NOTES:
Author: Yana
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None as such.
Disclaimer: The West Wing. Not mine.
Archive: JDFF archive, yes. Others please ask.
AN: J/D present but not explicit. More notes at the end.
"ROSS! Baby..." He turns up out of nowhere and strides towards me.
I frown at him. Today isn't a shaping up to be a good day, and having a half-cocked punk...even a friendly one...trying to cheer me up isn't helping.
He takes in my expression. "You don't like it when I call you Ross?"
"No," I say, remembering his other attempts to find me a nickname. "Ross is fine. It's the 'baby' part I object to."
"You gotta live a little!" He pounds my back in a manly display of affection and I rein in the urge to deck him.
"You sound like you've been living a lot." Reclining in his dark corner of the room, my perpetually grumpy companion decides to snipe up.
"Big P!"
The kid never learns. He gets a snappish "Don't call me that" for his pains.
"Potsie?"
"No."
"P-dawg?"
"Do you ever listen to yourself?"
"Quit being a downer. Otherwise I might start calling you 'Pothole'."
"I couldn't care less."
"BOTH of you!" I interrupt. I've already had enough, and we haven't even started yet. "Shut the hell up. You know why we're here." I pause to make sure I have their undivided attention. "It's time. The new season is almost here, and we've just taken delivery of the new line."
I open the door and usher them in.
"Whoa."
I'm not sure which one of them said it, but concede that the sight is pretty damn impressive. They stand there with their jaws dropped, staring.
I take a moment just to enjoy the silence.
"Ross, I gotta say, baby..."
See? You have to enjoy the silence while you've got it, because it never lasts. I start talking over him. "So what I need from both of you..."
He pulls a leather-tooled case off the wall and opens it. "Man...throwing stars?"
I snatch them away from him. "Shuriken. I need your help vetting these. All of it." I gesture at the multitude of shiny items hanging on the walls. "I know that you guys bump elbows. Sometimes your roles overlap."
"Different approaches for different..."
"Sometimes I have to finesse..."
"I know," I interrupt again. "It's a fine line at times. But you each have specialties, and I think you'll be able to find a few things here that'll make this year's event memorable."
The grump has already gravitated toward the vials of brightly-coloured fluids sitting in what looks like a stainless steel spice rack. "Slow acting?" he asks.
"Some of them."
"Hmmph."
Well, he's recovered from his awed wonder pretty quickly.
I leave them both to it and wander over to the hand-to-hand stuff. I finger the grip of one of the new leather-bound coshes. Perhaps I'm getting old. All this new, automatic, semi-automatic, high caliber...
THUNK.
A throwing star plants itself in the wall next to my hand.
I turn around slowly, and just for a moment, he looks really afraid. "Ross, sorry, I..."
Cutting him off with a gesture, I point at the automatic weapons. "That's more your speed. Leave the shuriken alone."
"I could use them!" he protests.
"Go."
Pouting, he does.
I turn back to the wall and pull down the new whip. Fifteen feet long. Smooth, tight plaiting. Steel handle core. Black. Dangerous.
I think of the old days, when I wreaked havoc with something like this. I was young, then. As young as the kid currently pulling the scope off a sniper rifle on the other side of the room. And more mischievous than him, if the truth be told. More playful, more distracted.
Less annoying.
But with that whip, man, I could...
"Do some serious damage," a seductive voice murmurs in my ear.
She always sounds seductive. Or maybe it's just me.
I turn and smile. "Hey. I didn't hear you come in."
She returns the smile. "You never do."
"Alpha-Girl!!!"
The kid is loud enough to turn everyone's head. She casts a long-suffering glance at me.
"Yeah." I say. "He's been like that since he got here."
I can see her mustering her patience. "Himmie..."
His face falls. "You don't like Alpha-Girl?"
"It makes me sound like a superhero."
"A-dawg?"
"Give it a rest, Himmie," she says gently.
"Do you want something more technical, more descriptive? Like Targeting and Assessment or..."
"You're not calling me T and A."
"Or something more Crouching-Tiger-Hidden-Dragon, more shadow-government, since you aren't in the field, you hang back behind the ssss..."
THUNK.
She'd plucked the shuriken out of the wall and hurled it past his ear with a supernatural speed.
"Not that you couldn't go out in the field," he amends hastily. "You're the best, Allie, the original, the brains of the operation, the heart, the often-imitated, never-duplicated goddess of..."
She clears her throat meaningfully and for once, he shuts up.
Then she turns back to me. "It's all here?"
I grin at her emphasis on the word 'all' and pull her over to the one bare patch of wall. She looks at me quizzically for a moment, then understands and places her hand in the middle of the patch. The wall slips away easily to reveal a viewscreen.
