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sergeant-spoons · 4 months

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22. Gilded Summer

Sutton Flynn-Marshall

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As the June breezes took wing, the Normandy invasion proved a resounding success—but the operation did not come without its grief.

D-Day came and went with little warning and far more turmoil than even Dick had expected. Always a cautious man, he'd prepared himself for a hundred different circumstances while awaiting the drop, his feet securely planted on English soil. And yet, despite all his preparation, France managed to surprise him time and time again in just a few short days. He lost his rifle in the jump, which did little to soothe his initial angst upon landing in such unfamiliar territory. He'd studied the maps and run the drills repeatedly over the past few months, but the real thing was different. He'd always known it would be so. Just not this different.

Men died. Men lived. Men were shot. Men got out of a skirmish unscathed. The hot, sunny days began to blur as Allied forces pressed southward into the mainland of France. The 101st Airborne met resistance here and there but never with enough force to deter their advance. Dick got his hands on another rifle, probably stripped from some poor soul with a sheet covering his head, waiting to be buried in the army plots already springing up in occupied towns up by the coast. Nix came riding into the rendezvous point on a tank and Harry and Buck both showed up a few minutes later. The only person they were missing... Dick couldn't think about her. Not here. Not in this place. He found the enlisted men of Easy Company and, just as soon as he'd arrived, left to make a tactical assault on Brecourt Manor. They lost a man there, Private Hall. Dick had only known him a few short hours, and yet thinking about being the commander to send him back to his mother in a box made his stomach turn. He was thankful that wasn't his job.

A week and then some after D-Day, Easy Company stopped to rest for the night after a taxing march through the better part of the evening. They'd traversed hills and dells on the path to Saint-Marie-du-Month; now, they braved swamplands and marshes on their way to Carentan. The boggy surroundings filled the soldiers' boots with lukewarm water and now caused the medics to scurry around to pass out fresh socks, all of them anxious to prevent trench foot. In the early hours of the morning, counting down the minutes to the sunrise, Dick accepted a pair from Doc Roe and slipped out of his boots to peel his wet socks off his sore feet. Beside him, Harry rubbed his feet in the grass until a bug of some sort bit him and he started to curse, jumping up and down until he was satisfied he'd squished the nasty thing. A few feet away, Nix didn't even stir on his bedroll. How he managed to sleep anywhere at any time, Dick would never understand.

"Saved my chute," Harry mentioned as if they'd already been talking about it as he plopped back down onto his poorly-laid-out bedroll. "It's silk, you know. Gonna send it back to Kitty."

He flashed a broad grin.

"Think it'll make her a fine wedding dress, don't you think?"

At first, Dick just nodded—Harry had told him this several times already—but then a thought came into his mind and stuck around. Harry pulled his chute out of his pack and refolded it, just as he did every night. The fabric often crumpled up throughout the day during their trekking and Harry's frequent, messy searching for one thing or another in his pack, so whenever they stopped for a while, he got the chute out and smoothed it all neat-like, as if he'd be presenting to Kitty tomorrow. He wouldn't see his fiancée for some time. None of them would see their loved ones for a while yet. Dick didn't say anything like that, of course. While not the most optimistic, given the circumstances, memories and dreams of home past and future were sometimes all they had. After a moment's more thought, Dick reached into his breast pocket and took out the folded photograph Sutton had left him the day she left Aldbourne. A month had passed since then. Dick looked at the photograph at least twice a day, though he tried not to look for too long. It wasn't his place. He still didn't know why she'd left it to him, but she had. And it meant something to him.

"Here."

Dick held out the photograph, and Harry, once he'd carefully guided his silken parachute back into his pack, accepted it with a curious smile. He unfolded it and his grin grew at once, just as Dick knew it would, but before he could say something teasing, Dick spoke.

"What do you think it means?"

"The picture?" Harry turned it over and read Sutton's handwritten message. "Or this? The note?"

"Both. No, just the photograph." Dick had studied her words long enough to make plenty of sense out of them. It was the picture he still didn't understand. "Why me?"

Harry snorted a laugh and pressed his face into his elbow to quiet his laughing, apparently not realizing Nix wouldn't have woken for anything but the morning. Dick held back a sigh as Harry shook his head over and over, then finally lifted his head and returned the photograph.

"She adores you, Dick," he said, sounding a little exasperated but too fond to really say so.

"I don't know about that."

"Well, I do. She feels safe around you."

Dick's gaze shot up from the grass swaying lightly between his boots.

