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Maya's eyes keep darting from the file in her hands back to Charlie, who sat next to her quietly, minding his lunch, while she examined him and the contents of the documents with minute scrutiny. Initially, she wasn’t too happy about his presence, but in the end, she did agree that it made sense for him to come with her on this assignment. After all, she was being rather high profile for this particular mission and they could not afford to be lax with security measures when their strategic political relations were so strained. Still, she couldn’t help but feel uneasy around the man tasked with safeguarding her life, though mainly it was because she barely knew a thing about him.
She initially surmised she could relieve that tension by requesting to see his file. She thought he'd object at first, seeing as how security outfits were typically the private and mysterious types, but Charlie had shown no signs of annoyance nor resistance when she asked about it. In fact, he gave it to her himself earlier that morning, while they were having breakfast in the hotel lobby.
She now watched him push salad into his mouth nonchalantly. It was hard to believe this man, with such a calm and almost meditative demeanour, was a subversive tactical ops and explosives expert.
She brought her coffee cup up to her lips and continued scanning the file. A piece of information caught her attention, or rather, the lack of it.
"It doesn't say your birthday," she said out loud.
Charlie quietly looked at her with a blank expression on his face and just shrugged.
"Really? Of all the things to keep quiet about yourself, you're going to pick birthdays?” She tapped the file with her index, pointedly. “This here has pretty much your entire life story, including detailed psych evals.”
Nonetheless, Charlie just shrugged again and kept eating his salad in silence.
Maya began to feel miffed at his blatant disregard of whatever she said. He was supposed to be her guardian; her life was effectively in his hands. She figured if he's going to be responsible for it, they should at least get to know each other a little bit.
"You know, it'll be a very uncomfortable assignment for the both of us if you just keep shrugging me off and refuse to talk to me," she protested, a little pouty.
This succeeded in making Charlie turn his attention towards her, at last. However, all he did was tilt his head towards the file, as if nudging her to keep on reading.
A little lower on the page was an annotation. It read: 'Selectively mute since childhood.'
"Oh." Maya's cheeks flushed immediately. "I didn't know. I'm sorry."
Charlie tilted his head, as if to say ‘no worries.’
"I guess that makes you really good at keeping secrets," Maya rambled, trying to lighten the mood she had crudely darkened. "No wonder you became an off-the-books special ops."
She was met with another mild nonchalant shrug from Charlie and he went back to his tea and salad.
Maya went back to her own food, pushing it around on the plate with idle efforts and feeling far more inhibited than usual. Socialising in general was not something that came naturally to her, it was something she had actually had to train for. The feeling of yet another failure at establishing an effective connection with began to seep deep into her bones and she felt her resolve for her mission begin to wane.
Just then, as she sighed in dejection, she felt a hand over hers, the one still holding the file. She turned to look and saw Charlie pull the file away. He swivelled it on the table and pointed at the line reading 'date of birth' and then at her. She tilted her head at first but a quick nod from him and a widening of his eyes helped her catch onto his meaning.
"My birthday?" she asked. Charlie nodded.
Maya smiled. "Well, that's a little complicated," she said. Charlie looked at her with a slightly intrigued expression in his eyes.
"You see, I was born in space."
Charlie's eyebrows raised, now fully interested.
Maya closed her eyes as she continued. "Normally, for those born in orbit, a birth date is used based on the timekeeping system of the nation that owns the vessel or colony. I always thought it was a little strange though… to pick a date dependant on a month of a calendar that relies on a tracking of seasons and the rotation of the earth around the sun, when all you've known is a fixed spot in the cosmos that oversees the coming and goings of all celestial bodies."
Maya opened her eyes to find Charlie staring intently at her. She gave out a short, nervous laugh, a little amused at the juxtaposition of his current attentiveness and the earlier dismissal. "It doesn't matter anyway," she said, rolling her eyes away from his. "It was a long time ago."
It startled her a little bit when Charlie lunged over to pick a pen from her pile of materials lying on the table. She watched him scribble something on the inner side of the folder.
No birthday either, then. We're not that different.
She smiled, a little surprised. “Yes, I suppose we're not. Something in common, I guess."
She was even more surprised when Charlie returned her smile. He grabbed the pen again and wrote another line.
Don't need words to get to know someone.