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Mission One
She returns to headquarters still smelling of industrial waste, no matter how many times she had the Hazmat guys hose her down. She gets a few stares and snickers walking through the lobby with her damp pink hair and hospital paper gown, but there was no salvaging her clothes and no time to stop off at home. Erik wanted to see her. Now.
She doesn't blame him. Gallons and gallons dumped into that river. What a fucking waste.
A restricted elevator, key pass, eye scan, voice recognition. Finally she stands deep underground in the Counter-Eco-Terrorism facility, the sole reason thirty floors of a dummy car insurance company exists above ground. Down here, she gets a different reaction to her ridiculous appearance. Hard stares, malicious whispering. Special agents can be such petty bitches.
"Your handler's waiting for you in the debriefing room," one of them gloats as she walks past. She grits her teeth.
She liked it better when Erik was just the guy who mysteriously popped in and out of her life, and not the guy who holds her accountable for her actions. She's taken to calling him boss sarcastically, and if he's picked up on the tone, he hasn't given any indication. She can't ever tell if that hapless obliviousness is part of a cover persona or not.
She can see him poring over the field report through the glass walls of the conference room, his black hair mussed as he runs an agitated hand through it. She doesn't need this debriefing or Erik to tell her what went wrong tonight. She knows. She was cocky, and worse than that, careless. If Erik asked her to justify half her actions tonight, she wouldn't know what to say. Despite all his warnings against it, she stupidly followed her gut instinct and a decoy straight into a dead end. By the time she wised up to it and double-backed to the river, it was already putrid. In the next few hours, the CET will receive a high-tech version of a ransom note from some mad scientist or another, demanding an obscene amount of money, or else the rest of the world's rivers and seas suffer a similar fate. She's beginning to hate these mad scientists on a personal level, for being so predictable sometimes.
Erik spots her from across the room and follows her with hard eyes as she makes her way to him. As soon as she closes the door, he presses a button on the conference table, turning the glass walls opaque. He's at least saving her from the public humiliation. A small mercy.
After a long moment of silence, he finally speaks. "You're not always right, you know. I know we let you get away with a lot of things because you're so good at this, but you're not always right. We're doing our job on this end as well. Sometimes you have to listen."
The weariness in his voice isn't what she was expecting. She's beginning to realize he's more aware than she gives him credit for.
"I know," she says. "I know. It won't happen again."
Mission Two
She thinks she needs a better disguise than just her pink hair if bad guys can recognize her on the street, when she's just a mild-mannered, bespectacled car insurance agent. She barely has enough time to lure them into an alley, away from the crowds, where she takes each tentacle monster out with a good kick to their twenty-five eyes. But not before one of them manages to get a swipe in, leaving a long gash on her left forearm. She waits for the clean-up crew to come and then makes her way home with her scarf wrapped around her arm.
It's not until she sees the half-finished pancake batter in her kitchen that she remembers why she left the house in the first place.
Eggs. She forgot the eggs.
Dammit.
She dresses her wound and heads back out again.
Mission Three
When a few old grad school friends calls, she's not sure why she accepts their invitation to a little reunion lunch date. Maybe the masochistic side of her personality that makes her such a good spy is bleeding into the other parts of her life.
They're all sitting around, talking about their high-powered jobs in environmental lobbying or alternative energy campaigning, when they pause mid-sentence and turn to her with an obnoxious combination of smugness and pity. "So, how's the insurance business?"
It's not their fault, really. She's offered nothing to lead them to believe otherwise. Back then, she was top of their class in environmental legislature and policy, when out of nowhere she dropped out of the program to sell car insurance. Most people attributed it to a nervous breakdown, and it wasn't as if she could correct them. Who would believe the real story, that a handsome man approached her with an offer to help save the world?
Looking around the table, she wonders if she made the right decision. She may stop evil scientists, but they're the ones keeping the bad guys from cropping up again. They're changing the shape of this world.
"Well," they say to her in a conciliatory tone, taking her silence as some kind of admission of defeat, "at least you look great."
Mission Four
Her mother calls, once a week, right on schedule, to ask her when she'll get married.
She sighs, considers faking a relationship to get her mother off her back. Like a really deep, deep undercover assignment, except this time she'd be playing a more well-adjusted version of herself. But the only men in her life are evil eco-terrorists and Erik, and bringing Erik home to meet her mom is not an option. Knowing him, he'd just charm his way permanently into her mother's heart and then she really would have to marry him. She can handle a lot - mad scientists, acid rain, mutant plant monsters - but she draws the line at fake marriage with her boss.
Men. Always willing to risk their necks to save your life, but when you actually need them for something, they're completely useless.
"I did meet someone last night," she tells her mother. Technically that's true - she did spend the night battling an evil scientist threatening to blot out the sun with his Smog Deathray.
"Oh?"
"I don't think it's going to work out though." She can hear her mother's face fall over the phone. "He smoked too much."
Mission Five
She's going to change everything.
If not, what has all this studying and paper-writing and exam-taking been for? She's going to finish grad school at the top of her class and then she's going to change everything.
That's what she tells herself, every day, up until the day she meets him. She's sitting in the quad, going over her notes from her last class, when someone standing above her casts a shadow over her papers. She looks up.
"Hi," a man says, his boyish charm meant to disarm her, but she knows better. "I'm Erik. With a K."
"Erin. With an N," she quips back. He smiles and sits down next to her on the bench.
"We've been watching you," he says, the charm still there, still not having its intended effect. Her first instinct is to throw her textbook at him, but what he says next stops her. "You could be doing so much more than this."
She blinks at him, and for the first time in her life, is at a loss for words. He takes one of her books, flipping through it casually. "Aren't you tired of all these words? Don't you want something more immediate?"
He hands her a card. She finally finds her voice.
"Car insurance?" she asks, raising an eyebrow.
"Tell me, Erin." A knowing smile, all teeth and flash and promise of a world larger than this one - and in this moment, she knows her life will never be the same again. "Do you want to save the world?"