"She told you that?"

One side of Harry's smile crawled up higher than the other.

"She didn't have to."

Dick wilted a little, and Harry seemed to notice.

"What? You don't believe me?"

"She trusts you more," Dick started to reply, but Harry was already cutting him.

"Yeah, right. She doesn't look at me the way she looks at you."

Dick could feel his face getting warm and thanked the night for hiding his heightened emotion.

"She doesn't look at me any kind of way. If she did, don't you think I would have noticed?"

"No," Harry said, and Dick was surprised at his sudden switch in tone from lighthearted to serious. "No, and you know why you never noticed? Because you never went looking for it. You never actually looked."

"I looked," Dick muttered, but Harry didn't hear.

"Dick, hey. You were so focused on making sure she liked you—a noble pursuit, don't get me wrong—that you totally overlooked how much she ended up loving you."

Dick took his helmet off his head and laid down on his bedroll. He didn't have anything to say to that, and it was all he could think to do was end the conversation there.

"You know I'm right," Harry said, reluctantly lying down as well. "Think about it. And get some sleep. Maybe you'll have figured it out by the morning."

Contrary to Harry's hopeful supposition, Dick had not figured "it" out by the morning—in fact, he'd only confused himself more, and so determined to stop thinking about the photo once and for all. He failed right after breakfast, when he took it out of his pocket without even thinking and couldn't put it back until he uncreased the fold and looked at her face. As he tried to convince himself to put it away, Harry sat down on the curb to his left, noisily eating his porridge-type breakfast (Dick had preferred to scrounge up an apple and a wedge of cheese than to trust army cooking, as friendly as Joe Domingus was). He didn't have to see what Dick was looking at to know what it was, and Dick put it away in his pocket at once. Just then, a few of the enlisted men wandered past. Joe Liebgott stopped, raising his hand in a casual salute, and Dick rose to answer the question he could see coming.

"Sir, how soon d'you think we're gonna get outta France?"

"Soon," Floyd Talbert laughed before Dick could venture a guess. "You know he's gotta get back to that London girl he loves!"

Dick could see from the look on the two men's faces that his expression had surprised them, and they quickly apologized and scurried after their pals. Displeased at his own reaction, Dick sat back down on the curb and shoved Harry's shoulder when he caught his friend snickering.

"Hey, c'mon, we both know they're right."

"No, they aren't. They're not right."

Harry gave him a look. Dick sighed, dropping his chin against his chest.

"She's from Colchester, not London," he corrected, and Harry slapped the cobblestones with the palm of his hand out of glee.

"Wipe that smirk off your face," Dick added, pulling back his sleeve to check his watch. "We've got to get moving."

"Oh, yeah? Or you'll what?" Harry cackled. "Kiss me? You'd better save that honor for the honorable Lieutenant Sutton Flynn-Marshall from Colchester-"

"Just Sutton, Harry, you know she doesn't like her surname."

"Right, yeah." He shook his head, a small smile still stuck on his lips. "I don't quite have your memory for those sorts of things."

Adjusting the straps on his pack, Dick stopped in the middle of the road and turned to face his friend, trailing behind with his porridge bowl still in hand.

"What sorts of things?"

Harry shrugged. "You know. Sutton sorts of things."

Dick pressed his lips together, displeased, but Harry just sauntered on forward and clapped his hand on his shoulder.

"Come on, slowpoke. You said it yourself—we've gotta get a move on if we're gonna make it to Carentan today."

Many miles away—but closer than Dick knew—Sutton was dealing with her own set of problems. She hadn't thought once about the photograph she'd left for Dick in the month since she'd left Aldbourne. She didn't have the time for it. She'd been positively swamped by her emergency redeployment. As soon as she returned to the London office, it became clear they hadn't meant to send her back in for this particular operation, but one of their better operatives had been killed and they had no time to find anyone else. At least Sutton knew she was wanted for her quick learning abilities. Once told, she knew better than to show her surprise at her chosen destination, but she managed to show relief, instead, which seemed to translate as eagerness to her superiors. They, inturn, threw her right into the deep end. Day and night, she memorized maps, fake names and birthdays, fake nationalities, fake accents, fake backstories: the whole lot. She'd be traveling with another operative for the first leg of the journey, after which they'd separate and she'd continue to her assigned post while he went on to his. Neither agents were told each other's true names nor their designated arrival points for optimal secrecy of the mission.

"I know it isn't what you might have expected, with your skillset, and all," supposed the strong-browed gentleman whose name Sutton was never given, "but this is where we need you, and I'm sure you won't disappoint."

