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dominic-armstrong · 7 years ago

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As Hard As You Can

To each their own and find peace in knowing Ain't always broken, but here's to hoping Show no emotion, against your coding Just act as hard as you can You don't need a friend Boy, you're the man

“Feeling Whitney,” Post Malone

“I’ll see you…” Dom trailed off, pulling up his jeans, eyes on the clock by the door as it flashed from 6:59 to 7:00. “…I’ll send you a message once I figure out my schedule for this week.” He said at last, zipping his fly and turning around to face the girl sprawled on the mattress on the floor.

She was pretty—brunette, his type, with dark eyes—and wound in a sheet even though it was September and it was freezing in the morning in Vienna. Apparently Russians were impervious to the cold, lucky them. She gave him a lazy smile as she shook her head, the kind of knowing look Dom could remember his mother giving him when he was young. I know better than you think I do.

“Uh huh,” the girl nodded, arching her back into a stretch, his eyes on her legs as they retreated back under the sheet. “So…that’ll be what? About a month or so?”

Dom shrugged, picking up his ancient leather jacket from the floor and tugged it on, eye already back on the clock. He was acutely aware that he had an intel meeting in fifteen minutes and the conversation they were skirting around was definitely not a ten minutes or less conversation.

“Do you think I’m stupid or something? I saw your name on that list, the one in the papers,” the girl went on. “I know you’re leaving soon��the less than a month kind of soon, Dominic,” she said sharply. “At least do me the curtesy of breaking it off like a man.” Before Dom could answer, she let out an irritable laugh. “Not that there’s anything to break off.”

Dom hated that he’d agreed. It’s not that he hadn’t been interested in Ana—in fact, the first time she’d come to watch drill with her brother, one of Dom’s men, Dom had missed almost every target he’d aimed for. She was like that—completely distracting to everyone around her. Which is why Dom had rationed his time with her carefully, refusing to be pulled into her orbit when he had work, drill, and everything else to deal with.

But that had been a year ago. It was insane to think about how fast the time had flown—how, in twelve short months, he’d gone from a company man to…whoever he was now. A version of himself that would now be boarding a shuttle craft to a space station of which he never had, even for a g-ddamn second, wanted to visit, much less become a citizen.

He should’ve known Mia would try to drag him up there with her. On an intellectual level, he felt for the girl—she was young, she’d be alone after she’d always been surrounded by family or maids or security guards…it was going to be a lot at once. When she’d told him he passed the background check, he’d been floored because he had been absolutely certain that something from his past, any of the million things he’d been able to keep from the Manz family, would rear its ugly fuckin’ head. It wouldn’t have taken a lot to catch it—some malware on his computer, a tapped phone, someone following him to the woods for drill.

But they hadn’t.

And now they wouldn’t. New computer, new phone, it was as simple as that. He’d had to sacrifice a few men when the Bishop kid had asked for his men’s information after he’d been brought into the fold of the trustworthy, but he’d managed to get a hold of forged papers for the ones who really mattered. That was one of the advantages of being the nameless, faceless help of the royal family wearing the same ugly, ill-fitting uniform—almost complete anonymity. For the ones who couldn’t afford fake paperwork, Dom made the rounds with the right bribes—minor crimes were easy to expunge if you went to the home office and asked the right kind of desperate secretary with the right kind of ‘aw shucks’ smile.

About the only person Dom had realized he wouldn’t be able to fool was Mia. He didn’t deal with her parents enough for them to know the rest of her detail by name, nonetheless face, but Mia would notice if, once they landed on Exodus, Blaine randomly started going by Blake and Reed suddenly started speaking with a Turkish accent. A series of strategic firings and rehirings took place right before the announcement, a shuffling of people from the King’s detail to the Princess��s…the kind of changes so small that they mostly flew under the radar and could be dismissed with a light explanation but significant enough under the surface that Dom had felt like he’d really accomplished something.

That something being he’d gotten the right men on the roster to go to Exodus. He didn’t love deceiving the princess. He had known her since she was nine, after all, nothing but blonde hair and boundless energy and smiles for literally everyone she encountered. When he’d been sixteen, full of angst and frustrated for being mocked for his Virginian accent, he had resented following around a little girl who practically danced from room to room, a little girl who was showered with a kind of praise and admiration and gifts that Dom had never seen before. Even though his job had been pretty insignificant when he started on her detail—double checking itineraries and being first-in and last-out of rooms she was entering and exiting (“bait” for booby-trapped assassination attempts)—he found himself less bothered by her as he grew. Mia bugged all of her guards to tell her their birthdays and made elaborate cards covered in glue and glitter which she presented with a smirky kind of pride. A few times she’d “slipped” and fallen into the lake on the grounds, splashing around until Dom or one of the other men jumped in after to save her, only to be met with giggles and splashing.

