New fic: Salus et Humanitas
Title: Salus et Humanitas
Universe: The Librarians
Character / Pairing: Eve Baird, Eve Baird / Flynn Carsen, the LITs
Spoilers: Light for the series.
Rating: PG-13 / T
Beta: Many thanks to phdelicious. All errors are mine.
Word Count: 3473
Summary: Eve, now and then.
Author’s Note: The Dinopark in Vyskov, CZ is a real thing. So is the bar in Boston.
***
They are back to back, Flynn’s head down trying to decipher the text that holds the key to getting away from the monster. Eve is holding the monster off with a broken pipe in one hand and her gun in the other. She is having more success with the pipe.
“Hurry up, hurry up,” Eve says, landing a satisfying blow to the monster’s side.
“Working as fast as I can,” Flynn says. Eve can feel him shift against her, can imagine his fingers running over the aging pages. “I thought you were supposed to be good under pressure?”
He’s teasing, even in this environment. “Terrorists and bombs, sure,” Eve says. “I’m still getting used to horned things with wings the size of a pickup.”
“Takes some practice,” Flynn responds. The monster runs at Eve again, and she spins them both away from the book for a moment. “I don’t think it felt normal for me for four or five years.”
Eve uses the distance from the monster to fire a shot at what she hopes is its head. “Plebe year was great training for a lot of crap,” she says. “Just not this.”
Flynn looks over his shoulder at her before bolting back to the book. “I have a hard time picturing you at West Point.”
Eve laughs. “Really?” she says. “Fourth generation. I’m still bummed I wasn’t Brigade Commander.” Eve takes a swing at the monster, this time landing a hit that seems to stall its progress. “You ready?”
“Got it!” Flynn says and then looks at the monster and utters what could be Latin or Greek. The monster disappears.
“Yes,” Eve says. “You did.” She grabs him by the hand and they run for the door.
**
She knows why Flynn can’t imagine her at the military academy. The Eve Baird he knows is his Guardian, his lover, a woman increasingly comfortable with the unknown and the unknowable, less bound by rules every day. This Eve Baird knows of magic and is learning-slowly, she’ll admit-to let the details go.
She grew up in Stuttgart and Aviano and Okinawa and a particularly dusty patch of Texas. By the time her father retired, he was Lieutenant Colonel Howard Baird and her mother was Mrs. Lieutenant Colonel Howard Baird, and given those choices, Eve knew early she preferred her father’s path.
“It’s 1990,” she remembers yelling at her mother. “Nobody gets married out of high school anymore!” Except around her, the girls on base were thinking about it, seriously.
“Evie,” her mother said, “you could just find a nice boy and settle down. Or go to school for nursing.”
“Did you miss the sexual revolution?” Eve yelled. “Did you miss everything about me?”
“I just don’t want you to limit your choices,” Eve’s mother responded evenly, but Eve didn’t think much of choices that were teacher or nurse or housewife.
And the door slammed, of course, because doors were always slamming in their house, Eve’s mother overwhelmed by a daughter who refused for even a second to be the girl she was supposed to be. To be much of a girl at all, Eve considers now.
The first thing she did at West Point was cut her hair as short as regulations for women would allow.
**
“My major at the academy was Defense and Strategic studies,” she tells Flynn later, after Jenkins has locked up the book and Eve has scrubbed herself of monster blood and they are resting in Flynn’s suite.
She had thrown herself all-in; not as a soldier-scientist or a soldier-historian, but as a soldier’s soldier, one who could assess any situation, give orders in any context. They hadn’t known what to do with her; women weren’t permitted in combat, but they couldn’t deny her the degree.
“My first degree was in Anthropology,” Flynn says. “I was twelve.”
Eve tries to imagine Flynn as a child. She imagines a serious boy, nose in fifty books at a time, with a prankster streak that he rarely indulged. Eve suspects that Flynn is more fun now than he was as a child. But she says, “When I was twelve, I wanted to be an astronaut.”
“I wanted to be-.” Flynn furrows his brow. “Probably an anthropologist and a linguist and an Egyptologist and a priest.”
“A priest?” Eve says, giving him an exaggerated once-over. “I don’t see it.”
Flynn shrugs. “I thought religion was interesting,” he says. “I hadn’t quite figured out that I could study religion and not take it to the very end.”
Eve smiles. “I get that. It took me a lot longer than twelve to figure out that I could be-I don’t know. More than just the best soldier ever.”
Flynn glances at her, sidelong. “What changed?” he asks.
Eve thinks about it. “You did,” she says, even though it’s only mostly true.
