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asphaltcowgrrlTitle: Ice Water in My Veins
Fandom: Code Red original fiction
Pairing: Ali Hart/Paulo Castelli (the poor boy finally has a last name after… I can’t even tell you how man years… 15 maybe?)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Ali is awakened by a text message to return to base to interrogate a prisoner refusing to speak English. Confronted by a ghost from her past, she has to put on a cold exterior to keep anyone from knowing that there’s more between the two of them than a shared language.
Author’s Notes: Written for the weekend challenge at 1_million_words. I was given the emotion of ‘cold’. This was the first thing that came to mind. And now… I have pumpkin bread to eat.
Word Count: 2,169
Ali glanced at the text message again and sighed. It hadn’t changed since the first time she read it ten minutes ago. Rolling onto her side, she pulled herself into a sitting position and dialed her one time boyfriend and current officer in charge, Bryan Tracey.
“Tracey,” he said into the phone.
“It’s Ali,” she said, still half asleep. “You asked me to call.” Actually, his text had demanded she call the second she got the text, but she hadn’t. To be honest, she’d tried to go back to sleep, but her curiosity had gotten the better of her in the end.
“Yes,” he half-said, half-breathed. “We have a potential terrorist in custody and he doesn’t appear to speak any English.”
Great, she thought pulling herself out of bed. Her first day off duty in nine days and she’s already being called in. “What does he seem to be speaking?” She had a wide variety of languages under her belt, but for the most part, nothing that would help with a supposed terrorist. There weren’t many in the states that spoke Gaelic. The jeans she’d been wearing the night before were still on the floor and she pulled them on, tucking the phone between her ear and her shoulder.
“Well, at first I thought it was Spanish.”
“Oh good lord, Bryan. Any number of people on the base right now could have acted as a translator for someone speaking Spanish. Even my brother could do it.”
His sigh was harsh and filled with frustration. “Did you not listen to me? I said I thought it was Spanish.”
“Honestly, Bryan? With the hours I’ve been working, I can safely say that no, I wasn’t listening to you.” She found a clean t-shirt emblazoned with the name of the local hockey team across the front and tossed it onto her unmade bed. “But fine, I’ll play your games, what did you figure it to be?”
“After asking one of our Spanish speaking interns to talk to him,” he began, words laden with snootiness, “I was informed that it wasn’t exactly Spanish, but something similar. He suggested Portuguese.”
Shit. “Please no, dear god,” she muttered.
“What was that?” Bryan pause for a moment before picking up where he’d been before her interruption. “And see I did try and find an interpreter before calling you. So you can stop being so pissy with me before I decide to pull rank.”
She was shocked he hadn’t done so already, to be quite honest. “Whatever, Bryan. Did you get a name out of this supposed terrorist?” Not that her own, personal gun running Brazilian terrorist lover would ever give his actual, real name, she knew. But she was privy to a handful of his favorite aliases. It was par for the course when chasing him down.
Papers shuffled in the background while he searched for what he was looking for. “I’ve got one Enrique Dias in custody. Not that I believe for one minute that that’s his real name.”
Ali knew it wasn’t. But then, maybe it was, she didn’t know. It was very possible that the name she’d known him by for the last twenty-five years – Paulo Castelli – might be yet another alias. Although, she wasn’t positive about that. “It’s probably not,” she agreed with him, trying to drag her brain out of the past and into the present. Paulo was indeed in the custody of the United States Army and there was only one reason why that would be true.
He wanted to see her.
“It’s about goddamned time you got here,” Tracey bellowed upon seeing her. “You should have been here an hour ago.”
Shrugging, Ali turned on him. “And you should have waited until a decent hour to call me, too. I didn’t even get home until after midnight last night. Six A.M. is too damn early.” Pushing past him, she walked towards the bank of interrogation rooms, signaling for one of the on duty guards to come her way. “I hear we have a suspected terrorist by the name of Enrique Dias in custody? Could you bring him into three for me.”
The guard nodded and walked off towards the holding cells. Ali let herself into interrogation room number three and pulled out a chair. Flopping tiredly into it, she glared at Tracey who had deigned to follow her inside. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said, holding up his hands, palms out. “Just making sure you two get locked in here properly is all.”
