orgilotes | so little time and only passing through

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modern au,
psl

so little time and only passing through

Andy kept her face down in her book, though she knew exactly how many people were in the café with her. She knew where they were in the room, what they were carrying, whether they were armed. She knew the man at her left elbow, sitting at the next table over, was a veteran from somewhere. Somewhere evidently not happy, given his service animal parked under the table by his feet. She glanced up at and past him, thumb marking her place in her book as she flicked the other fingers of her free hand clear of crumbs.

The café had baklava, and it--and pizza--were her weaknesses with food. It was so delicate and sweet, and she'd never forget how heavenly it had tasted the first time Quynh had pushed it to her lips, insistent. Quynh was always insistent, and had been even in her assurances to Andy that they'd always be together. And they had.

Until they hadn't.

Whether Quynh was actually dead or not Andy didn't know: they'd met on a foreign joint-operation and taken to one another immediately, and over the long, long months between when that operation had ended and when they'd met again Quynh had been in every one of Andy's dreams. Then she'd gotten time for rest-and-rec and Andy hadn't even questioned where she'd go, or who she'd see. They hadn't left the bed for an entire day. And things had gone that way for a long time, with letters and emails passing between them to mark the inanities of their lives, teaching each other their own languages--Andy spoke several, though for work she mostly stuck to Hebrew, and Quynh had been startled to learn her native tongue was Ossetian. They would meet and part, and spend time together, growing ever closer and happy. But the time when Quynh was supposed to meet Andy in Tel Aviv, Andy had opened the door to find two somber uniformed officers instead.

Her stomach had dropped like a lead weight and she didn't remember the rest of the next two weeks. Her unit didn't know exactly what had happened, but Andy was cooler, meaner: gone were even the little passing, laughing smiles that had lit her face occasionally at their jokes and jibes. None of them knew about Quynh, but they knew something was off. But they came and went, rotated on and off the unit, and Andy stayed. She was good at what she did, and what she did was good for the unit. Until three months ago it very abruptly hadn't been, and that brought her here.

Sitting at a café, trying to read and not concentrate on the dog whining at her, or the telltale buzzing in the back of her head that, had she been paying attention to it, would have heralded a trauma spiral about to begin. She just wanted to read. Quynh had always talked about traveling: she devoured travel guides and books about far-off places, marveling that the world was so easy to traverse now. There had been no excuse in her mind to not go, see things, meet people. It was why Andy was sitting in Rome, her hands cradling a guide book with trembling fingers, eyes closed in useless defense against the chatter of Italian she didn't speak.

"Can you stop her doing that?"

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"It does not matter. You lost her, the pain is there. A slip of paper does nothing for or against that." Marriage was a social construct. Love was human nature.

The waitress came and set their, thankfully still warm, food down. She also brought them two waters for when their drinks were gone, a rather pointed look at Nicky as she set it down. He didn't say anything, but his lips did curl a little upwards at their corners.

Once they were alone again, he shook his head and waved away her words. "I'm not going to eat in front of you without you eating, and if I don't eat she'll have my head."

Edited 2020-09-30 23:13 (UTC)

Andy followed that pointed look, and flicked back and forth between Nicky and the waitress: she'd eat, but at best it would be perfunctory. She'd had breakfast, and hadn't been eaten overly regularly for the past few weeks at any rate. The bagel wouldn't kill her, it was just extra calories. Maybe she'd stop losing weight here.

"No one really...knew," she said softly. "Israeli military--you can be out, officially, it's fine...but people still say things." Andy hadn't wanted to draw undue attention to Quynh, already a known outsider given her position. Nationalist militaries were insular to begin with, and her unit had been more so than most, a tight-knit group. But why exactly she was telling a stranger any of this was a mystery, though Andy didn't want to examine it. It felt too good, too normal to be speaking to someone who knew.

Someone else who broke the rules they'd all learned growing up: boys fell for girls, fighting was bad, love lasted forever. Andy suspected Nicky knew those falsehoods even better than she herself did. "Does it stop feeling like...this? Eventually?" she asked: surviving in the civilian world, chaotic as it was and alone, felt like those protracted deafening-ringing moments after a flashbang went off, or having to learn how to operate again missing a dominant hand. It was proving difficult indeed for Andy.

Edited 2020-10-02 17:21 (UTC)

He'd done his Italian duty of putting food in front of her. The rest was her choice. He'd met his obligation and felt no shame in neatly cutting his sandwich into thirds to make it easier to eat.

"I'm sorry. My husband was from Tunisia. It's illegal there, so he left. His family knew, of course. We still talk over the computer."

Was that strange that he still spoke to his in-laws? He didn't think so. His own family had disowned him, after all, so they were all the family had left. Samar still called him abnay. He blinked away the lump in his throat and pushed his plate to the side in favor of picking up his coffee again.

