bakerstreet | ( you're my mission. )

( you're my mission. )

YOU'RE MY MISSION

You're the kind of person who works best with a stone-set goal or a purpose in your life. Even if those duties were thrust upon you with no input of your own, even if that's all you know - especially if that's all you know - you find yourself most at home when you have a job and you do it. Unfortunately, though, what you've dedicated yourself has gone belly up and you're left reeling.

That is until you find a new mission: a person. They could have shown you kindness when you needed it most, they may seem like someone with a cause. A cause, that's good. That's what you need. You can serve this.

All of your focus, all of your resolve, all in one place; it's no wonder when your feelings begin to blur and "professionalism" and such is no longer the order of the day, if it ever was. So now, you're dedicated to them, which has its ups and downs. You have to protect them, keep them safe, keep them successful, and do what needs to be done for them - their dirty work, if need be - though they may not ask or want this. They especially may not want your brand of service. But loving them normally, of course, would be the most healthy way to channel all this, yet perhaps you're not sure how. You could learn...

...or you could continue with the mission.

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[ooc: either the mission or the mission-haver. Willing to go with any canon point, First Class, DoFP, Apocalypse.]

[ooc: Open for discussion.]

Danny wasn't usually in this situation. He had never had to deal with anything for this long, either, and perhaps that was the difference. He never had to deal with feelings, or well... He wasn't sure.

But what he did know was that right now it was not a good time to be tangled with others. Still, Danny looked over his shoulder as he twirled his keys on a finger casually. A woman had been tailing him for the better part of his walk, which meant someone else had tailed him before that and he had missed them. She was also the one they wanted him to see.

"Heh." He said to himself, shaking his head before turning the corner. Now wasn't a good time for tangles...

But he couldn't really just leave Miles to deal with everything alone. Could he?

Miles wasn't yet aware that there was an everything to deal with yet. Miles was, frankly, playing with his phone in a coffee shop - okay, maybe a little bit more than playing - while awkwardly trying to flirt with the barista.

He was so bad at flirting that no one would have been able to even tell that he was trying.

Since it wasn't going to work out anytime in this millennium, he frowned back at his phone, concentrating on what he was the best at. He was nearly in, he thought, and if he could crack into this level, he was going to have bragging privileges for months that none of the rest of his friends could even get close to surpassing.

"Come on," he murmured, focused now. "Let me in." He didn't even notice the barista roll her eyes and mutter to the cashier about geeks and their phone games. He certainly didn't notice someone new slipping through the door.

Danny spotted Miles easily enough. The man hadn't quite figured out that hiding was a good thing, or at least...blending in. So he ordered his coffee, smiling at her warmly and asking her about her day. They chatted easily as she made his mocha, and she seemed disappointed when he gave her a wink and then excused himself.

"You do know that is a crime, yes?" He whispered into Miles' ear as he sat at the table beside him. Though it did make him curious. Was it really Danny the people were after....or Miles. As far as Danny knew, no one had broken his cover. Even Miles seemed unaware that Danny was anything more than a simple mid level worker for a tech company. One that traveled a decent amount.

"You wouldn't fair well in prison, I think. You probably would end up curled in a corner, crying." He said, smirking a little.

"Motherf..." Miles spat out before he shifted in his seat and hid his screen. "You're sneaky as shit, you know that? If you keep doing that, I'm sending Chris next time your work phone's fucked."

As for prison, he shrugged. "Obviously," he said. "But I'm just working on...uh. A networking issue with the wifi at the office. Management starts making bitchy comments about how we're a technology company when shit goes down. They'd still be making bitchy comments if you were out on the road selling underwear."

Which Danny could pull off, he thought. Danny Cho was the hottest person who still talked to him on a regular basis. Most attractive people got scared away by the fact that Miles mostly talked in various programming languages.

Edited 2016-06-05 02:16 (UTC)

"I'm secretly a shinobi, you will never see me coming." Danny said, laughing a little. "I don't have to be so sneaky, you know. You never look up. Nose buried in your phone. You're what is wrong with our generation you know."

Still, Danny glanced out the window of the shop. The woman had passed the door, and moved across the street and disappeared. Either she was a terrible tail, or she'd just passed it off to someone else. That made it a question of who, now. Who indeed.

"Chris?" He asked, pulling himself back into the conversation. "You would let Chris touch my phone?" That was a horror, even for Miles. "And yes, yes. I am sure it is just a firewall issue. That you are playing with. On free wifi at Starbucks."

It wasn't a very smart move, if it were true.

Miles pinned Danny with a look. "Can't you be an idiot about computers like the rest of the guys in sales?" He said plaintively. At least, he thought Danny was in sales - he admittedly didn't pay much attention to the job titles, but he definitely traveled too much to be a support analyst and neither of them were old enough to be management.

"Also I'm at least 80% sure Chris wouldn't get too much suntan oil on your stuff if I subjected your office to him. Probably." Chris was, technically, his boss, but Miles ended up doing most of the office calls. It had something to do with the fact that Chris gave literally everyone the creeps.