"High definition?" she asks.
"Beyond."
Her lips curl into a satisfied smile. "Excellent."
With a few touches the screen flashes to life. She doesn't hesitate with the new equipment; slipping into her new, ergonomically-designed chair, she immediately homes in on a likely target with the skill of someone who's done this a million times before. I lean back, content to watch and admire her.
Then suddenly she sits up, staring at the victim she's tagged.
"What in the name of..."
I peer at the screen, then hastily step in front of it to block her view.
She stares up at me, her mouth open in disbelief. "Him?"
I shift, uncomfortable. "Yeah," I mutter.
"Still?"
"Yeah," I whisper, refusing to meet her eyes.
"How?"
"I swear I don't know."
"You don't know," she says flatly. "Did I or did I not tag him four...no...FIVE FREAKIN' YEARS AGO!"
"You did," I mumble.
"What the hell is the problem?"
"I don't know," I repeat lamely. This day is getting worse and worse.
"I handed that one to you!" she says. "Practically handed you his ass on a silver platter. I even baited the trap! She was perfect for him...young, vulnerable, and wide-eyed, yet with a hint of steel and wit beneath her sweet and gentle exterior..."
"Not unlike yourself," I try.
She snorts. "What happened?"
"I...I..."
"You don't know."
"I've tried everything."
"Really?"
It's the doubt in her voice that gets to me. After all, I'm not some rookie; I've been doing this for a while. I'm a professional and not without extensive, impressive skills.
So I do what any consummate professional would. I get angry.
"Yes, really!" I snarl. "I admit I started lightweight, with the longbow and then the crossbow, because it really did look like shooting fish in a barrel. But it didn't take long to realize that the traditional stuff wasn't going to work. I pulled out the heavy artillery. I swear, everything Hef has sent down in the last five years I've tried on this guy. I even let the Waco Kid over there," I gestured at him flipping his revolvers out of his belt, spinning them in his fingers, and slipping them back into their holsters, "take pot shots at him whenever the mood strikes."
"And nothing."
"Nada. Zilch. Zip. Zero."
"What about..."
"Oh, she's still there," I snap. "You don't think I worked that angle? She's impervious."
"But they're still hanging around each other, right?" Her voice has softened. "That's something."
"If you call making each other miserable 'something'," I grumble.
She studies me for a minute. "And even Himmie can't get him moving?"
"That guy," I stab my finger at the image of the bane of my existence on the screen, "has taken more hits to the groin than an NFL linebacker playing a team of midgets. Even if we weren't gunning for a permanent solution, he should have brought the caveman by now!" It's possible I'm yelling at this point.
Her lips quirk with amusement. "Really?"
I can't help it. Whenever she smiles, I have to smile back. "Even I'm impressed with the amount of heat he's taken."
Her grin widens. "So that's a definite something. He's got the urge, but he's not acting on it. Chivalry, maybe?"
"I could have sworn you killed that yourself years ago."
Now she does laugh, long and openly. "I probably did."
The others wander over to see what's so funny.
"Oh, him," says Himmie. "Yeah. For a while there I thought I was shooting blanks. Are you sure he's not g..."
"You used standard ammunition?" I interrupt him.
"Yeah."
"No conditional targeting system?"
"Hell no!" he says. "That's your bag. Or his." He jerks his thumb in the direction of the sometimes-named Potsie. "Me? I get right to the point. I strike like lightning. I'm in, I'm out. Fast. Hard."
"Like a bullet."
"Like a rain of bullets, baby. Boom-boom!"
I wince. "So, assuming you hit him..."
"Point blank, baby."
I wince again. "He'd just go for whoever he wants? Whoever's handy?"
"Oh, yeah."
"But he hasn't gone for anyone at all," I point out.
He thinks for a second, then sighs. "True."
Potsie--I've decided to call him that from now on, just to annoy him-- finishes studying the screen and straightens. "He looks familiar," he grunts.
"Really?" I ask.
He shrugs and wanders back to his slow-acting vials. I shouldn't complain...at least he's doing what he's supposed to be doing, not wasting time over a lost cause like the rest of us.
We surveil the target a while longer as he moves around his office. When the intended but apparently unappealing bait wanders onto the screen to talk to him, we all let out pained sighs.
I'm suddenly distracted by the flash of feminine hands dancing over the controls.
"This thing does remote ether analysis, right?" she asks.
"Hef said it does remote everything."
She makes a little happy squeak. "I've been on his ass about expanding our remote capabilities forever," she says. "It's about damn time."
Her analysis readings superimpose themselves on the screen. We all stare at the graph full of jagged spikes.