"No. But it gets easier. You find ways to make it easier." He reached down and Gioia shoved her muzzle into his hand, content to lay there like that until he let her go. "I struggled. A lot. Eventually I learned about these guys," he gently shook her muzzle and her tail thumped on the base of the table. "Things are better now. She keeps me from getting so lost in my own head. Gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning."

She took a breath, and watched as Gioia put her head in the man's hand.

"Did you meet while you were in?" she asked. "We--her name was Quynh. We met doing a liasion with interpol, and...it just worked. I loved her." It was a soft admission, but no less important for that, and not entirely sure how to follow that up.

He shook his head, smoothing his fingers over the fur between Gioia's eyes and up over her ears. It was methodical and habitual, a motion that he was obviously very familiar with. Self soothing in a way that made talking this much for this long easier. He still wasn't good at the whole talking 'thing' sometimes.

"No. We met in school. When he got his citizenship, we went in together." They had already been married, so they'd served together. Until they didn't anymore.

He looked away and took a large drink of his coffee.

"Sorry. I don't...talk much, anymore."

She shook her head. "You don't have to." The questions were personal: probably too personal, but that was all Andy had been asked in the last several months. Exit debriefs were never easy or enjoyable.

"You were lucky to have him."

"And you were lucky to have her." Because she was. Love was something that he never regretted feeling, even if it had far too quickly warped into one of the most painful things.

The memory of waking up in Joe's arms wasn't something he'd trade for all the dreamless sleep in the world.

He was quiet for a moment, understanding her pointed line of questioning. They weren't good at small talk anymore. None of them were.

Reaching down, he pulled a pen from Gioia's vest and scrawled out a phone number onto his napkin. After a moment, he added another. Then he put the pen back and rezipped her vest before he slid the napkin across the table.

"The first number is the number of the guy who handles my support group. You should see about coming. See what it's all about. It helps.

"The second is my cell phone. I might not answer right away if I'm having a bad day, but keep calling. You'll get me."

She could have talked about something painful for hours: it was normal things that were beyond her. She didn't know sports teams, she knew war. She knew battle strategy and breach techniques and how to disarm an anti-personnel mine in under a minute with someone else's foot still on it, but she couldn't do small talk. The weather, the news, clothes? What did she know about those?

Quynh had been the one to drag her out at night in slim cigarette pants and a button-up, a silly carefree smile on her face so broad she thought her cheeks would seize as they tugged each other across roads and sidewalks and through markets.

"I..." Shouldn't intrude, didn't plan to stay, didn't want to be a burden, all the reasons flitted through Andy's head, but none materialized into words. "I'm... Here," she said, halting even as she pulled her phone free of her pocket: when she unlocked the screen, a face was smiling out, a Vietnamese woman with silky black hair and beautiful eyes. Andy swallowed when she looked at it, but handed it to Nicky. "You can put yourself in. If you do that."

He could understand that. The mind clung to the pain a lot harder than it did to the laughter. Learning to focus on the good instead of dwelling in the bad was a coping skill that took a lot of time and effort. It was certainly a skill that had eluded Nicky for the first year he'd spent ghosting.

Honestly, it still eluded him sometimes.

He took her phone and called himself, pulling out his own phone as well so that he could save both of their contacts. He added (Gioia) next to his name in her phone. Along with his own number, he made sure to program the other number, as well. He labeled it 'G.T.-Start coming here' and handed her phone back across the table.

"There. I mean it. Call anytime. My sleep schedule isn't exactly a 'schedule' anymore, but I'm sure you can understand that."

"You really like that group therapy thing," Andy murmured, glancing at the phone.

She didn't sleep much either, and understood it perfectly when he said his schedule really wasn't one. Hers wasn't either. She'd stayed up until almost dawn that morning, after only a few restless hours of sleep early in the evening.

"I'll call. I don't know if I'm staying here for very long--I'm still in a hotel, I don't know if I'm going back to Tel Aviv or not," she said, shaking her head. There wasn't much for her there. There wasn't much for her anywhere, truth be told, but maybe she could find something. Somewhere. Why not Rome.

"What did you do while you were in?"

He shrugged one shoulder, leaning back in his chair to hook one elbow over the back. It was a casual position, relaxed...but he was also angled so he could see the entire courtyard and the street beyond.

It made it all the more believable when he flicked his gaze back to Andy.

"I was a sniper." If he'd been closer to his discharge, he would have continued it with his exact rank and title. He'd been out long enough, however, that his work spoke for itself. You don't get to be a sniper without a significant amount of training and skill.

"I would offer a couch to feel more human on, but I don't have one. I've only been here a few months myself." He was still in the VA apartments, looking for a place of his own but it still didn't feel right.

