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It had been Prez's idea to play volleyball — or rather, Prez had voiced it first, since Monarch tended to keep a lot of thoughts to himself as usual. If he had any reservations, he hadn't shown them, and this is how she finds herself strolling side by side with him in the bright midday sun, both of them wearing breezy t-shirts and sandals as they meander from their current forward operating base to the sparkling shoreline.
Prez adjusts the reusable shopping bag she's using as a beach tote on her shoulder as she speaks. "You think the others will join us? Volleyball's not as much fun with only two people."
Monarch shrugs, putting on a pair of sunglasses. Prez understands. When it comes to the other two members of Hitman on an off-day, anything can happen, so a shrug is really the only possible answer.
"Of course," she adds quickly, "spending one-on-one time with my pilot is never something I'd complain about." In response to that, he gives her an easy smile, one that makes her feel a little flutter of something in her stomach. Not unlike the pre-sortie jitters — at least, that's what she tells herself.
On any other day like this, she would be busy with repairs, constantly weaving in and out of hangars with her trusty toolbox, following Hitman around as they point out something in their planes that didn't feel right during their last flight, or made an odd sound when they landed, or I think something crawled into the intake again and I don't want to look at it myself, can you pretty please take a look and I promise I'll buy you a slice of cake if you do. There's always something that needs repairing, and it reminds her of rushing around her family's store to figuratively, and sometimes literally, put out fires to keep everything running smoothly.
Today truly is an exception. All repairs on her backlog are either done or waiting for parts that haven't arrived yet. Besides, a day like this is too good to spend all her time indoors. Nature here is so unlike everything she'd known in the Federation — the sun beaming in the bright blue sky, seagulls guffawing overhead, the fresh scent of the waves along the coastline, the breeze rustling through the dry, twisty brush — and she wants to soak it all in.
Simply put, it's a beautiful day, and she'd be an idiot not to take advantage of it.
They're silent as they walk. Despite the natural beauty around them, Prez finds that her eyes, conveniently hidden behind her own pair of oversized sunglasses, are drawn to Monarch. He's only wearing a basic white t-shirt and some near-fluorescent orange swimming trunks, which is a perfectly acceptable outfit in this climate, but there's still something weird to her about seeing him out of a flight suit and in his own skin. It almost scares her to believe that he's a normal man, not just a faceless pilot who often seems more his plane than the person in the cockpit. Sometimes it's just easier to think of him like that — a war machine of a man, a goliath who can never be touched — rather than the human he really is. Humanity doesn't seem fitting, somehow. Like it's too fragile for someone like him.
Monarch doesn't seem to notice her staring from where he walks a little ways ahead of her, simply enjoying the flora and fauna as they make their way along a thin trail through patches of tall grass. She watches him idly admire a passing butterfly. A contented smile dances on his lips.
She is struck suddenly with the urge to take his hand. Just to touch him somehow, to know he's there and he's real and he's as human as the smile he wears. But instead she looks away, feeling oddly guilty for something she can't put her finger on.
It's always like this with her. There are so many things she wishes she could say to him, and yet all she can manage to do is call him her pilot.
Does he know what she means by that, she wonders? Or why she says it? Unspoken communication is common from Monarch to his fellows, including her, but in a way it's foolish to assume the opposite is true — how could he know if she doesn't say anything? And what exactly is stopping her? Would—
"Woah!"
It all happens as if in slow motion. One moment she's fine; the next, her sandal has gotten caught on a snaking root crossing the sandy path, and she realizes she is falling. Out of reflex, she raises her arms and braces for impact.
She doesn't hit the ground.
Involuntarily, she lets out a little chirp. Monarch chuckles. He is so close that the air of his breathy laughter hits her shoulder, and her brain takes a second to register that he has caught her.
"Oh, I... I'm okay," she mumbles, pushing him away and straightening herself without showing her face, which she swears must be redder than a sunburn. Not even at the beach yet and already making a fool of yourself. Way to go, Prez.