"I won't, sir."

She couldn't tell if he believed her or not, but it didn't matter, in the end. Whatever he thought of her, he'd still be sending her into France just a week shy of the Allied invasion, and she'd still have a job to do. She'd get it done. It was a much more immediate appointment than the last she'd undertaken, but no less risky. She was to locate the police station of the former Vichy France—now under complete German occupation—in the former border town of Bourges, acquire the file the sympathizing police had been keeping on a known SIS operative in the region, and burn those records to a crisp, then get out of Bourges and head north in whatever direction she could until she met up with the invading Allied forces. The plan hinged on the success of the Normandy operation. Sutton's superiors and even her fellow spy seemed surprised at her confidence that the invasion would bear fruit. She kept it to herself just why: she believed that with men like Dick Winters spearheading the advance (even if it was only for a single company), they could hardly expect to fail.

The operation went as smoothly as it could have given the time, the place, and the situation in which she'd attempted it. Smoothly, at least, in Sutton's book, which meant she made it out alive and reasonably unharmed. She and her companion crossed the English Channel on a hired fishing boat bound for the border coastal town of Hondarribia, Spain. From there, they snuck across the border in the dead of night, encountering several delays that cost them nearly three valuable hours of darkness. After nearly getting caught by a small patrol of border guards, they split up much earlier than planned, but their tactic worked and they each lost the guards. Sutton learned several days later that her companion had also escaped and made it to his destination from her contact in Bourges. She found the police station, determined a point of entry, and broke in through a ventilation unit leading into a storage closet two nights after arriving in the city. She fled northwest, hoping to disappear like a ghost in the night, and strangely discovered that her path toward the sea was oddly devoid of troops and other Nazi personnel. She wouldn't know until after the war ended that Hitler had remained convinced that the Allied invasion of France would begin at Calais, not the beaches of Normandy, and had redirected most of his armed forces to the far northeast—the opposite of her travel route.

Days and nights passed with Sutton sleeping in haylofts and on mattresses in abandoned houses. She tried to stay out of these empty homes unless she had no other option, for the uncanny quiet of people being missing disturbed her so much she could hardly sleep. Barns proved her best option and remained that way until the morning of June 18th, when she came over a hill and discovered a signpost pointing toward a place called Carentan. Something about the sunny morning convinced her to follow the road, and she was soon glad she did, for she quickly came upon two American soldiers in a jeep who seemed mighty pleased to meet her. They told her the town was just back that way and they'd only finished up on the eastern half of it not ten minutes ago, then gave her directions as they lamented not being able to give her a ride.

"Forgive yourselves, gentlemen," Sutton implored. "I understand. Duty calls."

The two Americans drove off, one of them waving his helmet at her in farewell, and Sutton continued down the road, keeping her bearing north until she spotted the town. Still hearing the occasional exchange of rifle and machine gun fire, she strayed toward the eastern side of the town and took the long way around through the field, which proved the more dangerous route. A bleeding German shot at her from within a bush but was gunned down as soon as he moved by a soldier in the upper window of the building above her. As soon as she knew she was safe, she looked up and waved at the man, who leaned out of the window and told her if she was a civilian, she'd better get moving.

"I'm not," she called back, raising her hand to see him better against the sunlight over the rooftops. "I'm coming up north from Bourges."

"Hey, you sound British," the soldier exclaimed in surprise. "Do I know you?"

"You might. Are you with the American Airborne?"

"I sure am!"

The man ducked back into the window, then came back with another man.

"I thought that was you down there!" the second man exclaimed. "How on earth did you end up here, Lieutenant?"

Sutton couldn't help but smile, and smile wide, for the first time in a very long month. Lieutenant. Yes, that's what she was to these men. A figure of respect—and if not that, she was at least someone to be known.

"If I told you, I'd have to kill you," she joked, but then quickly had to explain she was only kidding when the two men looked alarmed.

"Yeah, yeah, of course," the second man laughed, and Sutton did think she could recognize him if she tried. "There's a checkpoint a few hundred yards to the east, they can let you in there. Might have to show 'em some papers or whatever, but I'll send somebody on over to let 'em know it's you."

"I'd appreciate that. Thank you... Sergeant."

The man beamed, and as Sutton continued on through the choppy undergrowth in the direction he'd indicated, she heard him say to his companion—

"You hear that, Smokey? She remembered me!"