Dom knew it had probably been lonely for her, growing up in a castle with no siblings, constantly followed around by men who’d typically rather be doing anything else. He was just growing out of his angsty teenage years when she began them. He remembered once, shortly after his twentieth birthday—he’d been second to only her bodyguard at that point—she’d chucked a boot at him with all of her twelve-year-old strength because he’d chuckled when he caught her lip-syncing in her room. There were a handful of years where she’d done her best to ditch the detail at every opportunity, leading to shouting matches between Dom and his father over whether or not a fourteen year old girl should have to have a twenty-one year old man wait for her outside of the bathroom. There had been more than one instance of her tossing a sparkling fruit drink in his face (she was too young for champagne, thankfully—alcohol in the eyes was fuckin’ painful), the time she’d tricked him into thinking her bathroom window was broken and then locked him inside and gone to the city on her own. There’d been a time, when he was twenty-three and finally scored his first real girlfriend, that a particularly ornery sixteen year old Mia had invited her to tea at the castle and proceeded to tell her every embarrassing thing Dom had ever done—the times he’d fallen down the stairs, sneezed loudly in the middle of an important meeting, managed to get a bloody nose while supervising a brunch with the Duchess of Cambridge.

And then suddenly, without warning, she was seventeen and didn’t look like a little girl anymore. Without a sign it was happening, Dom was one day chastising a child for trying to ditch her detail, accepting a hug from a sobbing, guilty nine year old…and the next day he was trying to persuade a headstrong woman to listen to advice that he himself would never have taken. He’d gone from tripping over books sprawled across her bedroom floor as she complained about having to go to events to plucking glasses of wine and flutes of champagne out of the hand of the girl who’d once hated those same damn events only years earlier. Even though she was still tiny, he could not, in good conscious, pick her up and throw her over his shoulder when she’d tried to take off on him. He couldn’t yell at her for risk of her yelling back. On at least one occasion, Dom had had to not-so-subtly threaten the Prince of Monaco with bodily harm when Dom had found him attempting to scale the terrace a few doors down from Mia’s room.

And now that Mia was grown up, the fact that he was lying to her practically every day had grown more difficult. When she was younger, it hadn’t bothered him…but now, when he felt like she had at least a decent read on whether or not he was bullshitting her, he had to be careful. He stuck to the truth as much as he could and took sick days when he knew he wouldn’t be able to get away with lying about why he had a black eye or why her detail had been shuffled around. He was glad he didn’t need to make up a girlfriend when he started using that an excuse for working fewer night shifts—even if he was rarely with Ana those nights, the fact that Mia knew Ana existed at least made the lie seem more likely than some random excuse.

And now here he was, standing in Ana’s room, listening as she told him off for the last year worth complaints she’d been holding in—that he was never around, that he was always working, that he was just going to fuck off to Exodus and not tell her until it was too late. Deep down, Dom truly did care about Ana, truly did care that he had hurt her, and truly did think he would miss her once he’d fucked off to space. But in that moment, as he heard the words it’s over fly out of her lips, spiked with vitriol and contempt, all Dom could think:

Fuck. There goes my alibi.

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dominic-armstrong · 7 years ago

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Dominic Julius Armstrong

26.

Bodyguard to Princess Mia Manz.

American ex-pat living in Vienna.

When Dom was sixteen, his father told him to pack his things--they were going on a spur of the moment camping trip. It wasn’t strange to Dom for them to hitchhike across what was left of Virginia to find a wooded spot near a bay; his father had grown up in the ruins of DC, afterall. It was only when his father woke him in the middle of the night and told him to abandon everything but his rucksack for a fifteen mile hike that Dom realized something was going on. By daybreak they were at the harbor, stowing away in shipping containers full of scrap metal, bound for Europe.

Europe was better for Dom and his father. A former security contractor, Dom’s father had built a name for himself internationally and found his experience appreciated by the Manz family within a few months of their arrival. Of course, it took time before they were trusted--Dom’s father had once been involved in international arms deals and had a reputation for being loyal but ruthless. When the Manz family finally hired his father to head security for the royal family, Dom found himself being named to the detail of Princess Mia by the time he turned 18. While his father preferred the suits and respect that came with being in charge of the logistical side of things, Dom enjoyed grunt work--he liked most of the men he worked with because they reminded him of his buddies from home, born from working-poor families that bound together to get by. While he wasn’t exactly thrilled to be working for someone whose clothes cost more than he’d make in his lifetime, he found a family with the men on the detail and learned to enjoy the kind of work that put a roof over his head, food in his belly, and allowed him to retreat to the woods on off days to run drills, hunt, and hike.

Growing up in the wilderness of Virginia made Dom resilient. Working with weapons and learning to fight made him strong. Having responsibility from a young age made him cocksure. The amalgamate of these parts of his life means that Dom is sharp, slightly arrogant, and hungry for whatever he can get his hands on. Dom is resentful for people who have more than he does that he feels did not have to work for it which is why he did his best not to learn, talk, or think about Exodus prior to the point that he had to begin prepping the Princess’s detail for the space bastards’ arrival.

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