He doesn't say anything about her fall — he's never been condescending about any mistake she's ever made, after all — but he does take the bag from her, apologizing that he should have offered to carry it earlier. He hoists it on his shoulder in a manner she can only describe as jovial. That's a word she's never attached to him before, and she tilts her head a little as he turns and continues to lead them onwards. Perhaps it's how he tends to be so guarded around everyone else, but here he seems different, and Prez can't tell if her observations are true or if it's just wishful thinking as they finally crest the grassland and their feet sink into the sandy incline to the beach proper.
The beach is nearly devoid of people, something she finds strange for a day like this, until she reminds herself that not many people would choose to vacation so close to an active military base. How "active" the place really is is another thing entirely. They may be stationed at an airbase, but it's purely due to the logistics of Sicario's specialization. The current contract actually has little need for air support, and so many of the pilots in Sicario have found themselves unexpectedly grounded. A fair few of them had headed straight for the nearest city to drink and gamble their hard-earned cash away, as per usual, but Hitman, due to current lack of funds from some recent bad financial decisions, has stayed put. She tries hard not to admit that she's glad about it, because at least this way, she's not alone.
Monarch has already found some vacant beach chairs and set down the bag. In front of them lie the straps in the sand indicating the borders of the volleyball court, but the net and poles are nowhere to be seen.
Prez's eyes scan a little further down the shore. There's an abandoned, rickety lifeguard stand down the beach, and an even more rickety shack not far behind it. "I bet all the volleyball stuff was put away over there," she says, glancing at Monarch, and then outright staring at him, because he is taking his shirt off.
It's not like he hasn't been shirtless before — they've been to so many places; one of them was bound to be hot enough to warrant it — although this seems peculiar somehow, now that they're not on a blazingly hot tarmac and instead at a regular old beach. It's funny, because he doesn't look too remarkable in the grand scheme of things. When Hitman is in a group, most eyes are either on Diplomat, as he's the tallest by a couple inches and has that kind of egregiously flashy smile that cameras love, or Comic, since she has the lightest hair of all of them along with a constantly dour expression that makes people wonder what on earth her problem is. But Prez knows that many people who fly under the radar have something else about them, and Monarch is one of those. A handsome fellow with sharp, keen eyes, well-built but relatively unassuming otherwise, if not wielding a bit of gravitas with his presence when he chooses to do so.
He must know about that commanding presence of his, because he smiles at her again with a knowing look, and that's the only thing that snaps her out of it.
Her face flushes with heat. Maybe his being so unreserved has disarmed her more than she cares to admit. "Y-yeah, whew, it is getting pretty hot out here, isn't it?" she says with a nervous laugh. To her credit, it really is a hot day, so, feigning confidence, she pulls off her own oversized tee, aware of Monarch's eyes on her while she does it.
A lot of people tend to describe her as cute, and while she doesn't like it when she's busy doing her decidedly un-cute job, she's not above a little femininity in her downtime. She likes to think her bikini reflects both sides of this — a sleek navy blue two-piece, fairly modest, or as modest as a bikini can be while exposing so much skin. It's a simple cropped halter top and boyshorts that are ruched up the sides, tied in little bows with strings that trail down her hips.
She marches over to the beach bag to deposit her shirt. In the back of her mind, she wonders if Monarch will say anything about her swimsuit as she pulls out a bottle of sunscreen. She tans fairly well, all things considered, but there's no harm in it. Besides, Comic always insists that she do it — probably something to do with her growing up working outdoors all the time. Not to do so would be the same as begging the Cascadian woman for a lecture on skincare.
Monarch looks at Prez hopefully, and a little apologetically, as he asks her a question.
She doesn't even stop to think before she answers. "Yeah, of course."
With that, he diligently sits on one of the chairs and she only realizes what she's gotten herself into as she starts to slather a layer of sunscreen across his back.
If seeing her pilot in his own skin was weird, well, touching said skin was even weirder. There's a slight buzz she gets from their contact as her hands glide along the strong ridges of his shoulders, the bumpy range of his spine. She never knows what to say in intimate moments like this, when it's just the two of them, and especially not now, while she's touching him where her hands have never gone before, her palms pressing cool sunscreen into the defined muscles of his back. Perhaps nothing needs to be said, so she lets the silence descend on them like a soft breeze.
