reasonability | (no subject)

(no subject)

Why is it always the Southwest? Is there something about Arizona and New Mexico that just attracts the bizarre? If it's not the Southwest, it's New York, and if it's not New York, it's not in America. Ridiculous.

Coulson makes a note to set someone on studying that, if they ever have time.

The three black SUVs turn off the road where the desert stretches flat. They're getting closer to the coordinates given to them by the Martian (Martian) scientist. And that's the reason Coulson won't complain too hard about the location: having the coordinates, knowing where the alien is going to appear, is a lot better than the alternative.

Reinforced tires bounce over scrub, swerving to avoid the worst of the cacti. The heat is blasting, though it's not even into the worst of summer. Heat shimmers along the road they've left. The air conditioning is on full blast.

May starts braking the car. She insisted on being the one to drive Coulson, and he didn't fight that hard. The other two, he sees, swerve out to either direction and stop, pointed inward to, theoretically, the coordinate point.

"It's about twenty meters ahead," she tells Coulson, glancing back. He sees it; scramble up the slope, and there's the entrance to a box canyon. Presumably the cave is further back.

Coulson nods. "Time?"

"Half an hour."

There's not really any traffic along the long, empty highway out here, but Coulson didn't want to take any chances.

He pulls himself out of the seat.

The heat hits him like a sledgehammer, but he doesn't flinch. Doesn't even take off the suit jacket. He takes a drink of water, and then leaves the SUV, May and a handful of others nearby. He didn't take most of his team this time. He's got to spread out his most precious resources.

A short, winding walk leads them in to where he can see the cave. He holds up a hand, stopping the operatives there. A couple of them scatter to cover, nearby. May moves a little ahead of him. He lets her; he's come to the point in his life where his life is more important than the lives of those around him. Which, honestly, is a situation he kind of loathes.

He checks his watch again.

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She glanced where he indicated, brow furrowed for a moment. Changing rooms. Oh yes, right. Human modesty issues. She did not understand them, but she was a guest and would not embarrass her host.

"Are we..." She glanced around the corners of the room, up high. "...under surveillance here, as well?"

She imagines they are, but in such a moment of vulnerability, she would prefer her privacy.

"Recorded, not monitored," he says. If there's something that goes wrong in the base, they need records of it. He doesn't get the luxury of privacy anymore, not outside areas too sensitive for any monitoring at all.

He gives her a smile, and slips into the changing rooms himself. Pair of unexceptional black trunks and a white t-shirt. The scar tissue. He doesn't like thinking about it, much less displaying it, and he's afraid he wouldn't be able to think about anything else.

He steps up to the side and dives in, a shallow dive, angled away from the wall. He swims to the shallower end, closer to her changing room.

Dejah emerges from the changing room in just a few minutes, wearing a sheer robe that only descends to mid-thigh. The tattoos on her face are echoed in similar markings down her shoulders, back, and arms, across her chest, down her hips and both thighs. She looks a bit trepidatious, but not shy. Simply unsure of the situation, not herself.

"You look like you've done this before." She makes her way to the stairs and takes her first steps down into the water, her eyes wide and her hands outstretched to the plane of the water, even though she knows it is not a solid surface.

"Sweet Issus, this is astounding." She descends cautiously until the water is at her waist. Her gaze moves to him, and she smiles, like a kid on Christmas morning. "It feels so strange!"

To be honest, he has a hard time concentrating on the water, at first. It's her, and then it's her radiant expression of delight. It reminds him of something he hasn't felt in a long time. It puts him at ease in the way a spymaster shouldn't be.

"Once or twice. Now, since you're less dense than humans from Earth, you'll probably float easier - remember the buoyancy." Put it in scientific terms, since that's what she knows the best.

He shifts up and moves next to her. "The first thing a lot of people learn is how to float," he says. "Try lying on your back, on the surface of the water."

He comes within reach and she takes his hand, holds on tight. She's desperately unsure of herself in this new medium, but she's clearly enjoying it.

"Just -- lie back?" She didn't know how to do that. "There's nothing to lie back on!"

Scientific terms are all well and good for understanding things, but experiencing them is an entirely different matter.

He touches the small of her back. A little daring, but - it's swim instruction. "Here," he says. "I won't let you go under."

It's only a little bit of trust, in the scheme of things. She can stand up and get out of this water. She's not in any real danger.