**
Kuwait was as dusty as Texas and hotter, too. By the time Eve arrived, the Gulf War had ended, but she had requested-insisted on, as much as possible-an overseas deployment in as military a capacity as she could find. Women as military police were successful in the conflict, and her commander accepted her with a curt, “You a lesbian?”
“No sir,” Eve responded.
“Damn,” her CO said. “Lesbians are easier than straight girls. Straight girls get pregnant.”
She thought for a minute about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and all the ways in which this conversation was a terrible idea, but said instead, “It won’t be a problem, sir.” He nodded, and Second Lieutenant Eve Baird set about being neither a lesbian nor a girl who would get pregnant, shipped home, and kicked out.
Trying to fit in with the guys meant seeing a lot of porn. Too much. “Don’t you ever get sick of that shit, Ramirez?” she asked one of the kids as he splayed out with a magazine in hand.
“Ain’t got nothing better to do,” Ramirez said. It was true, even if Ramirez claimed to have a girlfriend back home, because the nights were cold and long and impossibly dull.
“Seriously,” Eve said. “Play a game of cards or something?”
“Strip poker?” Ramirez said, leering over the top of his magazine. “See if you can make me forget this?”
She was his boss and it was disgusting that the only thing to do in that moment was say, “In your dreams, Private. But I’ll take all your money if you’d like.”
“Ain’t got any of that, Lieutenant,” Ramirez said and went back to his magazine. Eve shifted two chairs over and dealt herself a hand of solitaire, counting the minutes until she could head back to barracks without causing a stir.
**
The next day, Stone, Cassandra and Ezekiel come through the door with a jumbled story about-“Slow down,” Eve says in her best annoyed Colonel Baird voice. “One at a time.”
“Everyone is love-struck,” Cassandra says.
“That doesn’t sound terrible,” Eve responds.
“No,” Stone says. “Like, really love-struck. No one’s doing any work or any chores or anything other than staring into each other’s eyes. “
“It’s very creepy,” Ezekiel says. “Very.”
Jenkins descends the stairs. “How peculiar,” he says.
“How helpful,” Eve responds, peering down her nose at him. “Is this a known phenomenon?”
“Not sure,” Jenkins says. “Flynn might know-he’s around here?”
“Yes, yes,” Flynn says, scurrying in, from behind what Eve doesn’t know. “I’m here. Love-struck, you say?”
“Very,” Stone says.
“Creepy,” Ezekiel responds.
“I think we need reinforcements,” Cassandra says. “I think this is really big. And very bad.”
“Cupid?” Eve asks, because it’s obvious and the only thing she can think of from mythology that might be involved.
“No, no,” Flynn says. “More likely Pothos or Himeros.”
“Of course the Greek gods were real,” Stone says, and Eve is a little put off by the note of awe in his voice.
“And very dangerous,” Jenkins says.
“And what do we do about it?” Eve asks.
“We have to save the town!” Cassandra says.
Flynn pokes a finger in the air and scurries out, surely in search of a book. Eve watches him go, still more amused than concerned, though she’s sure the danger will come when they’re dodging angry Greek gods - “Unrequited love!” Flynn calls from somewhere beyond her sight-who take their sexual frustration out on mere mortals.
**
Eve’s first real boyfriend took her dancing.
She was between assignments with time to spare and no interest in spending it with her parents, happy to be itinerant for a minute, a lifetime. She landed first in Boston and shortly thereafter in a basement bar with a great beer list and a history of live music decades long.
She sat alone. The music was louder, a little more punk rock than she might have chosen on her own, but it suited the mood. It was a good night to be angry for no reason other than opportunity, and Eve let the bass and guitar thump through her heart.
But it was a bar and she was a woman alone and it wasn’t too long before a man sat down beside her. “I’d buy you a drink” he said. “But I don’t think this is really your scene.”
Eve glanced at him. It didn’t look like his scene either, but what did she know? She knew pidgin Arabic and was thinking of a language course, she knew how to clean and reload her weapon in a minute flat. She didn’t know if this man-her age, probably, with a crisp haircut and an easy smile-fit in at a club like this.
“Maybe not,” Eve allowed.
He extended a hand. “Chris Johnson.”
She shook. “Eve Baird.”
Chris Johnson held onto her hand. “Come on, Eve Baird. I’ve got a great spot for you.”
It was a jazz club, straight out of Big Band, featuring the kind of music her father sometimes played at parties with her parents’ closest friends.
“You know how to dance?” Chris asked.