There, he thought, he was in. Now it was just a matter of deploying the worm, and he was going to be king for at least a quarter. "You don't usually do Starbucks," he said in what he hoped was a smooth, conversational tone as he made someone's day terrible and then backed out again. The cloaking was still in place, he checked, and the phone was going to be trash as soon as he left, anyway. It was a small price to pay to stay out of prison for his little hobby.

"Checking out the scourge of coffee drinkers everywhere for funsies?"

"I'm in sales, my job is to know about computers." Danny replied, rolling his eyes. It wasn't as if he was selling a 'logo'. Though most of Danny's clients were the ones conveniently located near his points of interest. Moot point, really.

"Chris is disgusting, even for the typically disgusting American stereotype." Danny went on, though, before taking a sip of his mocha. There, he thought. There was a man and a woman sitting in a black SUV across the street. They had pulled up a few moments after he'd arrived, and still hadn't gotten out. They weren't even looking at a map as if they were lost.

That had to be the tail. But nor he had to wonder, seriously. Was it him or was it Miles. And how did he figure it out without blowing his cover.

"Miles, darling." He said, smiling lightly as his more serious expression melted away. "I saw you, and thought I would save you from yourself, if I were honest. Besides, you usually do Starbucks, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about."

"Tell that to your coworkers," Miles said, as he set the phone down facedown and leaned back in his chair. He balanced it on the back legs and raised his brows as he picked up his frappe and took a long drink. "Ed is going to set his on fire one of these days, and frankly...well, I want to be there when it happens."

He remained blissfully unaware of any black SUVs and their black-suited inhabitants. He'd learned to be more suspicious of the appearance of town cars.

"The fuss is about whipped cream," he said. "Caffeine topped with sugar is really how I make it through the day, you know. Even better if chocolate's involved."

What to be suspicious of all depended on what someone was looking for, Danny would have guessed. It was only the training drilled into him that kept him from nervously licking his lips and fidgeting. "Ed is an idiot," he said with a snort, looking at the shop shelves as if he is curious about it all. "But I don't think he'll be setting anything on air. He's not that much of an idiot."

What to do, what to do. If they were after Miles, he couldn't very well dump the phone now. It would be full of evidence, and finger prints. But how to tell Miles that without...explaining. Without being obvious.

"I can tell, you're always so chipper at work." Danny said after a moment, before turning his full attention to Miles. "You want to grab some Dim Sum?" He asked, sipping at his mocha. "I know a place close to here." And one that conveniently had a Korean cook. Someone who could be convinced to...distract any tails.

"Oh ye of little faith," Miles muttered with a smirk before blinking at Danny.

"Dim Sum?" he echoed as if he wasn't familiar with the concept. Which, of course, was false. He was Californian, born and bred, plus all the Asian kids tended to stick together throughout school. Which had meant that he'd been friends with other Indian kids, but also the Chinese and Korean contingent as well. "Um...sure? I could go for some dumplings?"

He didn't really mean for it to sound like a question, but...people didn't usually ask him out to lunch, unless he was going to be fixing something on said lunch. "You didn't break your phone, did you?"

Danny honestly didn't know if he had little faith in Ed or not. In truth, the only person at work he'd spent much time with had been...Miles. They were almost, maybe on the verge of being friends. Or something. And Miles had something Danny wanted, he'd been working his way into Miles' life for over a year to get it.

But things were changing. Quickly.

"No? Why would I need to break my phone to have some Dim Sum?" Danny asked, standing as he frowned at Miles. "Are you confused at what a Dumpling is or that I am asking you to come along? You don't to. But it seems a better idea that getting arrested for doing something stupid."

"What is it that makes you think I'm going to get arrested?" Miles said. He let all four legs of his chair back on the floor and stood up, palming the phone and picking up his messenger bag. "I mean, if I was doing something illegal, I'd like to think I'd be pretty good at it. Not that I am."

He'd have to wait to dispose of the phone, he realized, and carefully slipped it in the inside pocket of his bag.

"I know what a dumpling is," he said. "We call them samosas. It's door number 2. People from work don't really talk to me away from work." Even Danny, so far, had been a work friend only.

"Just...a guess." He said, his eyes traveling across the street to the car. It was still waiting, and for a moment he thought he caught a glimpse of a camera. It did not paint a comforting picture.

His long term game was going to have to become a short term game really quick. If they were after him, he could let them arrest Miles, and then he could quickly search the man's things to find the key before the police arrived. If they were on to Danny...

Well, he'd still need to find that key. And get it to the drop before something happened to him. And being arrested was not an option. Especially not in the America of today. "I....guess." He admitted, a bit awkwardly even. "I'm just...trying to make myself try more. I don't have many friends here. Just work."