“I doubt that,” she muttered. Before she could say anything more, the guard returned hauling the recent detainee by his arm. Lowering him into an empty chair, the guard attached his cuffs to the table, nodded, and let himself out. Bryan stood, stared at them both, and followed the guard out.
Ali waited until she heard the door locks click before speaking. “What’s your name,” she asked in Portuguese.
“You know my name,” he returned in his heavily accented Portuguese, that melodic voice tickling her ears and kicking her libido into overdrive. Turning his head up just a touch, he brought his melted chocolate eyes around to meet hers.
“My commanding officer tells me it’s Enrique Dias, is that correct?” She hated playing this game, especially with Paulo, but it had to be done. There wasn’t any way she could let anyone know she knew the man on the other side of the table. Not if she wanted to stay on this side of a prison door. He’d meant so much to her over the years, even when she was married to another man, that she found it damn near impossible not to react to his smile, his scent, his very presence.
Paulo had once given her a trick to help her out in situations like this. He’d told her to pretend she had ice water in her veins, to tell herself as much, so that she could look on him and not feel a thing. While it helped her steel her emotions, she’d never be able to convince herself that she didn’t feel anything for that man. Enemy of the state or not, sometimes he was the only thing she had.
“You were arrested under the suspicion of being a terrorist. Is this true?” Ali thought that ‘terrorist’ was too harsh a word, even though he was often affiliated with a terrorist organization. Left on his own, he’d run his guns and let the bad guys of the world take each other out on their own terms. As far as she was concerned, he was doing the world a favor.
“No my little bird,” he said, voice gentle and lilting, “you know me better than that.”
She forced herself to repress the smile she felt building. “Ice water in my veins,” she muttered in Gaelic, a language no one on their base understood.
“That’s my girl,” he praised her. “Talk yourself into it.”
“That’s really hard to do when you’re calling me by pet names and being so goddamned sexy while you do it. Why are you here?”
“I’ve missed you,” he said, honestly. “And I didn’t want to run the risk of going to your place or disrupting your children.”
“The kids are with their grandparents,” she said, not understanding why she’d even said that. “You could have sent a note like you always do.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But maybe I like sticking my neck out to see you. The challenge she is… exciting.”
The challenge of breaking into a military base, intentionally getting caught, refusing to speak English so that they’d call her in specifically… all to say he missed her. She’d had some fucked up relationships over the years, but this was by far the messiest. Now, once they were done with their little tea party, he’d give it an hour and then he’d break right out of his holding cell and disappear without a trace. He really needed a hobby.
“What do you need – Enrique?” She barely caught herself before calling him by his given name, or rather, the name he’d given her all those years ago.
“Just to see your pretty face one last time before I leave the land of the free for parts less… free.”
A flicker of sadness flashed across his face and it stopped her heart in her chest. “Where are you going?”
“Bogotá,” he said, shrugging like going into the Columbian capital wasn’t any big thing. “They say it’s guns, but it must be drugs.”
“It’s always drugs,” she said, remembering her few forays into Columbia. “How long?”
“As long as it takes, my little bird.” It wasn’t an answer, not really, but it was all he had and she’d have to live with that.
“So, what am I supposed to tell them that you said to me?” This was a favorite game of his, to make her lie for him, to find a story when there was none. Remembering this, it was easier to project the icy air she needed to get through this.
“Tell them there is a bomb in a building nineteen miles to the south of here. Don’t tell them which one, say I refused to give that information, but watch them scramble all the same.”
“Sometimes,” she said, her voice hard, “you are a real bastard.”
“I told you that the day you met me, but you never wanted to believe me.” His smile melted every crystal of ice she’d forced into her blood moments ago.
Standing, she slammed her fist onto the table, only partly for show. Mostly out of frustration. One of these days he was going to get caught – really caught – and then they’d both be in hot water. Although, she thought, turning to look at him again, savoring the curve of his jaw, he’d probably find a way to keep her out of it all if that ever happened. Paulo might be the scum of the earth in so many ways, but once you’d gained his trust, his love, he was loyal until the very end.
“I can’t keep doing this,” she finally said.
“You’ll never have to pay for my sins,” he told her. “I can promise you that much.”