“Many years of Arthur Murray,” Eve said, and at that moment, being the daughter of Mrs. Lieutenant Colonel Howard Baird had one sole benefit, because she took Chris’ hand and led him to the floor.
“Perfect,” he replied.
**
Eradicating angry Greek gods with a penchant for instilling feelings of hopeless longing in the population takes a few days. For several fascinating hours, Ezekiel and Stone make eyes at each other while Flynn and Cassandra dance around them trying to break their attention.
“Maybe we should leave them like that,” Eve says as Cassandra circles the men, muttering.
“No,” Flynn says. “It’s not-it doesn’t-it’s not doing this to people who have genuine feelings. It’s doing it to people that don’t like each other or don’t know each other. That’s just-.”
“Creepy?” Eve asks, leaning against the desk where Flynn has set up his work.
“Yeah,” Flynn says. “But more than that. Cruel. The whole point of love is choice, right? It’s not the way every society thinks, but ours does, and I don’t like to pass judgment, but-.” He shrugs, then looks straight at Eve. “For these people, and their values, in this context, it’s cruel.”
**
She spent half a year in Monterey, learning Arabic and hating another hot climate. California was less dusty, but still hot, and Eve longed for seasons and rain. Not a likely future, she figured, with language training almost guaranteed to send her back to the Middle East.
She took her limited leave in Seattle, learning to love coffee and hate beat poetry, clichés both.
“I hope you’re happy,” her mother wrote, and Eve couldn’t tell if there was approval or disdain behind the blue ball-point pen. “Whatever happened to that nice young man?”
The nice young man lived in Boston and stayed in Boston, and for Eve it was language school and then-and then. Then, her not-quite-combat experience and weapons skill and familiarity with the Middle East and Associates Degree in Modern Arabic landed her as close to the front lines of Operation Enduring Freedom as they could send her.
Afghanistan was hot and dusty and so angry, and Eve spent her rare free waking hours in the gym beating the shit out of the punching bag or the soldiers who thought they could take her on. “Captain,” they whined when she wiped the floor with them. “Come on.”
“Not my job to make you feel good about yourself, soldier,” Eve said.
No, it was her job to keep them alive. To assess threats and understand the ways the Taliban would use every weapon in its arsenal, bombs made of nails and fertilizer that soon grew so potent that the armored vehicles had to be redesigned, would use its women and children to counter her efforts.
Soon, her skillset had a new name for a new era. Counter-terrorism came with more classes and a different approach, and soon Major Eve Baird found herself in Brussels briefing the NATO command team about limiting the spread of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats.
Her mother’s ink-stained letters grew more strident, even as Eve found herself at the center of so many important fights. “I don’t care about their hearts and minds,” her mother wrote. “I care about yours.”
**
Flynn fucks like he fights.
His sense of purpose never wavers, but the way he multitasks makes it look like he is much less focused than he is. Eve comes, hard, to Flynn explaining the peculiar details about the sexual rituals of the Sambian tribe against her skin.
“Good?” he murmurs, resting his chin against her chest. She’ll need to wipe the grin off his face one way or another.
Eve grabs him by the ear and pulls him up to face her. “On you, it works.”
“Thank you,” he says, leaning in to kiss her.
She collapses on the pillow. “Gimme a sec,” she says and Flynn obliges by shimmying to lie beside her, propping his head up on his arm and smiling down at her. Eve scrunches her face, because he’s still smirking.
“What you said earlier,” Eve says when she catches her breath. “About choices.”
“Ah, yeah,” Flynn says.
“I’ve never been able to choose both,” Eve says. “This and-.”
“Being the best soldier ever?” he asks.
Eve nods, because it’s strange, fighting beside Flynn, sometimes fighting with him, more often than not sleeping at his side. “It was always one or the other,” she says.
His eyes sparkle. “Maybe it’s fate,” he says, leaning closer, wiggling his eyebrows. “Or magic.”
“Oh god,” Eve says. She sits up and grabs the pillow, trying to whack him with it. Flynn takes the hit and then pulls the pillow from her hands and tosses it across the room.
**
Ten years.
Mumbai. Madrid. Iraq. Afghanistan, again. Israel. Iran. Syria.
Worries about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of strongmen ceded to worries about mass destruction in the hands of jihadists. Worries about weapons of mass destruction ceded to worries about suicide bombs and then rose again. States and failed states and non-state actors and people in too many places with not enough to live for to care if they took civilization with them when they died.
Half her team, blown to smithereens in an IED attack. Eve identified their pieces, where she could. Spoke to their parents, in English and broken French.