"Yeah, yeah, save it for the pub. You want me to run over? Got nothin' better to do up here."

"What, nothin' better than shootin' Nazis in the bushes?"

Sutton lost track of the conversation as she went further away from it, but by the time she reached the checkpoint, a runner had arrived, and it wasn't either of the men from the window. They had her present her false French identification for posterity's sake, and even though they knew she wasn't Marguerite Dupont, they called her by the name until they let her through the gate. One of the men tried to hug her, but Sutton carefully declined and quickly accepted the offer of a boyish-looking fellow to take her to find somebody she knew better than any of them.

"You, uh, used to hang around Battalion a lot, right, Miss? Erm, Lieutenant?" the soldier asked, swinging his rifle nonchalantly between his hands. "Think I know where to find one of 'em. We lost the whole of Headquarters on D-Day, don't know if you heard—the Krauts blew their plane to pieces—but we've still got who's left floating around here somewhere. Most of the boys still haven't gotten over the shock. I know I haven't. Oh, how about Welshie over there? Erm, Lieutenant Welsh."

Sutton didn't mean to abandon the young man in the street—he had been helpful to her, despite his rambling—but Harry Welsh had just jumped up from the stone steps of a church, a grin splitting across his face, and she couldn't help but go to him at once. She'd only taken a few steps before a man cut her off, and she stepped back, caught by surprise and alarm. She didn't remember his name, but she knew she'd met him before; his distinctive face conjured up disagreeable memories for her.

"I just had to see it for myself," he said, blinking at her with oafishly wide eyes. "A woman, in a warzone."

Sutton tried to step around him, but he stopped her again. She would have shoved him away from her if she'd had any nerve, but she'd stopped caring about bullies like him some time ago. Instead, she did the one thing she felt right in doing and instructed him coolly to move out of her way.

"I've spent years in occupied Europe, Lieutenant," she added. "You and all your Americans aren't the first to come here. You're not special."

"Hell, Snider, leave off the woman," Harry said sternly.

"And stop gaping," Sutton added, her bravery bolstered by his presence. "It won't help you look any less like a rat."

As Snider—that was his name, she was sure of it, now that Harry had reminded her—stormed off, swearing things that would have made his mother faint, Sutton stepped up to Harry and hugged him before he was done asking her if he could hug her. He quickly caught her up on Easy's operations in France and made sure she got a bite to eat, then started to tell her about how he'd been saving his silk chute for Kitty's wedding dress—she thought it was sweet and told him so—before trailing off halfway through waxing poetic about his darling. Sutton felt bad for losing focus, but sitting still made her antsy despite her poor feet, which ached after days of cross-country travel in poorly made shoes. And besides, while she was thrilled to see Harry again, there was someone else she was doing a poor job of pretending not to keep an eye out for.

"I'd go on for hours if you didn't stop me," Harry laughed, waving off her apology when she started to give it. "Finish your bread and then we'll go. I can see you're frothing at the bit to see Dick again."

"Dick's here?" she asked, and her weak attempt to insinuate false ignorance made Harry laugh.

"Where else would he be?" he teased, his grin as persistent as the clouds coating the sun overhead. "Come on. We'll walk and talk."

The medbay was relatively quiet that afternoon. The battle had been over for nearly a week, and accordingly, things were calming down around Carentan. Dick had been sent by Colonel Sink himself after a meeting considering what the next few days would hold for Easy Company. Humbled enough by how wrongly he'd imagined disguising his limp, Dick complied. Doc Roe didn't have to voice his displeasure with his commanding officer for Dick to understand his several days of skipped check-ups had not won him any favors. So he sat still and let Roe do his job, managing to hold back a wince when the medic poked at the stitches. The westward-facing door opened after a time, and as Roe went to fetch a fresh bandage, Dick listened for the new arrivals. He could hear Harry coming around the corner, blabbing about how Dick had taken a bullet ricochet last week, and just as he ducked his head, a small smile of exasperation on his lips—

"You've been shot?"

It seemed France had not had its fill of surprising Dick. His head moved with such a speed that his neck twinged, but he hardly felt it, mesmerized by the sight before him. Sutton was walking directly toward him at a clipped pace, eyeing the wound on his leg, and he was so astonished that she was here and that her first words to him were of such concern that all he could think to say was what first came to mind.

"I'm fine, Sue—I'm fine, really."

He stared at her, and she stared back. He'd never called her that before, and the endearing nickname hung in the air like an unanswered question neither of them wanted to touch. Doc Roe cleared his throat, and Harry hooked his arm around Sutton's, backing her up toward the door they'd come in through.