She turns, orients herself to him, still glancing over her shoulder. Her blue eyes met his and she gave an incredulous little grin. This was not at all where she expected to be when she woke up this morning, but she was never one to turn down an adventure.

She gathered her hair with her free hand, pulling it over her shoulder, and then -- with a few hesitations and her heart hammering in her chest -- she leaned back, trusting him to catch her.

The water surrounded her, and she let go a soft exhalation of breath, an expression of pleasure so pure, it was almost sensual.

He barely does. Just the brush of his hand on her back, a contact that rushes a tingle through him. Every touch feels more underwater, he thinks. There's an intimacy to it.

This is the first time it occurs to him that this might be getting too close.

"See?" But he's smiling, and this is the best he's felt in weeks. He feels lighter, both inside himself and outside with the buoyancy of the water.

This whole adventure is far more intimate than anything Dejah has undertaken in the last century. That he's at the center of it has not escaped her. This whole world is alien to her, and being surrounded by pure water extends the experience into the surreal.

And he's the only fixed point in the storm of sensation. His hand on her back, his voice in her ear.

She reaches out a hand for him, catching his hand in hers and holds on so tight, her knuckles blanch. "Don't let go," she whispers.

Edited 2014-10-11 04:18 (UTC)

"I don't know about your kind," he says, "but for humans - there's an instinct to this. A fluidity." He lets her grasp him tight; his own is firm, but not desperate. "You can let the water carry you."

He lets the water lift her, slowly decreasing the amount of force he uses on her back. Tries to think back to when he learned to swim, but it's too far buried in the vagueness of memory. He just knows how to move now. The memory, the knowledge, is physical.

"Sorry," he says. "It's hard to describe something that feels natural." Without resorting to pure terms of physics.

"No, no. It's -- okay." The sound of his voice helps, and she takes a few long, deep breaths. This is only water. She bathes and drinks it every day. Listening to him, she tips her head back and begins to relax. Her shoulders melt, and her hips rise to the surface. The sensation leaves her a bit giddy and she laughs, the sound ringing in the high ceilings of the room.

"This feels so strange. It's like flying, almost."

"Closest most of us mere mortals get." Phil, on the other hand, has a flying car. He totally knows what flying is like. There's still something dreamlike about water, about being suspended - not defying gravity, but immune to it.

Now his hand is just touching her. There's almost no support.

"You're doing great," he says, and his fingers brush against the smooth skin on her spine.

The touch sends a shimmer through her entire body, and she shivers, a quiet gasp escaping her lips. A moment later, the tenuous balance she'd established is disrupted and there's splashing. She twists in the water, and reaches for him, ending up with her arms around his neck, an indelicate squawk turning into a bright peal of laughter.

He grabs onto her by reflex, hands onto her bare waist, slippery and wet and warm. It draws a chuckle out of him, too - a little more restrained, because it's hard to break the mood he's been in, these days, but his smile relaxes, grows natural as they grow still.

He should certainly return the professional boundaries between them. He should let her go.

He doesn't.

It's good that he doesn't let go. Neither is she, despite the quiet giggle and the way her cheeks are darkening in what must be a blush. She does try to relax her grip a little, so she's not strangling him, but it's clear by the way she's holding on, she's still not at all comfortable with being in the open water.

That is, until her feet hit the bottom and she discovers the water is only waist deep. A little of the terror bleeds away, but none of the embarassment. She drops her head to his shoulder and laughs again, this time at her own expense.

Goddess, he smells good. Even in the water, this close it's impossible to ignore. He smells -- male. And certain instincts wake up instantly, instincts she'd tried to keep suppressed for a very long time. She found herself in the arms of a very masculine man, and while virtually (deliciously) naked.

She didn't move, just held very still, breathing him in, waiting for him to -- do something.

Edited 2014-10-29 01:45 (UTC)

And, unfortunately, something is exactly what he does not do.

Not because he doesn't want to.

He really, really wants to.

But he remembers SHIELD and he remembers responsibilities, and he thinks, wow, if relationship drama in the workplace is a problem, interplanetary relationship drama might be even worse is he actually thinking about this in terms of relationships.

Oh, no.

Oh, no, he's managed to articulate to himself exactly what he was really trying to avoid thinking about.

He's screwed.

He's also smiling.

"I get the feeling exporting water to Mars could be a big industry for us."