“You can’t promise me anything,” she said, feeling the truth of it sitting heavily in her stomach. “I have to go now, to give your little bit of misinformation to my boss. And then you’re going to slip out unnoticed I assume?”
“You’re correct,” he said, oozing charm.
Ali stood and walked to the door between her and the free world. She gave a sharp rap and waited for the guard to unlock it. With one foot outside of the interrogation room, he spoke.
“Amo você.”
“You’re such a liar,” she said in English, forgetting herself for a moment. Paulo just grinned.
“What did he have to say,” Tracey asked, pouncing on her the moment she exited the interrogation room.
With a sigh, she repeated the false intel Paulo had given her and watched everyone in the general area scramble for action. She was left behind, of course, since she’d been on shift for nine days without a break, but that didn’t make her feel any better.
When Ali arrived home an hour and a half later – after a necessary stop at a local diner for food, coffee, and a slice of very unnecessary coconut cream pie – she found a neatly folded piece of paper wedged into the jamb of the door leading from her garage into her house. The familiar blue paper set her heart stuttering so she slipped it into her pocket to read once she was safely inside.
Unfolding the note, she looked at the neat script and non-English words written upon it.
My little bird,
You asked for a note, so here is your note. I hope your breakfast was satisfactory and that you are home now, safe and sound, ready for a long nap. I shall miss your pretty face and fiery nature while I am away. I can only dream that I will see you again someday.
xx
It was unsigned, but it didn’t need to be. There wasn’t anyone else who could have left it for her. She had to admit, she was impressed. That the note was waiting for her meant he’d broken back out in record time. And had gotten out safely.
“Paulo,” she said into the quiet of the house. “One of these days you really are going to be the death of me.”
“May we pray that today is not that day?”
She turned and stared into the melted chocolate eyes she saw in her dreams. “But what about Bogotá?”
He shrugged. “It’ll still be there tomorrow, no?”
“Yes,” she said, grinning and opening her arms. “It invariably will be.”
And the same went for her nap. It could wait an hour… or two, right? She melted into his embrace and felt relief as the ice water in her veins slowly melted and began to boil.
Fandom: Code Red original fiction
Pairing: Ali Hart/Paulo Castelli (the poor boy finally has a last name after… I can’t even tell you how man years… 15 maybe?)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Ali is awakened by a text message to return to base to interrogate a prisoner refusing to speak English. Confronted by a ghost from her past, she has to put on a cold exterior to keep anyone from knowing that there’s more between the two of them than a shared language.
Author’s Notes: Written for the weekend challenge at 1_million_words. I was given the emotion of ‘cold’. This was the first thing that came to mind. And now… I have pumpkin bread to eat.
Word Count: 2,169
Ali glanced at the text message again and sighed. It hadn’t changed since the first time she read it ten minutes ago. Rolling onto her side, she pulled herself into a sitting position and dialed her one time boyfriend and current officer in charge, Bryan Tracey.
“Tracey,” he said into the phone.
“It’s Ali,” she said, still half asleep. “You asked me to call.” Actually, his text had demanded she call the second she got the text, but she hadn’t. To be honest, she’d tried to go back to sleep, but her curiosity had gotten the better of her in the end.
“Yes,” he half-said, half-breathed. “We have a potential terrorist in custody and he doesn’t appear to speak any English.”
Great, she thought pulling herself out of bed. Her first day off duty in nine days and she’s already being called in. “What does he seem to be speaking?” She had a wide variety of languages under her belt, but for the most part, nothing that would help with a supposed terrorist. There weren’t many in the states that spoke Gaelic. The jeans she’d been wearing the night before were still on the floor and she pulled them on, tucking the phone between her ear and her shoulder.
“Well, at first I thought it was Spanish.”
“Oh good lord, Bryan. Any number of people on the base right now could have acted as a translator for someone speaking Spanish. Even my brother could do it.”
His sigh was harsh and filled with frustration. “Did you not listen to me? I said I thought it was Spanish.”
“Honestly, Bryan? With the hours I’ve been working, I can safely say that no, I wasn’t listening to you.” She found a clean t-shirt emblazoned with the name of the local hockey team across the front and tossed it onto her unmade bed. “But fine, I’ll play your games, what did you figure it to be?”