She was shipped to the Czech Republic to consult with the Centre of Excellence on Joint CBRN Defence, in a sleepy little town a three-hour drive from Prague. “We never made it there when we lived in Europe,” Eve’s father rumbled on the phone and three weeks later Colonel and Mrs. Baird arrived in Vyskov with contraband American liquor and kinder expressions than Eve wanted to welcome.
The town came with a peculiar dialect and an outdoor museum with over 30 fake dinosaurs, and Eve and her parents stared up at what was intended to be a life-size replica of a stegosaurus.
“This is weird,” Eve said.
“You don’t seem happy,” her mother responded.
“I mean it,” Eve said. “People come from all over the country to see this.” She waved a hand at the Dinopark. “Prague is-.”
“Further from home?” Eve’s mother said. “Harder to find parking?”
“There’s no one here,” Eve said, looking around the empty park. She understood from the literature at the entrance that thousands of people visited each year, but it was a Tuesday in November and the tourists, wherever they were from, had stayed home. She didn’t mind. No crowds.
“Do you have friends here, Evie?” her mother asked.
Eve blinked. “I-.”
“Don’t hassle the girl,” Eve’s father responded. “Ours is a lonely work.”
“You spent your career on bases with thousands of soldiers,” Eve retorted before she could stop herself. “There were line dances in Texas.”
Eve’s mother looked over as they passed into the shadow of an Apatosaurus. “You hated those,” she remarked.
“Yeah,” Eve said. The dinosaur loomed overhead, stark against the clear fall sky. The dances had been lame, nothing for an ‘80s girl or an aspiring soldier to enjoy. Her parents had loved them, holding hands with friends and laughing into the night; Eve hadn’t seen the appeal. “I definitely did.”
**
Eve sits at her desk in the Annex and laughs. The LITs-she can’t help but call them that when they travel in a herd the way they do-are in Guatemala in search of a Gryphon, she thinks, though Flynn insists Gryphons are not native to that region. She doesn’t know where Jenkins is.
Flynn materializes at the sound of her laughter. “What?” he says. He has had his nose in a book for twelve hours straight and Eve hasn’t bothered him. She’s gotten in a workout, studied the fighting patterns of southern orcs, and called home for the first time in a month.
“My mother,” she says. “Says that if I bring you home for Easter, you’re to sleep on the couch. Or I am. But I think she’d prefer that it be you.”
Flynn grins, but dodges the obvious point. “Your parents don’t have a guest room?” Eve narrows her eyes at him and he tries again, still smiling. “I’ve slept on far worse things than couches,” Flynn says.
“So have I,” Eve says, but stops because Flynn has probably slept in some supernatural being’s lair and she’s just got dirt floors in violent places. She remains surprised, sometimes, at how much constant peril is part of their shared experience. “That isn’t the point. I’m over forty years old.”
“I don’t think my mother would have made you sleep on the couch,” Flynn says, putting his hands in his pockets and looks down at his shoes.
Eve cringes. Flynn hasn’t said much about his mother, but from what she knows, Eve would have liked her. “I’m sorry.”
Flynn shakes his head, brushing off her apology and straightening his posture. “It’s-it’s not okay, but it is, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Eve says. She knows.
“So, you’re inviting me home for Easter?” Flynn asks.
“My parents do a whole themed thing,” Eve says, as if that is an explanation. “You can add it to your study of comparative American religious behavior. There are inflatable rabbits.”
Flynn laughs, and Eve suddenly can’t wait for him to see the whole spread, to watch the way he tries to be polite about such a display. She will never invite him for Christmas-she will never go home for Christmas again-but she wants to see the way he tries to piece together multicolored eggs and a neighborhood party with two different Colonel Bairds.
She wants to see what her mother thinks of Flynn.
“Rabbits,” Flynn says, thoughtfully. “It should really be hares.” Eve holds up a hand to stop him. “I will try not to say that when we are there?” And it’s an acceptance of the invitation and it is Eve’s turn to smile.
“Right,” Eve says. “Good!”
Flynn rocks back on his heels. “I never got to do that when I was twenty-one,” he says. “The whole visiting the girlfriend’s parents for a holiday. It never seemed to be as important as-.”
“Everything else?” Eve responds and Flynn nods, pretending to be sheepish. They are too proud of all the work they’ve put in to get to these places to be concerned about opportunities lost, and they both know it. “Me neither,” Eve says.
“Well, Guardian,” Flynn says, pulling his hands from his pockets and offering one to Eve. She takes it and stands up, brushing against him. She doesn’t step back as he says, “I guess it’s going to be an adventure for both of us.”
