Work Text
You weren’t exactly social. You had a hard time with crowds, struggled to make yourself heard over the din, flinched away from loud noises. You never knew what to do with your hands, tripped over your tongue about as often as your feet, and you could never figure out whether or where to settle your gaze, or when it was appropriate to drop an expression. No matter how earnest your efforts, everything about human interaction felt forced and fake, like you were a moth among butterflies, pretending to belong. Fareeha liked it that way. It meant you kept to yourself. It meant she didn’t have to share. Her eyes were always on you, memorizing your expressions and quirks, the way you fiddled with whatever was at hand if she happened to stop by your station, how quickly your gaze dipped when she allowed you to notice her scrutiny.Her hands gravitated to your skin in subtle ways that wouldn’t scare you off, under the guise of professional necessity or casual coincidence, glancing contact when you handed her a dossier, bodies brushing on a packed lift.Her mind drifted to you whenever prudence would allow it and sometimes even when it wouldn’t, your face often flashing through her thoughts even in the middle of firefights. She was trying to perfect her plan of attack, the best way to drag you into her life, into her bed, under her wing where she could protect you as well as appreciate you. It had been the hard, steady work of over a year breaking down the walls you’d built up, until you’d smile and wave when she nodded at you in the halls instead of skittering away. It had taken such a concerted effort on her part to work her way inward that she was utterly blindsided when you took the initiative to breach those walls yourself. She’d been surprised when you showed up at the gala. All company personnel were invited, of course, but you’d never seen fit to attend this sort of function before. Her own prominent position made such appearances practically mandatory, and she’d resigned herself to an evening deprived of not only your presence but also the feeds from the security she’d set up around your home. Yet there you were, dressed to the nines and looking even more vulnerable than usual so far outside your element.She’d been perturbed, to say the least, when she returned from escorting some politician or other onto the dancefloor to find you caught up in conversation of all things with a tech beside the hors d’oeuvres, a couple of wallflowers keeping each other company.She’d been apoplectic when that same tech tugged you out onto the floor as something Classical began to play, the two of you moving together in an awkward, textbook waltz, the stuff of secondary school proms. That night, her eyes weren’t on you, her hands weren’t on you, her mind wasn’t on you – they were on the interloper. Sharp eyes tailing the tech’s steps back to a low-rent apartment, the sort of place where a break-in wouldn’t attract too much attention. Strong hands wrapping around a throat, silencing a scream before it could even form. Keen mind bent to making the scene look like a junkie’s robbery, a crime of convenience by an anonymous, amateur assailant. You were jittery the next day, jumping like a hare at every little sound or motion, speed-walking out of rooms whenever someone mentioned the technician you’d become acquainted with just hours ago, whose name had been all over on the news that morning, the police tossing out a wide net in search of witnesses they wouldn’t find. You’d learned that reaching out could hurt, received a harsh reminder that the world was a dangerous, chaotic place, and retreated into your shell, the night before now nothing more than an anomaly you’d already come to regret. Fareeha smirked. You were back to yourself, as far as she was concerned. In the future, she would endeavor to keep it that way.