“After asking one of our Spanish speaking interns to talk to him,” he began, words laden with snootiness, “I was informed that it wasn’t exactly Spanish, but something similar. He suggested Portuguese.”
Shit. “Please no, dear god,” she muttered.
“What was that?” Bryan pause for a moment before picking up where he’d been before her interruption. “And see I did try and find an interpreter before calling you. So you can stop being so pissy with me before I decide to pull rank.”
She was shocked he hadn’t done so already, to be quite honest. “Whatever, Bryan. Did you get a name out of this supposed terrorist?” Not that her own, personal gun running Brazilian terrorist lover would ever give his actual, real name, she knew. But she was privy to a handful of his favorite aliases. It was par for the course when chasing him down.
Papers shuffled in the background while he searched for what he was looking for. “I’ve got one Enrique Dias in custody. Not that I believe for one minute that that’s his real name.”
Ali knew it wasn’t. But then, maybe it was, she didn’t know. It was very possible that the name she’d known him by for the last twenty-five years – Paulo Castelli – might be yet another alias. Although, she wasn’t positive about that. “It’s probably not,” she agreed with him, trying to drag her brain out of the past and into the present. Paulo was indeed in the custody of the United States Army and there was only one reason why that would be true.
He wanted to see her.
“It’s about goddamned time you got here,” Tracey bellowed upon seeing her. “You should have been here an hour ago.”
Shrugging, Ali turned on him. “And you should have waited until a decent hour to call me, too. I didn’t even get home until after midnight last night. Six A.M. is too damn early.” Pushing past him, she walked towards the bank of interrogation rooms, signaling for one of the on duty guards to come her way. “I hear we have a suspected terrorist by the name of Enrique Dias in custody? Could you bring him into three for me.”
The guard nodded and walked off towards the holding cells. Ali let herself into interrogation room number three and pulled out a chair. Flopping tiredly into it, she glared at Tracey who had deigned to follow her inside. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said, holding up his hands, palms out. “Just making sure you two get locked in here properly is all.”
“I doubt that,” she muttered. Before she could say anything more, the guard returned hauling the recent detainee by his arm. Lowering him into an empty chair, the guard attached his cuffs to the table, nodded, and let himself out. Bryan stood, stared at them both, and followed the guard out.
Ali waited until she heard the door locks click before speaking. “What’s your name,” she asked in Portuguese.
“You know my name,” he returned in his heavily accented Portuguese, that melodic voice tickling her ears and kicking her libido into overdrive. Turning his head up just a touch, he brought his melted chocolate eyes around to meet hers.
“My commanding officer tells me it’s Enrique Dias, is that correct?” She hated playing this game, especially with Paulo, but it had to be done. There wasn’t any way she could let anyone know she knew the man on the other side of the table. Not if she wanted to stay on this side of a prison door. He’d meant so much to her over the years, even when she was married to another man, that she found it damn near impossible not to react to his smile, his scent, his very presence.
Paulo had once given her a trick to help her out in situations like this. He’d told her to pretend she had ice water in her veins, to tell herself as much, so that she could look on him and not feel a thing. While it helped her steel her emotions, she’d never be able to convince herself that she didn’t feel anything for that man. Enemy of the state or not, sometimes he was the only thing she had.
“You were arrested under the suspicion of being a terrorist. Is this true?” Ali thought that ‘terrorist’ was too harsh a word, even though he was often affiliated with a terrorist organization. Left on his own, he’d run his guns and let the bad guys of the world take each other out on their own terms. As far as she was concerned, he was doing the world a favor.
“No my little bird,” he said, voice gentle and lilting, “you know me better than that.”
She forced herself to repress the smile she felt building. “Ice water in my veins,” she muttered in Gaelic, a language no one on their base understood.
“That’s my girl,” he praised her. “Talk yourself into it.”
“That’s really hard to do when you’re calling me by pet names and being so goddamned sexy while you do it. Why are you here?”
“I’ve missed you,” he said, honestly. “And I didn’t want to run the risk of going to your place or disrupting your children.”