***
Universe: The Librarians
Character / Pairing: Eve Baird, Eve Baird / Flynn Carsen, the LITs
Spoilers: Light for the series.
Rating: PG-13 / T
Beta: Many thanks to phdelicious. All errors are mine.
Word Count: 3473
Summary: Eve, now and then.
Author’s Note: The Dinopark in Vyskov, CZ is a real thing. So is the bar in Boston.
***
They are back to back, Flynn’s head down trying to decipher the text that holds the key to getting away from the monster. Eve is holding the monster off with a broken pipe in one hand and her gun in the other. She is having more success with the pipe.
“Hurry up, hurry up,” Eve says, landing a satisfying blow to the monster’s side.
“Working as fast as I can,” Flynn says. Eve can feel him shift against her, can imagine his fingers running over the aging pages. “I thought you were supposed to be good under pressure?”
He’s teasing, even in this environment. “Terrorists and bombs, sure,” Eve says. “I’m still getting used to horned things with wings the size of a pickup.”
“Takes some practice,” Flynn responds. The monster runs at Eve again, and she spins them both away from the book for a moment. “I don’t think it felt normal for me for four or five years.”
Eve uses the distance from the monster to fire a shot at what she hopes is its head. “Plebe year was great training for a lot of crap,” she says. “Just not this.”
Flynn looks over his shoulder at her before bolting back to the book. “I have a hard time picturing you at West Point.”
Eve laughs. “Really?” she says. “Fourth generation. I’m still bummed I wasn’t Brigade Commander.” Eve takes a swing at the monster, this time landing a hit that seems to stall its progress. “You ready?”
“Got it!” Flynn says and then looks at the monster and utters what could be Latin or Greek. The monster disappears.
“Yes,” Eve says. “You did.” She grabs him by the hand and they run for the door.
**
She knows why Flynn can’t imagine her at the military academy. The Eve Baird he knows is his Guardian, his lover, a woman increasingly comfortable with the unknown and the unknowable, less bound by rules every day. This Eve Baird knows of magic and is learning-slowly, she’ll admit-to let the details go.
She grew up in Stuttgart and Aviano and Okinawa and a particularly dusty patch of Texas. By the time her father retired, he was Lieutenant Colonel Howard Baird and her mother was Mrs. Lieutenant Colonel Howard Baird, and given those choices, Eve knew early she preferred her father’s path.
“It’s 1990,” she remembers yelling at her mother. “Nobody gets married out of high school anymore!” Except around her, the girls on base were thinking about it, seriously.
“Evie,” her mother said, “you could just find a nice boy and settle down. Or go to school for nursing.”
“Did you miss the sexual revolution?” Eve yelled. “Did you miss everything about me?”
“I just don’t want you to limit your choices,” Eve’s mother responded evenly, but Eve didn’t think much of choices that were teacher or nurse or housewife.
And the door slammed, of course, because doors were always slamming in their house, Eve’s mother overwhelmed by a daughter who refused for even a second to be the girl she was supposed to be. To be much of a girl at all, Eve considers now.
The first thing she did at West Point was cut her hair as short as regulations for women would allow.
**
“My major at the academy was Defense and Strategic studies,” she tells Flynn later, after Jenkins has locked up the book and Eve has scrubbed herself of monster blood and they are resting in Flynn’s suite.
She had thrown herself all-in; not as a soldier-scientist or a soldier-historian, but as a soldier’s soldier, one who could assess any situation, give orders in any context. They hadn’t known what to do with her; women weren’t permitted in combat, but they couldn’t deny her the degree.
“My first degree was in Anthropology,” Flynn says. “I was twelve.”
Eve tries to imagine Flynn as a child. She imagines a serious boy, nose in fifty books at a time, with a prankster streak that he rarely indulged. Eve suspects that Flynn is more fun now than he was as a child. But she says, “When I was twelve, I wanted to be an astronaut.”
“I wanted to be-.” Flynn furrows his brow. “Probably an anthropologist and a linguist and an Egyptologist and a priest.”
“A priest?” Eve says, giving him an exaggerated once-over. “I don’t see it.”
Flynn shrugs. “I thought religion was interesting,” he says. “I hadn’t quite figured out that I could study religion and not take it to the very end.”
Eve smiles. “I get that. It took me a lot longer than twelve to figure out that I could be-I don’t know. More than just the best soldier ever.”
Flynn glances at her, sidelong. “What changed?” he asks.
Eve thinks about it. “You did,” she says, even though it’s only mostly true.
