It was nice, in all honesty. He wasn’t the sort of person Syler normally found himself getting along with, but the more he allowed himself to relax, the more he found that he enjoyed the agent’s company. He had the same sort of quick wit he usually saw among other members of the operations branch, for all that he was as physically destructive as an ill-timed explosive. A menace, a shameless flirt, completely incapable of being serious outside of assignments, and constantly leaving Syler food like he was a stray cat that needed fattening up, but still, nice.
“God I’m bored,” the man in question stated, voice in his ear and two thousand miles away.
“Stake outs usually are, I’m told,” Syler replied. “Any sign of Sanchez yet?” Dufault had been sent to covertly eliminate the head of a growing drug cartel operation near the Mexican capital. Three days of surveillance had lead to his position holed up in a small room in the office building across the street from the cartel headquarters, waiting for Sanchez to exit the neighboring building for a clean assassination.
“It must be nearly midnight there,” Dufault continued. “Why on earth are you still in the office?”
“Besides the obvious answer of you still being in the field on active assignment and throwing a fit whenever I hand you off to someone else? It’s the only time I have to work on my side projects undisturbed.” Indeed, Syler was in one of the development labs now, laptop balanced on a free corner of the workbench, allowing him to oversee the security cameras in Dufault’s nook while staying safely out of range of any sparks his soldering iron might create.
The sound of shuffling on the other end of the comms drew Syler’s attention. He glanced at the security feed, watching as the man adjusted his position, probably hoping to return circulation to his extremities after hours laid prone behind a sniper rifle. Syler had refused to let him take the modified HK416 with him for this operation.
“Don’t you have a life?”
“Not with you people around.”
A short pause, then: “Someone to go home to?”
“I’m painfully single, thank you for asking,” Syler replied sarcastically, setting down the soldering iron and reaching for the microchip destined to power the low-profile drone he was developing.
“I could fix that, if you’d let me,” the other man replied, and Syler bristled, taking back what he’d said about the other man toning down the flirting. Apparently, he’d just been building up a reserve to irritate him with.
“Dufault, I know you’re bored, but could you find something else to seduce? That nice bookshelf in the corner, maybe? Your rifle? Anything.”
“Darling, I’m hurt.”
“Be serious for once.”
The other man was silent long enough that Syler glanced up at his computer, thinking the connection had somehow gone out. He was impossibly still on the feed. “Alright,” Dufault finally ground out, voice devoid of its usual teasing. “It’s hard to find someone I can be serious about in this line of work. Half my life is lying and the rest is classified, never mind the bi-monthly deployments at a moments notice. Oh, and let’s not forget periodically having to sleep with foreign operatives to gain access to information. Call me old fashioned, but that’s hardly the recipe for a stable relationship.”
Syler gaped at the unexpected honesty, swallowing tightly, pulse suddenly out of time. “You sound shockingly sincere.”
“Some might even go so far as to call it romantic,” Arthur replied, tone rife with self-deprecation.
Both men were quiet for a moment. Syler wasn’t quite sure what to say, troubled by the knowledge that the reason for Dufault’s flirting had evolved to include the possibility he was genuinely interested and not just teasing to fill time. With Syler’s luck, it was equally likely to be either and he hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about asking, if he even wanted an answer at all. He’d never been good at this sort of thing, awkward and fumbling in most relationships, platonic or otherwise, and he’d learned early on not to want things that were so obviously out of reach for people like himself. There was a reason he specialized in robotics and artificial intelligence. Emotions were…difficult. Disappointing.
He cleared his throat. “Dufault, I—”
“Shit,” Arthur hissed, and Syler yanked his attention back to the security cameras. “Sanchez’s car just pulled up. I thought he was supposed to be in the building!”
“He was,” Syler began flicking through security cameras, settling on the small convoy of cars that had arrived on the scene.
“Fuck me, this is going to be messy.” Arthur lined up the shot, breathing evening out over the line. Syler rapidly reassessed the exit plan to compensate for the increased security surrounding the kingpin, fingers flying across the keys as he accessed roof top cameras.
In the span of a few seconds, Sanchez exited the car and was met with a bullet between the eyes. Arthur dropped away from the window, withdrawing the rifle, already dismantling it. Syler rapidly worked to ensure the doors to the building were locked, a bid to buy Dufault time, watching as Sanchez’s security guards frantically tried to locate his agent’s position. They locked onto the office building almost immediately, a bullet shattering the window as Arthur slammed the door shut, sprinting into the hallway.
“Eastern staircase. Take it to the top of the building. There are too many guards to exit out onto the street.” Arthur grunted. The guards were already at the door to the complex, smashing the entrance open and spilling into the ground floor as Arthur started on the stairs at a dead run. “There are no electronic locks between here and the rooftop. Get up there and I can lock the fire door to keep them off your trail.”
“It’s always fucking something, isn’t it?” Dufault huffed, rounding