“The kids are with their grandparents,” she said, not understanding why she’d even said that. “You could have sent a note like you always do.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But maybe I like sticking my neck out to see you. The challenge she is… exciting.”
The challenge of breaking into a military base, intentionally getting caught, refusing to speak English so that they’d call her in specifically… all to say he missed her. She’d had some fucked up relationships over the years, but this was by far the messiest. Now, once they were done with their little tea party, he’d give it an hour and then he’d break right out of his holding cell and disappear without a trace. He really needed a hobby.
“What do you need – Enrique?” She barely caught herself before calling him by his given name, or rather, the name he’d given her all those years ago.
“Just to see your pretty face one last time before I leave the land of the free for parts less… free.”
A flicker of sadness flashed across his face and it stopped her heart in her chest. “Where are you going?”
“Bogotá,” he said, shrugging like going into the Columbian capital wasn’t any big thing. “They say it’s guns, but it must be drugs.”
“It’s always drugs,” she said, remembering her few forays into Columbia. “How long?”
“As long as it takes, my little bird.” It wasn’t an answer, not really, but it was all he had and she’d have to live with that.
“So, what am I supposed to tell them that you said to me?” This was a favorite game of his, to make her lie for him, to find a story when there was none. Remembering this, it was easier to project the icy air she needed to get through this.
“Tell them there is a bomb in a building nineteen miles to the south of here. Don’t tell them which one, say I refused to give that information, but watch them scramble all the same.”
“Sometimes,” she said, her voice hard, “you are a real bastard.”
“I told you that the day you met me, but you never wanted to believe me.” His smile melted every crystal of ice she’d forced into her blood moments ago.
Standing, she slammed her fist onto the table, only partly for show. Mostly out of frustration. One of these days he was going to get caught – really caught – and then they’d both be in hot water. Although, she thought, turning to look at him again, savoring the curve of his jaw, he’d probably find a way to keep her out of it all if that ever happened. Paulo might be the scum of the earth in so many ways, but once you’d gained his trust, his love, he was loyal until the very end.
“I can’t keep doing this,” she finally said.
“You’ll never have to pay for my sins,” he told her. “I can promise you that much.”
“You can’t promise me anything,” she said, feeling the truth of it sitting heavily in her stomach. “I have to go now, to give your little bit of misinformation to my boss. And then you’re going to slip out unnoticed I assume?”
“You’re correct,” he said, oozing charm.
Ali stood and walked to the door between her and the free world. She gave a sharp rap and waited for the guard to unlock it. With one foot outside of the interrogation room, he spoke.
“Amo você.”
“You’re such a liar,” she said in English, forgetting herself for a moment. Paulo just grinned.
“What did he have to say,” Tracey asked, pouncing on her the moment she exited the interrogation room.
With a sigh, she repeated the false intel Paulo had given her and watched everyone in the general area scramble for action. She was left behind, of course, since she’d been on shift for nine days without a break, but that didn’t make her feel any better.
When Ali arrived home an hour and a half later – after a necessary stop at a local diner for food, coffee, and a slice of very unnecessary coconut cream pie – she found a neatly folded piece of paper wedged into the jamb of the door leading from her garage into her house. The familiar blue paper set her heart stuttering so she slipped it into her pocket to read once she was safely inside.
Unfolding the note, she looked at the neat script and non-English words written upon it.
My little bird,
You asked for a note, so here is your note. I hope your breakfast was satisfactory and that you are home now, safe and sound, ready for a long nap. I shall miss your pretty face and fiery nature while I am away. I can only dream that I will see you again someday.
xx
It was unsigned, but it didn’t need to be. There wasn’t anyone else who could have left it for her. She had to admit, she was impressed. That the note was waiting for her meant he’d broken back out in record time. And had gotten out safely.
“Paulo,” she said into the quiet of the house. “One of these days you really are going to be the death of me.”
“May we pray that today is not that day?”
She turned and stared into the melted chocolate eyes she saw in her dreams. “But what about Bogotá?”
He shrugged. “It’ll still be there tomorrow, no?”
“Yes,” she said, grinning and opening her arms. “It invariably will be.”
And the same went for her nap. It could wait an hour… or two, right? She melted into his embrace and felt relief as the ice water in her veins slowly melted and began to boil.
