salute [h.s]

chapter 1 - covert communications & interesting introductions

Around 1:30 in the morning, Piper's stomach grumbled so she attached the portable headset for the phones and ventured off to the staff lounge on the floor below. She had expected it to be empty but there was a guy in a suit standing with his back to the doorway, pouring a coffee. Piper stepped into the room cautiously – suits usually meant agents and their moods were unpredictable at best.

She tried to get to the kettle as quietly as possible but the suited man had the senses of a proper agent and he craned his head around when the toe of her shoe squeaked on the floor. Piper instantly cursed all the higher powers when she realized it was her least favourite, Agent Samson.

His lips curled into a sneer at the sight of her and she could see a renewed light in his eyes at the sight of his favourite prey. "Why, good morning Stoner."

Piper curled her hands into fists and resisted the urge to pop him straight in the nose. In a fight with a field agent, she stood about zero chance of coming out a winner. "It's Stone," she corrected, her voice thin as she tried to stay calm. "But you knew that, Samson."

Samson's sneer only deepened until he looked like some malformed troll creature – Piper wasn't convinced that Samson wasn't a troll, to be totally honest – and he took measured steps toward her until he was towering above her slight frame. "That's Agent Samson to you, Stoner. Some of us in this building have earned that designation."

He knew that it was a sore spot for her so he was jabbing at it to irritate her. The trick was to not get worked up over it. Piper, unfortunately, struggled with that. "Earned it on your back?" she shot back.

Samson's face darkened and before she could pull away, he had caught her wrist tightly in his hand and was squeezing it hard. She was well aware that he had the strength to crush the fragile bones beneath her skin and pressed her lips shut to keep from saying anything else that would get her in trouble.

"If you want your tongue to remain in your mouth," Samson breathed hot against her face, "then you'd better rein it in. Capiche?"

"I didn't know your little brain was capable of foreign languages," her mouth spouted off before her brain reminded it that it was a bad idea to rile up Samson.

Samson chuckled to himself and then in an eye blink, Piper was turned around and pressed up against the countertop. He had yanked her arm behind her back and was pulling on it painfully. Piper yelped as Samson pressed his full body against hers, every hard muscle in his body pushing against her and making her feel impossibly small. "One day, I'm going to punish you for all of your insubordination, Stone. And I'm going to love every second of it."

Samson held her there, trapped against the counter, for an eternally long moment and then his weight was gone. Piper trained her gaze on the wall in front of her so Samson couldn't catch a glimpse of the ghostly white colour of her face. Eventually, she heard the lounge door close behind him and she finally turned around, letting out a long breath.

She hated that man so fucking much. He had singled her out in the first days of her mandatory field training, as he had been their instructor for the session – weapons basics (Piper had always wondered who had thought it was safe to give Samson access to weapons). It had been because she was a girl, and she was young, and she was pretty. He had thought that she would be easy prey to pick on. She had talked back, which was essentially written into her DNA. Samson hadn't liked it very much.

Since then, she had been called Stoner by both her superiors and her colleagues, a name that Samson had created and spread around. She had been the brunt of many inappropriate jokes that would have sent her running to HR if the SIS actually had an HR department to deal with shit like that. She had come into work to find all of her equipment vandalized and damaged on more than one occasion. And if that hadn't been proof of Samson's small, immature brain, she also received prank calls to IT every once in a while. As if she couldn't check call display – she had a fucking Ph.D. in computer science.