that's the way the world is. If someone has to do it, I'd rather it was someone like you. You think about what you're doing. You think about why you do it, and how."
There was nothing she could say to that, and so she didn't try. Instead, she closed her eyes and nuzzled her face further into his shoulder.
"I love you," Peter said, softly.
Maybe in the morning it would be enough.