There's a thought appearing at the surface of her mind. Try as she might, it won't sink, so she ventures a look, and almost wants to die from unrealized embarrassment.
She can't deny it.
She would really, really like to rub sunscreen over the rest of him too.
For fuck's sake, pull it together, Prez, she tells herself. This is your pilot we're talking about. Just act like a normal person for once in your damn life, will you?
She stops as soon as his back has been taken care of, not entitling herself to do more, and he turns to her with a small thank-you nod before giving her an inquisitive look and asking, quite bashfully, if he can get her back too.
After the intense, invisible battle inside her head, she can't help herself — a boisterous laugh tumbles out of her, and it seems a perfect time to practice playing a little coy, so she does. "Ooh, pump the brakes, Monarch. I'm a big girl, I can put on my own sunscreen just fine, thank you."
He wrinkles his nose, a little huffy. He was never an exceptionally handsy man, though today, without his wingmen present, he seems to have let loose a little, and Prez can't complain. Even so, it's rather fun to take the wind out of his sails; she can see why Comic does it to Diplomat constantly. Unlike Dip, though, Monarch recovers quickly, and merely mentions that it was only fair of him to offer to return the favor.
Flirting was never one of her strong suits growing up, but she likes to think she's gotten better at it over the years as she answers. "Heh, well, I'll tell you what. You get me a few drinks first and maybe you'll have a shot at it."
He looks away briefly, bemused, as they take turns with the bottle of sunscreen, covering the rest of their exposed limbs. She knows Monarch is looking at her as she runs lotion over her legs, but his gaze isn't leery, just matter-of-fact, and it matches his tone exactly as he comments that the only cooler they have was already taken out by Diplomat, so she'll have to take a rain check on that drink.
He points further down the beach. In the distance sit two reclining chairs with the cooler between them, but neither of the other two Hitmen are visible.
Diplomat plus Comic plus alcohol was always a heady combination. Idly, she wonders if she'll see them at all today, as she and Monarch stand and head over to the algae-stained shack behind the lifeguard post.
Finding the volleyball equipment is arguably the easiest part of this. Setting it up is an entirely different story. Prez knows, from an engineering standpoint if nothing else, that the poles would be heavy, but she hadn't imagined they would be this heavy. No thanks to the sunscreen on her hands, it's constantly slipping out of her grasp, and she wonders if she should have waited to put it on as the heat of the sun and their efforts starts to make her sweat. It takes them a few tries to get a good system in place to install them properly at the center line of the play area, Monarch mostly doing the heavy lifting and her mostly aiming the damn thing into the ground.
It's after the poles are set up and she's staring at them with the net in her hands that she recognizes just how cheap this equipment is, and perhaps why it had been taken down to begin with. The winch that's supposed to hoist up the net is broken.
She sighs in exasperation. "Ugh. You've gotta be kidding me. Of course, the day I decide to take a break from fixing things, something needs fixing."
Monarch, for all his instinctual physics expertise in the air, isn't much of a mechanical engineer, so he only looks on with a bit of a helpless expression as Prez thinks about how to jerry-rig a busted old winch into working properly without a set of tools around. "I guess I could... but I'd need an anchor point for that... well, maybe... no, that won't work."
Rather sheepishly, he suggests they could try tying up the net the old-fashioned way.
Prez purses her lips and lets her gaze travel down the beach. "Yeah, but we aren't tall enough to do that. I don't want to go through the effort of taking these down and putting them up again." She taps her foot as she often does when the crew chief gears in her brain are turning, sand flying away in little clouds as she kicks it up. "How about this. We can detach the ladder from that old lifeguard post — no one's using it anyway — and..." She turns around.
Monarch is squatting in the sand.
"Uh. Um." Her eyes shift around awkwardly. In her head she rewinds the last parts of their conversation in an attempt to locate context for what she's seeing. Or maybe this a foreign thing she doesn't know about? They have long coastlines where he's from. They must have beach volleyball too. Is she intruding on some kind of niche Cascadian beach ritual related to setting up volleyball nets?