I point. "Uh, is that peak there...uh, wow. That's what I think it is, right?"
She nods slowly. "Himmie didn't miss."
"Of course I didn't!"
We both instinctively ignore him. I trace the display. "So, if he has that much juice pent up inside him..." I turn to her. "How the hell *does* he store that much indefinitely?"
She frowns and the graph on the screen changes to some weird fractal display I won't even pretend to understand.
"There's a blockage," she murmurs. "But..." She frowns. "It's not internal."
I want to ask her what the hell she means by that, but she has another series of graphs up before I can say anything.
Suddenly she pushes back from the console. "What the hell?" she says in disbelief.
"What?"
"There." She points.
"That's a spike...of...wait."
"That's not him," she prompts me.
I think quickly. "Not him...her? That's her?"
"She's been completely inundated...with the other form of..." she gestures meaningfully.
"Someone gave her..."
"Someone gave her a *lot* of..."
I turn to her. "You know what this is? This is the balance that can't exist. This is the irresistable force," I jab a finger at the target, "meeting the immovable object." I tap the screen where the bait appears for emphasis. I have to calm down, otherwise I'm gonna put a hole in the new equipment.
Taking a deep breath, I ask, "So she does want him?"
"Oh, yeah. But it's been transmuted into the impotent form of lust--longing. She can't act on it, she can only think about it. Pine for him."
"That really sucks," I say feelingly.
"Tell me about it." Her eyes suddenly meet mine, her intense gaze burning into me.
I turn back to the screen quickly, swallowing. "So while we've been trying to get him to give in to his impulses..."
"She's been dwelling on all the reasons they can't be together," she finishes. "Here's the energy imaging."
I see the shimmering crackle of desire from the target, surrounded and contained by the cool green light that radiates from the bait.
"The two aspects of lust, the impulsive action and the impotent analysis, perfectly balanced..."
I trail off. She stares at the screen a minute longer. Then her mouth twists into a grimace.
"POTHOS!" she bellows.
He wanders over, a vial of fluorescent pink liquid in each hand. "You know, I think I can get a nice steady burn going if I mix these..." He catches sight of the screen. "Whoa."
"You know anything about this?" she asks in a dangerously quiet voice.
He peers at the screen. "Oh, yeah. Her. She was my chemistry experiment a few years back. Remember the gas canisters Hef sent up, and we were like, no way are we gonna be able to use them, they carry like fifteen doses, you could floor an elephant with..." He notices our glares. "What?"
"You tried one anyway?" I ask.
"Yeah. Slow administration is the key. She took all fifteen doses with no ill effect over the period of a month. Still, it was more of a theoretical experiment. Noone really needs fifteen doses..." We're still glaring at him. "Again, I say, what?"
Aphrodite flips the two graphs up side by side. "By dosing my bait, you created the perfect theoretical balance. Except it isn't theoretical. It's actually happened."
He whistles. "Whoops. You mean to tell me that while I was trying to cool her down, this poor schmuck," he points at the hapless male's graph, "has basically been target practice for Idiot Boy?"
"Hey!" says Himeros. "At least I was upfront about things. No insidious, secretive, slow-acting compounds here, baby!"
"You never think," snaps Pothos. "You just jump in, never mind who or what gets caught up in your physical frenzy of..."
"Doesn't look like you were thinking much either!"
"I admit I hadn't planned this, but look at it!" He gestures at the screen. "The perfect balance, the perfect blend of thought and impulse..."
Aphrodite stands up and grabs them by their collars, effectively ending the argument by lifting them both off their feet. "I'm only going to say this once," she grinds out. "It's not natural. They've both been overdosed. *Highly* overdosed." She shakes the two of them for emphasis and they nod. "The energies they've absorbed have created a standoff between them." Suddenly she lets go, and they fall in a heap at her feet.
It's not the first time she's had that effect on men.
"So," she nudges them with her toe. "What are you going to do about it?"
Pothos sighs. "I have an antidote," he offers, climbing warily to his feet. "I just...she had such a full life, I didn't think she needed it. I had no idea."
"Well, I don't have an antidote," Himeros announces. "There is no antidote. Desire isn't meant to be stored up like that. It's meant to be acted upon, and it dissipates immediately afterwards. Didn't think you could actually stockpile it."
I decide to speak up. "Whatever we end up doing, we owe these two. Agreed?"
They both nod.
"So we need to get them alone together. Really alone."
"In a soundproof room," Aphrodite observes dryly.
"With a day or two to themselves. Completely to themselves," I continue.
"That's not going to be easy," she observes. "Considering where they work."
"Ah, but you have a connection there, right?"