**
Kuwait was as dusty as Texas and hotter, too. By the time Eve arrived, the Gulf War had ended, but she had requested-insisted on, as much as possible-an overseas deployment in as military a capacity as she could find. Women as military police were successful in the conflict, and her commander accepted her with a curt, “You a lesbian?”
“No sir,” Eve responded.
“Damn,” her CO said. “Lesbians are easier than straight girls. Straight girls get pregnant.”
She thought for a minute about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and all the ways in which this conversation was a terrible idea, but said instead, “It won’t be a problem, sir.” He nodded, and Second Lieutenant Eve Baird set about being neither a lesbian nor a girl who would get pregnant, shipped home, and kicked out.
Trying to fit in with the guys meant seeing a lot of porn. Too much. “Don’t you ever get sick of that shit, Ramirez?” she asked one of the kids as he splayed out with a magazine in hand.
“Ain’t got nothing better to do,” Ramirez said. It was true, even if Ramirez claimed to have a girlfriend back home, because the nights were cold and long and impossibly dull.
“Seriously,” Eve said. “Play a game of cards or something?”
“Strip poker?” Ramirez said, leering over the top of his magazine. “See if you can make me forget this?”
She was his boss and it was disgusting that the only thing to do in that moment was say, “In your dreams, Private. But I’ll take all your money if you’d like.”
“Ain’t got any of that, Lieutenant,” Ramirez said and went back to his magazine. Eve shifted two chairs over and dealt herself a hand of solitaire, counting the minutes until she could head back to barracks without causing a stir.
**
The next day, Stone, Cassandra and Ezekiel come through the door with a jumbled story about-“Slow down,” Eve says in her best annoyed Colonel Baird voice. “One at a time.”
“Everyone is love-struck,” Cassandra says.
“That doesn’t sound terrible,” Eve responds.
“No,” Stone says. “Like, really love-struck. No one’s doing any work or any chores or anything other than staring into each other’s eyes. “
“It’s very creepy,” Ezekiel says. “Very.”
Jenkins descends the stairs. “How peculiar,” he says.
“How helpful,” Eve responds, peering down her nose at him. “Is this a known phenomenon?”
“Not sure,” Jenkins says. “Flynn might know-he’s around here?”
“Yes, yes,” Flynn says, scurrying in, from behind what Eve doesn’t know. “I’m here. Love-struck, you say?”
“Very,” Stone says.
“Creepy,” Ezekiel responds.
“I think we need reinforcements,” Cassandra says. “I think this is really big. And very bad.”
“Cupid?” Eve asks, because it’s obvious and the only thing she can think of from mythology that might be involved.
“No, no,” Flynn says. “More likely Pothos or Himeros.”
“Of course the Greek gods were real,” Stone says, and Eve is a little put off by the note of awe in his voice.
“And very dangerous,” Jenkins says.
“And what do we do about it?” Eve asks.
“We have to save the town!” Cassandra says.
Flynn pokes a finger in the air and scurries out, surely in search of a book. Eve watches him go, still more amused than concerned, though she’s sure the danger will come when they’re dodging angry Greek gods - “Unrequited love!” Flynn calls from somewhere beyond her sight-who take their sexual frustration out on mere mortals.
**
Eve’s first real boyfriend took her dancing.
She was between assignments with time to spare and no interest in spending it with her parents, happy to be itinerant for a minute, a lifetime. She landed first in Boston and shortly thereafter in a basement bar with a great beer list and a history of live music decades long.
She sat alone. The music was louder, a little more punk rock than she might have chosen on her own, but it suited the mood. It was a good night to be angry for no reason other than opportunity, and Eve let the bass and guitar thump through her heart.
But it was a bar and she was a woman alone and it wasn’t too long before a man sat down beside her. “I’d buy you a drink” he said. “But I don’t think this is really your scene.”
Eve glanced at him. It didn’t look like his scene either, but what did she know? She knew pidgin Arabic and was thinking of a language course, she knew how to clean and reload her weapon in a minute flat. She didn’t know if this man-her age, probably, with a crisp haircut and an easy smile-fit in at a club like this.
“Maybe not,” Eve allowed.
He extended a hand. “Chris Johnson.”
She shook. “Eve Baird.”
Chris Johnson held onto her hand. “Come on, Eve Baird. I’ve got a great spot for you.”
It was a jazz club, straight out of Big Band, featuring the kind of music her father sometimes played at parties with her parents’ closest friends.
“You know how to dance?” Chris asked.