And he's stalling. He's stalling on doing something or not doing something because as long as this moment lasts, there's nothing ruined. There's nothing dead or broken.

She stays close, still grinning broadly, laughter running under her skin or is that heat lightning? It's hard to say. The water amplifies everything, his scent, the sound of his voice, the feel of his hands at her waist.

"What, am I to bring it back with me in my pockets?" Her tone is playful, light, but there's a certain breathlessness quality to her voice.

In a heartbeat, it becomes imperative that this moment, this feeling not be allowed to fade, to dissipate like so much smoke. The urgency takes her by surprise and she pulls back to look into his face, her cheek brushing his. She needs to see his face.

"You make it look so easy. Can you show me how? Please?"

"Transport system doesn't work on inanimate objects?" Because that would be interesting, if it was the case. Though Coulson couldn't imagine why. If anything, he would think that it would be harder to transfer living material. No one knows what causes that spark of life - what's the difference between a perfect corpse and a breathing human.

Sometimes he wonders if he could even tell the difference. What if his soul is somewhere else?

"Demonstration?" he offers, drawing back a little bit. Opening up the space between them. He's not so sure he wants to go through with this yet.

He pulls away and she leans after him, the movement entirely unconscious. But she catches herself, comes up short. She closes her eyes for a brief moment, breathing deep and forcing her hands to let him go. They slide down his arms to his hands. When she opens them to look at him again, she gives him a warm smile.

"How about this? You demonstrate your -- instinctual understanding of water. And afterwards, I will tell you about how I travel from Barsoom to here and back again. Over coffee?"

Are you asking me on a date? is what he almost says. Catches himself in time. Though, honestly, maybe it's worse to try to keep it ambiguous. He'll play it cool. Nick Fury would probably play it cool.

He dips backwards and breathes in, floating on his back.

"Ever been in weightlessness?" he asks. "Because I haven't, but we use this to train people in it, so it might have some similarity. The thing that really helps is that you can push against the water to move." He takes in a breath and turns over, going underwater. Sort of a breaststroke movement, going to the far end of the pool and then back before breaking the surface again. He's a little out of breath.

He didn't say yes. But he didn't say no, either. And he is -- demonstrating. She chooses to take that as a good sign.

She watches, wide-eyed as he submerges and begins to traverse the length of the pool. He really does make it look like he was born to the stuff. She experiments, waving her hands in the water, trying to stabilize herself against the waves of water that precede his return. It works better with her fingers cupped together.

He emerges from the water, and she's grinning like a fool. Like he's juggled fire or disappeared a rabbit into thin air. "Amazing. All right. Let me try."

She struggles, holding his gaze as she forces herself to sink down into the water. The water covers her shoulders, and she lifts her chin. A moment later, she sinks beneath the water.

She emerges less than five seconds later, coughing and sputtering, her hands reaching out for something to hold onto.

Steps in - he's stepping in a lot, lately, isn't he? - and pulls her out of the water and back against him.

"Easy," he says. "I got you." Pat on the back, in case she needs a little help coughing it up.

After a moment or two, when she's a little more recovered (and he is not thinking about supporting her body, about his hands where they had rested on her waist, now on her arms), he says,"Sorry, I should've thought of that. You might want to hold your nose at first, and keep your mouth closed." A little rueful.

She's still wiping her eyes and shoving her hair back out of her face, chuckling at her own ineptitude. "Yes, I only wish I had thought of it sooner!" She rests her hands on his chest this time and steps back, smiling at him with bright blue eyes. It is simple to respect his need for a little distance, especially with the water all around them. What a wonderful playground, she thinks.

"Do you open your eyes under water?"

When someone is warm, it takes a moment to bleed through the water, even when they're touching - and there's only enough time for that to happen, for him to start to feel the warmth of her hand before she pulls away.

He grins. "Give it a try," he suggests. The world looks amazing underwater. "You ready?"

Because this time he'll go under at the same time as her.

Her eyes went wide and she nodded, this time pinching her nose shut with one hand. She had to bob a little in the water, to counteract the forces of buoyancy, but she managed.

The world went silent and fluid. The chlorinated water stung her eyes a little, but not horribly. She blinked, focusing, looking across at him. A laugh caught her by surprise and the sound was muddled by the puff of bubbles that followed.

She reached out and caught his fingers in hers, beaming at him, looking ridiculous with her hand on her nose and her hair in a dark halo around her face.