#woops i said i'd do short fills but this was really fun oh no

[explosionshark]

31 the I cant keep kissing strangers one for jack/Miranda. U know, if u want to

I’m gonna cheat bc I remembered the prompt wrong and already wrote half of it in my head while I was showering, so

-

It’s years of experience, it’s meticulous and brutally honed control of her body, it’s her genetic predisposition to deceit and manipulation that keeps Miranda from reacting when her the alert pings, a brief series of flashes on the corner of her ocular overlay. S.O.S.

Dupont’s hand is on her thigh, just under the material of her dress, grip damp and too tight. He’s leaning in close, under the auspice of speaking into her ear in the crowded club, but she recognizes the clumsy excuse to peek down her dress for what it is. It takes every ounce of restraint not to shove him bodily away and rush straight for the rendezvous waypoint blinking on her display -- a maintenance closet beneath a stairwell at the back of the club. There’s a thrum of panic in Miranda’s chest that she squashes with a deep, subtle breath and a careful flick of her hair. She drags a teasing finger down Dupont’s chest as she leans back.

“Excuse me a moment,” she pitches her voice low, breathy, the way she knows he must be imagining it sounds in bed. She shoots him a smoldering look over her shoulder before she leaves, adding a bit of whine to her words. Desperate women are, to men like this, honey to flies. “Don’t go where I can’t find you.”

She’s careful as she slips into the crowd, gait controlled, face expertly molded into an expression annoyed enough to ward off potential interruption from men, yet still bland enough to fail to catch the interest of anyone watching.

It’s torture, keeping her pace unhurried as scenario after gruesome scenario of what could have gone wrong plays out in vivid detail. Jack wounded, bleeding out among the bleach bottles and filthy mops. A Cerberus trap, Jack captured, bait to lure her to the same fate. Dozens upon dozens of equally vivid, equally terrible possibilities conjured with each leisurely step, all laying the same accusation at her feet: Miranda’s mistake, with Jack paying the price.

Jack hadn’t been Miranda’s first choice.

Miranda’s list of trusted contacts is smaller than it’s ever been and shrinking by the day. Trusted and available? Smaller still.

She had wanted Shepard. Or, better yet, Kasumi. But Shepard was wrapped up on some affair on Tuchanka and Kasumi was running a different op for the Shadow Broker, out on the edges of the Terminus.

Jack had been an indulgence - and one that was proving to be foolish and selfish.

She was humanity’s strongest biotic and one of the most capable operators Miranda had ever known, but her strength lied in frontal assaults. Massive destruction, flamboyant, devastating attacks with lots of collateral damage. Not delicate infiltration missions like this.

She should have been safe with her students on Grissom Station, not here dying for Miranda’s cause, not--

--Grabbing Miranda roughly by the hips, slamming her back against the shelving unit along the wall hard enough to rattle the metal, laying the flat of her arm across Miranda’s chest, just under her neck, to pin her there.

“What do you think you’re doing?“ Miranda hisses. She can’t see any obvious injuries or damage to Jack in the dim light of the closet, not held in place like this. When she raises her hands to pat down Jack’s body there’s a flair of shimmering blue light in the air, and then the always disconcerting staticky sensation of stasis fields pinning them in place at her sides.

“What am I doing?” Jack huffs, fists still bunched in the material of Miranda’s dress. A shame - it had been nice. Expensive. She can feel the material ripping under the strain of Jack’s grip and despite everything, she finds it distantly erotic. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Miranda, for all of her considerable intellect, feels like she is at least three steps behind a conversation she doesn’t remember starting. She shakes her head, twisting as much as she can with her hands pinned. “Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m not fucking hurt,” Jack snaps, hips jolting forward to slam into Miranda’s rattling the shelf again. This time she hears the fabric of the dress rip in Jack’s hands, can’t contain the shiver it sends down her spine that Jack absolutely notices. “I’m fed up. I can’t keep watching you kiss strangers.”

Jealousy? Miranda doesn’t bother trying to hide her laugh. “If you’ll remember, my kissing a stranger was a key part of the plan you agreed to. I was supposed to be doing that while you were--”

“Keep him busy,” Jack growls, “You were supposed to keep him busy while I did all the hard work. You never told me your plan to distract the guy was to let him put his big stupid gorilla hands all over your--”

“Someone was taking their time ‘doing all the hard work,’“ Miranda sneers back. “I had to improvise. He was losing interest.”

“Hey, it’s your stupid hack module that wasn’t working,” Jack accuses.