“Many years of Arthur Murray,” Eve said, and at that moment, being the daughter of Mrs. Lieutenant Colonel Howard Baird had one sole benefit, because she took Chris’ hand and led him to the floor.
“Perfect,” he replied.
**
Eradicating angry Greek gods with a penchant for instilling feelings of hopeless longing in the population takes a few days. For several fascinating hours, Ezekiel and Stone make eyes at each other while Flynn and Cassandra dance around them trying to break their attention.
“Maybe we should leave them like that,” Eve says as Cassandra circles the men, muttering.
“No,” Flynn says. “It’s not-it doesn’t-it’s not doing this to people who have genuine feelings. It’s doing it to people that don’t like each other or don’t know each other. That’s just-.”
“Creepy?” Eve asks, leaning against the desk where Flynn has set up his work.
“Yeah,” Flynn says. “But more than that. Cruel. The whole point of love is choice, right? It’s not the way every society thinks, but ours does, and I don’t like to pass judgment, but-.” He shrugs, then looks straight at Eve. “For these people, and their values, in this context, it’s cruel.”
**
She spent half a year in Monterey, learning Arabic and hating another hot climate. California was less dusty, but still hot, and Eve longed for seasons and rain. Not a likely future, she figured, with language training almost guaranteed to send her back to the Middle East.
She took her limited leave in Seattle, learning to love coffee and hate beat poetry, clichés both.
“I hope you’re happy,” her mother wrote, and Eve couldn’t tell if there was approval or disdain behind the blue ball-point pen. “Whatever happened to that nice young man?”
The nice young man lived in Boston and stayed in Boston, and for Eve it was language school and then-and then. Then, her not-quite-combat experience and weapons skill and familiarity with the Middle East and Associates Degree in Modern Arabic landed her as close to the front lines of Operation Enduring Freedom as they could send her.
Afghanistan was hot and dusty and so angry, and Eve spent her rare free waking hours in the gym beating the shit out of the punching bag or the soldiers who thought they could take her on. “Captain,” they whined when she wiped the floor with them. “Come on.”
“Not my job to make you feel good about yourself, soldier,” Eve said.
No, it was her job to keep them alive. To assess threats and understand the ways the Taliban would use every weapon in its arsenal, bombs made of nails and fertilizer that soon grew so potent that the armored vehicles had to be redesigned, would use its women and children to counter her efforts.
Soon, her skillset had a new name for a new era. Counter-terrorism came with more classes and a different approach, and soon Major Eve Baird found herself in Brussels briefing the NATO command team about limiting the spread of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats.
Her mother’s ink-stained letters grew more strident, even as Eve found herself at the center of so many important fights. “I don’t care about their hearts and minds,” her mother wrote. “I care about yours.”
**
Flynn fucks like he fights.
His sense of purpose never wavers, but the way he multitasks makes it look like he is much less focused than he is. Eve comes, hard, to Flynn explaining the peculiar details about the sexual rituals of the Sambian tribe against her skin.
“Good?” he murmurs, resting his chin against her chest. She’ll need to wipe the grin off his face one way or another.
Eve grabs him by the ear and pulls him up to face her. “On you, it works.”
“Thank you,” he says, leaning in to kiss her.
She collapses on the pillow. “Gimme a sec,” she says and Flynn obliges by shimmying to lie beside her, propping his head up on his arm and smiling down at her. Eve scrunches her face, because he’s still smirking.
“What you said earlier,” Eve says when she catches her breath. “About choices.”
“Ah, yeah,” Flynn says.
“I’ve never been able to choose both,” Eve says. “This and-.”
“Being the best soldier ever?” he asks.
Eve nods, because it’s strange, fighting beside Flynn, sometimes fighting with him, more often than not sleeping at his side. “It was always one or the other,” she says.
His eyes sparkle. “Maybe it’s fate,” he says, leaning closer, wiggling his eyebrows. “Or magic.”
“Oh god,” Eve says. She sits up and grabs the pillow, trying to whack him with it. Flynn takes the hit and then pulls the pillow from her hands and tosses it across the room.
**
Ten years.
Mumbai. Madrid. Iraq. Afghanistan, again. Israel. Iran. Syria.
Worries about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of strongmen ceded to worries about mass destruction in the hands of jihadists. Worries about weapons of mass destruction ceded to worries about suicide bombs and then rose again. States and failed states and non-state actors and people in too many places with not enough to live for to care if they took civilization with them when they died.
Half her team, blown to smithereens in an IED attack. Eve identified their pieces, where she could. Spoke to their parents, in English and broken French.
