Duty

For Stella, duty had always come first. It was this sense of the bigger picture that had earned her a promotion- the ability to keep a clear head while your friends lay dying around you was a valuable talent in MI9, one that was encouraged. Her mantra had always been "work first, social life later", and, in the end, it had worked. She would, perhaps, take the odd day off- when her most promising agent was electrocuted trying to break into a SKUL vault, it had stretched to two- but generally, she kept her work and emotions separate. She had to. It was part of the job.

Which was why Frank, on some level, had always exasperated her. He was the sort who would ferry everyone else out of a burning building, forget to do a head count, and run back inside in the mistaken belief that there were more people in there. And be killed in the process. Secretly, she admired him for it- she would never be that brave, to show the world how she felt, all the time, risking all the drama and complications that came with it- but officially, she was supposed to disapprove. So disapprove she did, even though she would feel her own eyes sting in sympathy every time worry for his team showed on his face.

She still loved him. Not in the exhilarating, giddy way she had when they were both young graduates, working in their first missions for MI9- but quietly, softly. Now there were no big things, she focused on small things more- the serious look on his face when they had to have a meeting about the agents and their progress-or lack of it. The way he would always make cheesy jokes that weren't even funny, to relieve the boredom of a long surveillance stretch. But, mostly, she kept these thoughts locked away- locked away in the part of her brain that still grieved for the deaths of her friends, that worried about her parents, that that made long, meandering phone calls to her sister late at night because they hadn't spoken in weeks.

She knew she still loved him- but didn't want to risk the fact that he didn't love her. Although occasionally, she did see signs of it- little things, nothing more. Like when she reviewed his updated MI9 profile, and noticed that he'd changed his secure password- the old-fashioned default that could be used to override the system and remove all his data from the network, if he was captured. After they broke up, it had been T0tT3nH4Mh0tSpUrRul3s- but he'd changed it, a few weeks ago. She leaned closer to the screen, eyes misting with tears. B3aUtifulSt3LLA.