"Everything still feels too big."

She nodded once, short and professional; a recognition of how much training he'd have had. Andy knew exactly how specialized that field was, and that was coming from her. She had none of the patience to sit for hours and hours marking a target, though she hardly even flinched at hostage recovery, disruption of weapons smuggling or human trafficking, or much else. She was a damn good soldier.

"I'm...I was Unit 269. Sayeret Maktal, IDF." She had to stop herself from giving a rank and serial number: it was so very much second-nature that she stumbled over not saying it, shaking her head.

"It's difficult to not say all of it. I still forget sometimes, even if I'm out." It didn't feel real sometimes, like this was all some kind of dream an she'd wake back up in the field, sleeping against a fellow unit member, or curled up against Quynh in their bed. God, what she wouldn't give for that part, that brain-aching, heart rending loss to be a nightmare, nothing substantial. "They do a good job breaking us, don't they?"

Edited 2020-10-18 04:08 (UTC)

Everyone had something they were good at. They were all trained to fulfill the basics and the standards, but everyone had a unique skill that offered something special to their team. Nicky had patience and the ability to turn off his compassion. Joe had close blade skill and an easy ability to lighten the hearts of those around him.

Or maybe that was just Nicky.

He smirked and nodded, looking down at his half eaten sandwich and untouched chips. He wasn't going to eat any more. Probably not for the rest of the day. He could almost hear Joe's disapprove 'tsk' in the back of his mind and his eyes softened for a moment as he shifted the plate further away.

"They do. I did the full introduction for probably a full six months. On bad days, it's still in my mouth. I've just gotten better at swallowing it again.

"You will, too. You just have to give it time.

"This place doesn't help. Rome is beautiful and glorious...but it is big and busy. Things were a little easier in Genoa, but I couldn't stay there. I still haven't found anywhere better, though."

She let out a faint huff of a laugh, more a sort of breathy sneeze than anything else. "You would have liked it where I was born. It's a few hours outside Tbilisi, but very small. Quiet, if you're the right kind of person."

Andy was not. It was why she had left: fear was a way of life in any place that had once been part of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and Andromache was fearless. She never hesitated to charge into a problem, to dive head-first into any challenge she found. It had made her a valuable asset to the unit in many ways.

"I do miss the horses, though. I grew up on a farm, so...I liked them. We had drafts."

Just because he wasn't going to eat didn't mean he was going to not drink his coffee. Another image of Joe 'tsk'ing at him popped up in his mind's eye and he hid his smile in the foam of his drink.

"It sounds beautiful...but probably a little too quiet. I grew up in Genoa, which has never really been small. Not as big as here, of course, but it's a port city. New faces every day and all the cultures and habits you can possibly think of. I had hoped to go back there after his funeral, but.." He shrugged a shoulder and took another sip of his drink to hide the pain in his eyes.

"It didn't work out. Horses sound nice, though. I've never been around them, myself. Gioia here is the closest I've ever had to a 'pet'." Under the table the dog perked her ears at the sound of her name, but she didn't move.

"Oh, it was," she replied, turning her teacup around in her hands. "Too small. Too...it wasn't even a town, really. More like a village." She hadn't been a good fit there much past childhood, especially not when she'd come out to her family. Two of her four sisters still spoke to her, though they were far-flung across the globe now, but her parents and youngest sibling hadn't had any contact with her since she'd left.

She'd initially tried to stay close, but Russian military expectations had not suited Andromache, nor had she suited them. So she'd ended up in Israel. "They were quite a bit like Gioia, honestly. They were working animals. But I loved riding them, and even doing the work for them. They...show appreciation better than most people do."

"Most animals do." Under the table, Gioia shifted a little to put her head on Nicky's foot and he glanced up and past Andy. "The waitress is coming back." With a box and a stern talking to if her bemused smirk could be believed.

He intercepted her with a quiet chuckle and something that could have been reassurance, but it was all in Italian. She pointed at him with the waxed cardboard and he laughed, but nodded and took the 'threatening' tool from her hand. In exchange, he handed her a card and she ran it quickly through the tablet that she pulled from her apron pocket. He signed the screen and she smiled at them both before once more leaving them to their conversation.

Nicky's smirk lingered on his lips for a moment before he started moving the barely touched food from his plate to the box. "She likes to fuss over me. She's taken up the role of my sister while I've been here. Apparently, she likes you and thinks that it is lovely that I've made a new friend."

That got a faint laugh from Andy. "We've known each otherfor...what, an hour, and we're friends already?" she asked, faintly lost at the implication. She didn't have many friends, or any really: just teammates, unit members with whom she was closer than others.

"Why didn't you eat?" she asked, glancing from the plate to the box with a lifted eyebrow.

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so little time and only passing through

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