She was shipped to the Czech Republic to consult with the Centre of Excellence on Joint CBRN Defence, in a sleepy little town a three-hour drive from Prague. “We never made it there when we lived in Europe,” Eve’s father rumbled on the phone and three weeks later Colonel and Mrs. Baird arrived in Vyskov with contraband American liquor and kinder expressions than Eve wanted to welcome.
The town came with a peculiar dialect and an outdoor museum with over 30 fake dinosaurs, and Eve and her parents stared up at what was intended to be a life-size replica of a stegosaurus.
“This is weird,” Eve said.
“You don’t seem happy,” her mother responded.
“I mean it,” Eve said. “People come from all over the country to see this.” She waved a hand at the Dinopark. “Prague is-.”
“Further from home?” Eve’s mother said. “Harder to find parking?”
“There’s no one here,” Eve said, looking around the empty park. She understood from the literature at the entrance that thousands of people visited each year, but it was a Tuesday in November and the tourists, wherever they were from, had stayed home. She didn’t mind. No crowds.
“Do you have friends here, Evie?” her mother asked.
Eve blinked. “I-.”
“Don’t hassle the girl,” Eve’s father responded. “Ours is a lonely work.”
“You spent your career on bases with thousands of soldiers,” Eve retorted before she could stop herself. “There were line dances in Texas.”
Eve’s mother looked over as they passed into the shadow of an Apatosaurus. “You hated those,” she remarked.
“Yeah,” Eve said. The dinosaur loomed overhead, stark against the clear fall sky. The dances had been lame, nothing for an ‘80s girl or an aspiring soldier to enjoy. Her parents had loved them, holding hands with friends and laughing into the night; Eve hadn’t seen the appeal. “I definitely did.”
**
Eve sits at her desk in the Annex and laughs. The LITs-she can’t help but call them that when they travel in a herd the way they do-are in Guatemala in search of a Gryphon, she thinks, though Flynn insists Gryphons are not native to that region. She doesn’t know where Jenkins is.
Flynn materializes at the sound of her laughter. “What?” he says. He has had his nose in a book for twelve hours straight and Eve hasn’t bothered him. She’s gotten in a workout, studied the fighting patterns of southern orcs, and called home for the first time in a month.
“My mother,” she says. “Says that if I bring you home for Easter, you’re to sleep on the couch. Or I am. But I think she’d prefer that it be you.”
Flynn grins, but dodges the obvious point. “Your parents don’t have a guest room?” Eve narrows her eyes at him and he tries again, still smiling. “I’ve slept on far worse things than couches,” Flynn says.
“So have I,” Eve says, but stops because Flynn has probably slept in some supernatural being’s lair and she’s just got dirt floors in violent places. She remains surprised, sometimes, at how much constant peril is part of their shared experience. “That isn’t the point. I’m over forty years old.”
“I don’t think my mother would have made you sleep on the couch,” Flynn says, putting his hands in his pockets and looks down at his shoes.
Eve cringes. Flynn hasn’t said much about his mother, but from what she knows, Eve would have liked her. “I’m sorry.”
Flynn shakes his head, brushing off her apology and straightening his posture. “It’s-it’s not okay, but it is, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Eve says. She knows.
“So, you’re inviting me home for Easter?” Flynn asks.
“My parents do a whole themed thing,” Eve says, as if that is an explanation. “You can add it to your study of comparative American religious behavior. There are inflatable rabbits.”
Flynn laughs, and Eve suddenly can’t wait for him to see the whole spread, to watch the way he tries to be polite about such a display. She will never invite him for Christmas-she will never go home for Christmas again-but she wants to see the way he tries to piece together multicolored eggs and a neighborhood party with two different Colonel Bairds.
She wants to see what her mother thinks of Flynn.
“Rabbits,” Flynn says, thoughtfully. “It should really be hares.” Eve holds up a hand to stop him. “I will try not to say that when we are there?” And it’s an acceptance of the invitation and it is Eve’s turn to smile.
“Right,” Eve says. “Good!”
Flynn rocks back on his heels. “I never got to do that when I was twenty-one,” he says. “The whole visiting the girlfriend’s parents for a holiday. It never seemed to be as important as-.”
“Everything else?” Eve responds and Flynn nods, pretending to be sheepish. They are too proud of all the work they’ve put in to get to these places to be concerned about opportunities lost, and they both know it. “Me neither,” Eve says.
“Well, Guardian,” Flynn says, pulling his hands from his pockets and offering one to Eve. She takes it and stands up, brushing against him. She doesn’t step back as he says, “I guess it’s going to be an adventure for both of us.”
***