She frowns and says, "You really want me to call that blowhard and say, hey, brother-husband, could you arrange for there not to be a war for a few days?"
I wince. "Maybe not."
"You know how grateful I am videotape hadn't been invented when I knew that guy?"
"It's pretty quiet right now," I say hastily, not wanting to wade into that whole situation again.
"Right." She focuses on the task at hand. "Can we get them together, alone, for the weekend?"
"Shouldn't be too difficult. They're always dropping by each other's apartments late at night."
She shakes her head. "Denial."
"Unnatural," I agree.
"Let's do it."
Watching her work the controls is a real pleasure. On the screen, time passes for our heroes and suddenly he's offering her dinner and a ride home.
"Nice touch," I say.
"That wasn't me."
"He just spontaneously asked her on a date?" I ask in disbelief.
"It's not a date per se," she explains. "From reviewing their files, I see they have a history of this type of behaviour."
"Still," I comment with a grin, "It's nice she's getting dinner first."
I get a backhanded slap for that, which would have landed me on my ass on the floor if I hadn't been expecting it.
We fast forward through dinner and locate the most promising point in time to put our plan into action. Our heroes pull up in front of her house and sit in his car, still talking. It's obvious that they don't want to leave each other for the weekend, but neither of them knows how to tip the scales so that they can take that next step.
"Pothos...make sure she's the only one who gets the antidote," Aphrodite warns, "Any minute now they're going to say goodnight and he's going to drive away..."
He nods and takes off.
We can see him almost immediately on the viewscreen, though of course the couple in the car can't see him at all. He slips through the rear passenger-side door to sit behind our girl of perpetual longing.
"Wait for it, wait for it," Aphrodite mutters. I grin and squeeze her shoulder.
Pothos wets his fingers from a vial of antidote and reaches out to touch her bottom lip. His touch is so light as to be unnoticeable, and no mortal can see the drop of antidote, but the woman suddenly smacks her lips thoughtfully. Then her tongue sweeps out, licking up any remnants.
Success.
Pothos is back with us in a flash. "Piece of cake."
I grin. "Let's see what happens now."
The couple keep talking, though. No sudden fireworks, no steamed up windows, no suspiciously rhythmic rocking of the car.
Himeros frowns. "Do you want me to give the guy another shot in the groin?"
"I don't think that's necessary," Aphrodite says calmly. "She's asked him in for coffee."
And then I see it: the cool green glow on the screen slowly transmuting into a shimmering crackle of desire.
"Excellent," I say, satisfied.
We watch as they go in...
She hangs up her coat and turns to take his from his hands.
Their fingers brush together accidentally.
A second of time hangs in the air.
Then...wow.
Conflagration would be the right word. Suddenly she's devouring him, pushing him against the door, but he's pushing back, refusing to be cornered, wrapping his hands around her ass, lifting her, carrying her into her room, tumbling them both onto her bed.
"Wow." I say. "I had no idea mortals could...."
The screen shows me not only what is currently going on, but also projects what will be going on for the rest of the weekend, if all conditions remain constant.
I have to say, I didn't think it was possible for a man and a woman to do what they're going to be doing for as long as they're going to be doing it.
Himeros grins, pleased. "I guess they'll work through his overdose in no time."
"Something like that," Aphrodite says.
I frown, suddenly remembering. "That's the desire taken care of, but we wanted a permanent solution. What about..."
Aphrodite cuts me off by gesturing at the screen, and I realize that they don't need my help at all.
She gets to her feet and grabs my hand. "Is it safe to leave the two of you here to vet the rest of the artillery?"
"Yeah," says Himeros. "I'll even check your bow and arrows, Ross, if you want."
I'm having trouble concentrating, what with the goddess of love squeezing my hand. "Sure," I manage. "You break it, I kill you."
"No problem."
Aphrodite starts towards the door, towing me in her wake. Then suddenly she stops, staring past me. I look behind me and see the whip hanging on the wall.
"Bring it," she murmurs.
She always sounds seductive to me. And believe me when I say that as the god of love, I hear a lot of seductive voices.
I grab the whip. "Let's go."
My bad day is about to get better.
THE END
End Notes:
Eros: the god of Love, who used to use a whip but apparently prefers the bows and arrows now
Himeros: a divine power representing Desire, usually for something within human reach
Pothos: a divine power of Longing, usually for something unattainable
Aphrodite: needs no introduction :) Some say she was Eros'
mother, other sources say that Eros was older than her and present at her
birth. She once cheated on her husband with Ares, god of war, and got caught
in the act. Her husband trapped the two of them in flagrante delicto
and invited the other gods and goddesses to come and look at them.