But Monarch looks up at her expectantly, a hand crossing his body to pat his upper back, and she realizes—
He wants me to get on his shoulders?
She fights the heat rising in her face. She takes a step forward as a question, and Monarch answers by lowering his head.
Oh my god. Oh my freaking god.
Her heart starts beating like a drum in her ears. She issues a wordless prayer to no one in particular that he doesn't somehow detect how quickly her pulse is racing as she hesitantly walks in front of him, fidgeting with the net in her hands, wondering if it's a cruel practical joke to mess with her after playing so coy earlier, but in her heart of hearts she knows it's not.
She turns around and scoots back until she sees the back of his head between her knees and their skin finally touches. An errant thought runs through her mind that her bare legs are around his head for the first time — shut up! she thinks as loudly as she can, as he wraps his arms around her shins like they're straps of a backpack and starts to stand. And, as they often do when she's with her pilot, her feet leave the earth.
Being on Monarch's shoulders is not a new thing — they'd done it once before, when scheming to steal Dip's sunglasses. That particular stunt had resulted in Monarch running as fast as his legs could carry them both while she wore the sunglasses and took a victory photo to commemorate bamboozling Hitman 2 once again before he could show off to Hitman 3.
They're in the same formation now as they were then: her knees hooked on his frame and his arms curled around her legs.
This, however, is extremely different.
The skin of his shoulders is warm, having borne the brunt of the sun before her thighs took its place, and the heat of him underneath her is a remarkably peculiar feeling that she can't quite place words to. Something resembling security, a vague feeling of reassurance, owing to the fact that he felt comfortable enough to do this while there's no fabric separating her skin from his. It's nice in a strange way, his muscles firm yet pliant as he moves beneath her. She hesitates to call it comforting.
The only thing she knows for sure is that it feels right.
He adjusts to her weight with a light grunt and slowly ambles to the closest pole. There, the net goes up without a hitch, despite her hyperawareness of Monarch's hands resting themselves on her shins, his fingers pressing periodically against her skin in a rhythm known only to him as he does his best to breathe steadily and stay still on the ever-shifting sand.
Realizing she hasn't said anything in a while, she clears her throat. "That's one down."
The other side of the net is on the ground. Prez has half a mind just to hop off to save Monarch the trouble of squatting with the addition of an entire human being on his shoulders, but his grasp on her ankles remains strong as he slowly makes his way over to it.
"I'm not sure about this," Prez says when he starts to lower himself to the ground.
All she gets in response is a dismissive grunt.
"Seriously. Take a breather or something. It's crazy hot out here."
His laugh comes out in a puff of air as a hand leaves her leg to pick up the corner of the net. He can handle it, he says, and besides, he needed a good workout anyway.
Her mind is on the image of him removing his shirt, seeing the body underneath. "Well. I'd disagree."
He knows it's a compliment, and his hand squeezes twice in an unspoken thank you as the other passes her the net.
"And if I didn't know any better, I'd say you're just looking for a reason to have a girl on top of you." The words have left her mouth before she can consider the ramifications of saying something like that. She feels her cheeks grow hot. It's a much more daring tease than she's ever made, and part of her wonders if she should have said it at all, but Monarch doesn't answer. He seems more focused on the effort of standing upright again. When he's done, he opens his mouth to reply as he takes a step.
And his foot slips.
"Eeep!" The yelp is from Prez, and entirely involuntary, the same kind of yelp that gets caught in her throat when Monarch pulls some crazy air maneuver while she's in the backseat, so she's not sure why it came out now. Falling always seems like it happens in slow motion. Reflexively, her hand whips out to grab a shoulder beneath her—
—and grabs his hand instead.
It takes her a second to recognize this, and when she does, she gasps, and her eyes widen in wonderment and slight dumbfoundedness. It's a good thing he can't see her face. Despite the stumble, he's still on his feet, and Prez is still on his shoulders, and they both regain that tenuous balance. She is so preoccupied with the sensation of his hand in hers, of pressing her fingertips into the smooth surface of his palm, riddled by the occasional callus, that she almost misses the fact that he is saying something to her.
I've got you.