Of course, at that exact moment, Miranda’s display pings again. The tracker she’d slipped into Dupont’s jacket shows him leaving the bar, headed for the elevator to his suite.

“Jack, let me go,” Miranda says quietly, urgently, and to her credit Jack does so immediately without arguing. “He’s on the move. I can try to head him off in the lobby, but-- Look, this is very important. Did you leave any evidence you were tampering with the safe or anything else in his room?”

“Uh, yeah,” Jack snorts. “I think he’s gonna notice his top secret Cerberus Reaper hacking plans are missing.”

“But you said the module--”

“Yeah, total crap. Useless. I just blasted the ever-loving shit out of the safe.”

“Jack.”

“Anyway, if he’s on the way up there he’s gonna notice uh. Pretty much right away. We should get out of here.”

“We should have been gone the moment you compromised the plan,” Miranda hisses, following Jack out of the closet, wincing at the sudden too-bright light of the hallway.

“Nag, nag, nag,” Jack drawls, throwing open the emergency exit door to the alley behind the hotel with a truly unnecessary flair of biotics.

“We went over the codes before we even got here,” Miranda reminds her. In the back of her mind, she’s counting down the seconds they have before Dupont realizes he’s been robbed, before he puts together she was involved, before he decides to come after them for the data (bad) or alert Cerberus to what happened (worse). She figures in how long it would take to stop running and strangle Jack in one of these dank Illium alleyways and realizes, regrettably, she can’t afford the slowdown. “There’s one for emergency exit, one for mission compromised, one for package acquired. Any of those would have done. S.O.S. is emergency only.”

“Well, it was an emergency, okay?” Jack says, stopping short at the curb while Miranda calls forth the skycar she’d arranged with a flick of her omin-tool.

“How so?” Miranda demands, shoving Jack into the back of the skycar first and clambering in gracelessly after her, ruined dress gaping open in the front. “This is coming out of your pay, by the way.”

“It was a pre-emergency--”

“That’s not a thing.”

“If his hand got any higher up your skirt I was gonna blow both of our covers by ripping his arms off in the middle of the bar.”

Miranda should still be mad -- furious -- that Jack had scared her so badly. Should be angry for the terribly botched mission as well, the absolute flouting of her discreet and effective plan.

But they’ve lived. Another day in a galaxy torn apart by war on multiple fronts, another day outmaneuvering the Illusive Man himself, another day Miranda gets to find herself in the company of this beautiful, blunt, maddening, impossible woman.

And they had gotten the data, despite everything. A success, however unconventional.

And if all she has to show for it is another burned identity and a ruined dress, Miranda finds she doesn’t mind as much as she might have in any other circumstance besides this -- in the backseat of a skycar with Jack, genuinely irritated to have seen someone else touching Miranda, a torn dress, the thrum of adrenaline still rushing through her veins.

“Never figured you for the jealous type, Jack,” Miranda says, relenting, twisting in the seat to pin Jack with a simmering look.

“Yeah, you did,” Jack mutters. “Were probably counting on it when you asked me to do this thing with you. Probably got off on it. Control freak.”

“Why would I do something like that?”

“Probably has something to do with you being an arrogant psycho that’s obsessed with keeping me under your thumb.”

Miranda pauses in the dark of the backseat and stares Jack down. She’s tense, pupils blown wide, breath coming in gradually quickening gasps.

Miranda has seen Jack scared and angry and hurt before. She’s seen her wound up tight on adrenaline, turned on to the point of recklessness too. Knows well enough the difference between the two to recognize this for what it is.

It’s that confidence that draws Miranda across the space between them, shrugging the straps of her dress down her shoulders in a movement that allows her to reach the zipper in the back and slide it down immediately after. Jack doesn’t move to stop her when Miranda drops a hand to Jack’s thigh, a more elegant parody of Dupont’s boorish groping earlier. The higher Miranda’s hand ventures, the further open Jack spreads her legs, nostrils flaring as Miranda leans in close, whispering into her ear at the same time as her hand slips past the waistband of Jack’s pants, to the soaked front of her underwear.

“Funny, Jack,” Miranda says, mockingly, stroking her slowly. She’ll draw this one out, as a lesson. “Under my thumb seems to be exactly the place you’re always so desperate to be.”

“Fuck,” Jack groans, a low hiss of air from between her clenched teeth.

Miranda grins in the dark. She’d been wrong, before. Jack had definitely been the right pick for this mission.

-

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