"We'll come back later. Sorry to disturb you, Doc. Dick."

Roe mumbled something and went back to looking at Dick's leg, and all Dick could do was lift a hand in a meager wave after his friends had already gone.

Trying to free her from her distraction, Harry took Sutton to see Nix next. He nearly fell out of his chair when she came in through the door, and he hugged her after asking if he could. He pulled up a chair for her (but made Harry sit on the floor) and caught her up on everything Harry had been too absentminded to tell her before, starting with Meehan and the rest of HQ going down in their plane—news which Sutton had started to glean from her guide earlier but still made her queasy now to truly know it had happened—which resulted in Dick's sudden promotion to Easy's commanding officer and his immediate deployment to capture the German guns on D-Day. He'd led that operation.

"And Speirs here was there, too," Nix added, and Sutton and Harry turned to find the lieutenant standing in the doorway, listening in on the report. Sutton stood and shook Speirs' hand, which seemed to surprise him, but not in a bad way.

"Glad to see you're still alive," he told her, and Sutton echoed the sentiment in kind.

"Oh," she said, reaching into the small knapsack she'd managed to fill up halfway during her travels north, "I've got something for you."

She presented a fine lighter, which Speirs readily took, that she'd picked up a few days prior on the road. With the ground so trampled, it must have been dropped by a German soldier some time beforehand. She'd left that road quickly, made uneasy by the fresh tracks, but the lighter had given her something to do for an hour or two that night as she waited, restless, for the sunrise. She'd polished it up and now gave it to him; he thanked her and told her he'd go put it to use right now. As he left, Sutton shut the door behind him (lest any other eavesdroppers appeared) and found Harry practically aghast behind her.

"I smoke, too!" he exclaimed, dismayed that the gift had been given to someone other than himself, and Nix chimed in just the same.

"Shh," she told them both, waving her hands to pacify them. "This will keep him from nicking some poor private's family heirloom. At least, it will for a little while."

Harry cracked a smile, and Nix rolled his eyes as Sutton sat back down in her chair.

"And besides, you haven't been forgotten," she appeased them. "I did find something for each of you."

First, a decanter of whiskey for Nix.

"I know it's not your usual, Lewis, but I did my best."

He whistled and took it from her, admiring the fine glass, and Sutton felt gratified that she'd carried the heavy thing all this way from Bourges just for him.

"Sutton, I could kiss you."

Shying away, she mumbled her disapproval of the idea, and he laughed fondly.

"I'm just kidding, relax. That's somebody else's job, not mine."

Sutton felt her ears start to flush pink and wished it were cold enough to justify pulling up her collar to hide how he'd flustered her.

"Speaking of Dick," Harry chimed in, "did you get him something, too?"

"I did," Sutton replied evenly, drawing Harry's gift out of her pack, "but that's for him and not you. This, on the other hand-"

She gave him the silver hairpin she'd picked up just outside of Tours and watched his eyes light up.

"-is for you. Well, for your fiancée."

Harry sighed happily and turned the hairpin over in the light to examine its fine craftsmanship.

"You know me so well."

Nix returned to recounting Easy's exploits across the northwestern part of the coast, though it didn't take him long to catch Sutton up to speed with how they'd taken this very town—so it was Carentan, she'd followed the signpost correctly—just a week ago. It had been a hard-won fight. They'd lost men, more even than on D-Day, but the company persevered all the same. Sutton didn't want to think about any of that too much. The idea of so much unnamed loss reminded her of her unknown companion somewhere out there in the south of France, still deep in the Nazi-occupied country. If he was still alive, that is. His operation would be more drawn-out than hers had been—it had been planned for much longer, due to its greater risk.

"So, the point of the matter is, Dick will make Captain just as soon as we move out," Nix concluded. "I'm sure of it."

He seemed pleased at how pleased and proud Sutton seemed on Dick's behalf, but before she could remind him it was only because Dick was her friend, a knocking came on the door, and Dick himself arrived, accompanied by Lieutenant Buck Compton.

"Would you look at that, Winters?" Compton exclaimed, grinning from ear to ear as he seized Sutton's hand to shake. "It's the pretty Brit I met back in Aldbourne. What a sight for sore eyes you are, Lieutenant."

Sutton hummed her thanks a bit awkwardly, distracted by the jealousy she saw flickering through Dick's eyes. It couldn't be jealousy, she'd clocked the feeling wrong. She must have. Jealousy wasn't a friend of Dick's—right? Did she know him well enough to make that claim? And if he was jealous, what did it mean?

