Doug and Terry -

[x-cypher.livejournal.com]

Terry stops by Doug's office after a day in the office with the 'feebs'. They both try their hardest to avoid certain things, and Terry drops an unexpected twist on things.


Normally, Doug Ramsey's office-slash-server-room in the offices of the Snow Valley Centre For British Spellings and Wayward Superspies contained some level of benign chaos. The internal workings of a server spread out on a desk, scribbles on a whiteboard, the signs of a mind at work. There was none of that currently, though, everything at precise right angles, and sitting a regimented distance from each other. The rigidity spoke to a need to control something, anything, about its owner's circumstances, even something as small as his workspace.

The rearrangement of his space, if not his life, made the knock at his door perfunctory, but Terry knocked anyway as she hesitated inside the frame. Her hand disappeared quickly back under her arms which were crossed tightly across her chest, along with the edges of a long, light, shapeless sweater. It had been a few days since they had returned, whisked away from the nightmare island, and dumped back into their lives to pick right back up. Or at least to pick up the pieces. It might never be long enough to do either. "Hi," she said, still a little bit hoarse and with lines forming at the corners of her eyes as she narrowed them on him and his surroundings.

That he had rearranged things to be able to see visitors immediately when they entered his space was another subtle sign of the control Doug felt badly in need of. "Hi yourself," he greeted Terry, his own voice not quite hoarse, but definitely a bit raspy, as if he hadn't been doing much talking since their return.

She leaned a shoulder against the frame, then let her head follow suit, staying quiet for a moment before opening her mouth as if to speak. She shut it again with a sour expression. Somehow, asking 'how are you' seemed a little too obvious and pat. So instead, she offered him a little bit of the control he craved. "Can I come in?"

"Of course." Doug's face softened a bit. There was harshness in his body, a reflection of the things that had been done to him, but he could at least try for a bit of normalcy and their usual banter in the midst of the emotional tempest he was trying to keep under wraps. "Paperwork day with the feebs?"

Terry pushed away from the door and wandered further into the room, casting a look around for a place to sit. She dropped her arms long enough to tug a chair from it's precision placement and drag it closer to the edge of his desk. They folded back up with a jerky shrug of her shoulders as she flopped into the seat. "Some. More like I-Pol on my arse. Apparently they do not like receiving information about one o' their own being associated with a terrorist attack on a government. No matter how fucked up it is," she answered, voice dropped to a growl. She sunk further in her chair and hunched her shoulders up to her ears.

Doug's eyes widened. It probably also didn't help that one of the other people she'd shared a cell block with was on Interpol's most wanted list. But he didn't say that part. "How big of a problem are we talking?" he asked, worry creeping into his voice. He knew that, for all of her occasional frustration with bureaucracy, Terry took pride in her position with Interpol.

Terry made a noise and flicked her fingers in his direction, to dismiss or deflect the question. She didn't know, and at the moment, she didn't care. While she had some shielding from Duncan, it was all a jumbled mess, and only likely to get messier. "Administrative leave. For whatever that means. How about you?" Obvious conversation shifts didn't have to make sense. Administrative leave could mean any number of things. Waiting to fire until the news cycle passed, shielding her from political fallout before bringing her back... Doug filed it all away with a note to keep an eye out. "Back to work," he replied, with a gesture encompassing the room. "No rest for the wicked, et cetera."

"Is that what you are then? Wicked?" Terry asked, the bluntly flat question stripped of the usual flirting tease it might have had before. She exhaled and propped her head on her hand, closing her eyes as she turned her face away.

"Maybe." Which was really a softer way of saying yes. Because it was how Doug saw himself. "Rogue, remember?" And that perhaps came out harsher than he intended, and it was his turn to close his eyes and hide his face. But right now he didn't have the strength to try and navigate his way through the conflict inherent in who they were and what they did. At the moment, he didn't know if they could ever manage to bridge that gulf for the sake of whatever they might want. If they even wanted the same thing.

"I thought it was Knight," Terry countered sharply, sideswiping the edge of a set of memories she had been trying to work up the nerve to confront for his sake while avoiding for her own. She caught the tail end of her own anger, banked and fragile in its containment, and curled in over it protectively. She opened her eyes and looked the arrangement of the room over before looking back at him. "Mo chara..." she murmured half apologetic, half questioning.

The snappish comment brought up its own set of memories in Doug, memories that he'd been trying to keep under wraps so that he could keep going. He was on the verge of snapping back, but then he saw the shift in Terry, and heard the hesitance in her questioning. "Yes, mo chara?" he asked, tentative himself, the question serving two purposes, responding to her, and down underneath layers of emotion, wondering if the words were true. Were they still friends, or were they fracturing under the weight of events?

Terry held out a hand to him, palm up, offering and seeking some of the same reassurance. She dropped her eyes to watch his hand's approach, then laced her fingers with his and squeezed. "I am thinking I will head out to California for a bit," she said softly.

See the pattern. Doug knew who was in California. His hand didn't snatch away from hers, and his expression didn't change. But there was a minute shift at the back of his eyes, and an equally small change to his voice. "Tell Bobby I say hi," he said in return.

She looked up, a frown already forming. "I will," she said, tone gone slightly edged though she gripped his hand tighter. Doug blinked, a look of confusion stealing across his face. That hadn't been quite the reaction he'd expected. Or he'd expected it to be more severe. And now, with Terry still there, he was on uncertain footing again. "I. Um." He bit his lip. "Any issues with your powers coming back?"

Terry released the hold she had on him with a blink. It was her turn to get conversational whiplash. Straightening in place, she shifted to the edge of her seat and turned to face him. "What? No- I mean. Some, but-- What?" Her voice cracked a little on the last word.

"I just...I know that having them gone was...hard. And I was worried about there being any lingering effects?" Because worrying about others was how Doug coped with his own problems. Which was to say, he didn't actually cope with them, just shoved them away in favor of looking after other people.

No fair turning her own coping mechanism against her. Terry grimaced and> > looked away. "Not the hardest part, to be sure" she admitted, trying to lock her expression down and translating the jumble of emotions to every other part of her body and bleeding it into her vocal patterns. She pulled her hands into her lap and wrung the tips of her fingers. "Things seems t'be more or less back to normal. Wee bit o' strain, wee bit o' loss." Whether she was talking about her powers or something else entirely was not clear.

Back to normal. Doug wished he knew where normal was for him anymore. Or how to get there from where he was. Strain and loss, that was putting it mildly for him. "Well...that's good?" he said, something of a question in his tone. Clearly, he thought, 'back to normal' involved her husband somehow, which was a strain and a loss of its own to Doug. Maybe that was finally the answer to what they were.

Terry sat back in her chair and looked at him from under lowered lashes. "Suppose," she said lowly, uncertain what the question actually was and too tired to chase it down. "You?"

"About the same, I guess." Things were probably more than 'a wee bit' strained, but that was Doug. Downplay, downplay, downplay. Especially when it came to the sharp kick in the gut it felt like to hear that she was going to California.

The inevitable outcome of a conversation between two avoidant people is that the conversation will grind to a halt. "Oh. That is good too," she echoed inanely, fully aware that neither of them were good and frustrated by her own inability to breach the barrier of too much, too soon between them. Terry made a face and slumped further in her seat before she rocked forward and pushed herself back up to her feet.

Doug was frustrated by his own inability, and the way it kept him from doing anything as yet another person walked out of his office, and maybe his life.