first minute.

[profession]

MAKE IT QUICK.

prompts, text, action.
anything goes.

tick tock tick.

Comments

[profession]

[ How does a young woman as arresting as Gaby end up becoming an agent, if not for circumstance dictating its own terms with no consideration? Waverly picked her out on his own, sly as a man as one could be, and pitted her against the best of two global powers. Not that they'd given him an option on that front either, Illya considers — but that's not the point.

Like he told the American: it's not the same.

He scans the crowd for his benefactor and Illya knows right away, from the shape of her neck and the slope of her shoulders alone, that she is here. Under cover, yet still her. There's a small impatience to the way she holds her book, as if she's read it before and is hurrying along the page in front of her for the better parts that follow.

He picks up his glass, walks over to her, and sets the glass on her table with a clink. ]

Would you mind terribly?

[doublecover]

[Book still in hand, Gaby peers over her glasses and at the man in front of her. She keeps her mouth relaxed, unsmiling and unamiable. Her expression is harsh but her eyes are sympathetic. Sorry, Illya: a cover is a cover and you're stuck with a hardass today.]

Do I look like the type to welcome strangers to her table?

[Though nevertheless she closes her book and slides it over to one side. Her hand moves to her glass so that she can lazily trace the rim of it with her fingertips, but immediately she hesitates and instead grips it with a deliberately cautious awkwardness. She feels oddly comfortable with him considering everything that has happened between the two of them and what she has done. His presence makes the muscles in her shoulders soften and her lungs feel slightly larger than before.

A stranger would not feel quite so at ease and so, for now, she is relegated to stilted, sheepish smalltalk. She stiffens her shoulders and looks at her drink.]

What do you do?