"Hey, Buck, why don't you come and see this gorgeous thing I've just picked up from a little birdie who knows how to give good gifts?" Harry suggested as he smoothly guided Compton back out of Nix's makeshift office with a hand on the lieutenant's shoulder. "Not sure what you'd call this design here, but Kitty's going to love it..."

A jeep horn honked outside and Nix got up from his desk.

"I'll be right back." He pointed at his two friends. "Behave."

Dick chuckled, so Sutton felt free to join in. He looked happy to hear her laugh, but she couldn't make it last long, nervous to be in his presence again after their time apart. She didn't expect him to think of it that way—as if her absence meant something vast to him the same way it meant something vast to her—but maybe he'd missed her, just a little.

"I brought you something," she said at the same time he said, "I kept your picture."

She paused, then asked, "What?" just as he did the same.

"You... for me?"

"Yes," she said, taking the escape he'd awkwardly provided to go digging through her knapsack. "I got it for you when I was- well. I can't say, but... South. I got for you while I was south."

She'd bought him a pocketwatch. Not that she would tell him she'd spent any money on him—she'd picked everything else up along the road—but she'd ended up in a secondhand watch shop while hiding from an S.S. patrol and the watch reminded her of Dick so strongly she hadn't even realized she'd bought it until it was in her hand. As she gave it to him now, their fingers brushed, and she pretended not to notice, pulling her hand back like she'd noticed nothing special about him at all. The watch was brass but gilded in gold on the handsome lion crest on the back and the hands of the clock. The crest likely represented some family, but Sutton didn't know who or from where. All she knew was she thought Dick would like it. And from the smile creeping up his lips, she'd been right.

"It's right on time," he said as he looked between the hands on the pocketwatch and then those of his wristwatch. "Exactly right on time."

Before Sutton could express how happy that made her to hear—how happy it made her to hear his voice—Nix came back in with two boxes stacked haphazardly in his arms, and Dick stepped aside to help, carefully placing the pocketwatch in his breast pocket as he moved. Sutton caught a flash of white photo paper as he flipped shut the flap of the pocket and wondered if it could be her photo before dismissing the idea as wishful thinking. The breast pocket was where soldiers kept pictures of their girlfriends and fiancées and wives—pictures of the women they loved. It wasn't like that, with Sutton and Dick. They were only friends—even if Sutton would have married Dick tomorrow if he'd asked her to. But she'd never tell him that. And he'd never ask.

A runner came in just as Nix and Dick were setting the boxes down on the desk and informed Dick rather impatiently that something had come up on the other side of town and they needed him there immediately. Sutton instinctively tried to follow, but Dick insisted she stayed back, squeezing her hand briefly on his way out the door. She stood by the window, antsy, watching him go, and Nix tried to appease her by telling her Dick is right— she'll only draw attention to herself by trying to help.

"And besides," Nix added as he began sorting through the papers in the first box, "resting your feet for a little while will do you some good."

"What about Dick?" she asked, still looking out the window.

"What about him?"

"He's limping."

Nix leaned around the desk to see through the glass, following her gaze, then grunted out of amazement.

"I'll be damned, he is. Remind me never to underestimate your powers of observation, Agent."

"It's not much, really," she said, neatly bending one leg over the other as she sat. "When I worked at CP, I sort of... puzzled out whose walking pattern was whose. So I knew who to open my office door for... and who to keep it shut against."

Blowing air out of his nose, Nix pressed his lips together, and at Sutton's suspecting squint, he let loose an unabashed smirk.

"I meant the whole 'you're a spy' thing," he told her smugly, "but I am more than happy to go with the 'I've memorized Dick's footsteps' angle you've got going there."

"Oh, shut it," she replied bashfully, retreating to her chair, and Nix chuckled, putting the lid back on the first box.

"Whatever you say, Agent. Now rest up—I'm sure you've had a long few weeks out there in God knows where."

He set a stool out in front of her, and with a grateful sigh, Sutton lifted her aching feet and gave them a rest as ordered.

"I couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you, Lewis."

"Don't mention it," he muttered, already distracted by his work, and returned to sorting his papers, a task which Sutton peacefully watched him complete for the rest of the warm afternoon.

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(Sutton's back! Woohoo! I'm having a little trouble with tagging people so if it doesn't seem to be working, let me know and I'll see what I can do to fix it.)

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