For a moment, a vivid memory appears of the first time he ever said those words to her. She had stumbled out of the cockpit after a long sortie. Her legs were like jelly, as if she'd just run a hundred miles, and they had given way beneath her.
And he'd caught her. And, so quietly no one else could hear, he'd said those words.
At the time, she'd been embarrassed. Furious, even. She didn't like the appearance of not being enough on her own, and back in the Federation, she could never afford to seem weak when she had an entire family to provide for. Least of all, she didn't want his pity. So she had pushed him away. It was like an affront to her, to be given help when she could show him and everyone there how she still managed to struggle to her own two feet, to drag her body all the way to the showers, to leave him standing there in the hangar.
Amidst the soft summer breeze, his hand turns over and grasps hers in turn, palm to palm, warm and soothing, and suddenly those three words don't seem full of pity anymore.
All at once, she feels like a fool. How many times had she said that exact thing to him in the skies? And not just her. How many times had he turned to help chase off a bandit on a wingman's tail? How many times had that been done for him? At the end of the day, they don't call that pity.
They call it "having each other's backs".
He seems to detect this little internal turmoil of hers because he squeezes her hand curiously. It takes her a moment to find her voice again. "Yeah. I'm okay." Then, so quietly she's worried he won't hear, she whispers, "Thank you."
Two squeezes are the response back.
He manages a little hop to adjust them both, scattering the butterflies in her stomach as he positions himself by the second metal pole, and with great reluctance, Prez releases his hand and strains her arms outward as she ties the rope securely.
The volleyball net is finally up.
"Stellar teamwork as always, I see."
Monarch turns them both around. Diplomat has jogged his way to them from his part of the beach, face reddened presumably from the sun, surfboard under his arm, and sunglasses perched on hair that's damp and tousled, likely from falling into the ocean more than once.
"Well, you know what they say about Monarch," Prez says, her voice restored to its usual tone. "He always gets results."
"Yeah, he always finds an interesting way to make things work, doesn't he?" he says with a grin. "Anyway, I thought I'd stop by to help you out, but it looks like I missed all the fun." He nods upwards. "Do I get a turn up there too?"
Monarch chuckles, shaking his head and remarking that he already carries Dip plenty.
Dip grimaces. "Ouch. Well, since it's all set up now, if you're gonna play volleyball, I'm in."
"Put on some sunscreen first," Prez says, and inwardly cringes at how much she sounds her mom. Or like Comic. "Your whole face is clearly suffering."
"I'll have you know I tan pretty well, but thanks."
"If that's the case, why are you so red?"
For a split second, a genuinely surprised and embarrassed look crosses his face, but it's gone in a flash. He sticks his surfboard in the sand and grabs the volleyball. "I'm... gonna go grab Mick. Two versus one isn't fair, you know. Even if you only have one pair of legs." Before they can say anything more, he's running off again.
Prez sighs. "That was weird."
It's just how Diplomat is sometimes, Monarch says.
"Well, I guess it can't be any weirder than what we're up to." She glances down at him. "You tired of this yet, Monarch?"
To her surprise, Monarch shakes his head. He places his hands gently on her thighs, angling his head up at her as he speaks, his eyes visible above his sunglasses. He doesn't mind, he says with something in his voice that's more than fondness. He likes her up there. Because she has his back.
She's not sure if he'd somehow read her mind or if it's supposed to be a joke about her literal position right now, but it's a sweet sentiment, so she smiles and rolls her eyes. "Of course I have your back." And then, hesitantly, she adds, "And you've got mine. Right?"
A twinkle in his eyes, two reassuring squeezes, and an easy smile. Right.
Although not for sunscreen, apparently.
She laughs, lightly swatting his head. "Oh, let it go already, you dumbass."
He laughs too, the sound of it reverberating through her legs, and she can't keep a smile from her face as he turns them towards where Comic sits in the distance, lounging next to the cooler, already being accosted by Diplomat and the volleyball. Comic glances over to them. Monarch waves and Prez shouts out a greeting for good measure, and as she raises her arms to wave along with him, high on the shoulders of her pilot, she feels as though her hands could touch the sky.