"Yeah?" Miles tipped his head to one side as they walked down the street, and pushed his hair behind his ear. "Me either. Most of my college friends went to the Silicon Valley." He still couldn't define exactly why he hadn't. He'd kind of...frozen after graduation. The job he had now was safe.

Even if his extracurriculars weren't so safe.

"I mostly end up going home and eating a lot of pizza lately," he said. "I'm petitioning pepperoni to become its own food group." He glanced over his shoulder when the ignition started up in a car, and his eyes narrowed. "Huh."

"Miles..." Danny said, as they walked. He saw the SUV drive by, missing the second occupant. The walker was behind them, a blond man with black sunglasses who paced them at 30 feet. Every nerve was kicking in, Danny thought.

They figured him out.

How would be a question for later. But it had to be him. They did not move like police, or FBI. They blended in well enough that no one else seemed to notice. And they knew, he thought, that he knew they were there.

"I don't think pepperoni should be its own food group," Danny continued after a pause. But he did not seem as interested in conversation all of a sudden. Turning the corner, he picked up his pace toward the Dim Sum shop. His fingers tapping his stomach as he walked, a nervous tick that helped him think.

Miles could, at least, pick up the sudden tension. And he'd caught a look at the guy behind them; he wasn't a spy or anything, but Sunglasses was too calmly single-minded to really blend in. At the same time, he didn't have the air the FBI agents had - at least the one time he'd skated too close to trouble back at CalTech.

He silently matched Danny's pace, but his eyes had an analytical expression in them as they stepped inside the shop.

"Are we being followed?" It seemed less accusatory to phrase it like a question.

"Yes." It seemed rather straight forward. Turning they crossed the street, and Danny breathed out a little to see that the traffic cut blondie off. That was one less for him to worry about as he picked up their pace again.

"Do you trust me?" He asked, before pulling Miles into the Dim Sum shop with him and moving with studied movement to the kitchens where he shouted in Korean at a cook and tossing his head back toward the door as he took Miles' arm and shoved him to the back of the kitchen.

They would have to wind their way through the alley and then back out on the streets. And in a desperate need to disappear.

Miles' lips compressed into a line, but after a brief moment he nodded curtly. "Yes," he said. "Right now." It was a qualified answer, but that was to be expected, given their situation. He quickened his pace to keep up with Danny and hitched his bag up more securely on his shoulder.

"I'm pretty sure I'm going to have questions later, though," he said as they dodged through the alley.

He set his hand on Danny's arm. "Do you want to lose him or just confuse him?" He asked. He wasn't, particularly, an expert at dodging tails. But he was close to an expert on this city. He'd run around these streets most of his life.

"Losing them would be a good start." He said, looking at Miles somewhat curiously. The whole 'questions later' was going to be somewhat...complicated. His controller would coldly tell him just to shoot Miles.

Just shooting Miles certainly made more sense than just taking off with him in tow.

"Unless you wish to be shot without even a question." Because he had a feeling that this would be a 'no mercy' situation. Considering these people wanted him to see them.

"Personally? Rather not be shot at all," Miles said as he pivoted in the alley and yanked Danny towards the back door of an Indian buffet restaurant. "I've heard it hurts."

He wasn't, he thought as they opened the door and he gave the cook a sheepish grin, entirely sure why he was pulling Danny along. He liked Danny - he liked him a lot, and he thought they were friends - but Danny was clearly either in deep shit or was deep shit himself. The smart thing to do would be to drop him and save himself.

"This way," he said, though. "If we go out here, we'll be half a block from the bus station, and there'll be too many people there for them to catch up to you. Us. Whatever."

Being shot wasn't so bad after the first time, so to speak. Pain was easy enough to work through if it was an arm, even a leg could be worked through. Though it did make things harder. However, Danny was in no rush to be shot either.

So he followed, and nodded along. A bus station was good. Once on the bus, they could fade into the crowd. "Bus station works," he said with a nod.

Moving onto the street again, Danny glanced both ways for a quick moment, then turned toward the bus station. As they passed a street vendor, Danny paused. Just long enough to swipe a hat unnoticed by the distracted vendor and kept walking as he slipped it onto his head.

"We should go back to your place." He said, discreetly dropping his phone into a slightly open purse of a passer by. "Then I'll go on alone."

More or less, at least.

Not, Miles thought, exactly the scenario in which he really wanted to hear those words, but...

Well, he didn't think he'd do so well at interrogation, either. Maybe he should have gone with something more his speed, job-wise, after all. If he'd gotten a job with Google, he wouldn't be trying to outmaneuver people who basically screamed agent at the top of their lungs.

In a silent, brooding spy sort of way.

Speaking of silent, brooding and spies...he gave Danny a sidelong look as they dodged through the terminal towards the bus that would drop them near his place.

They were inside the darkened and definitely sparse apartment before he said something. "What are you into?" Miles said quietly, tapping his fingers against his folded arms. He wasn't, he could admit, the most plugged into the real world. He'd broken into some secure systems and some places that would have earned him hefty jail sentences and extradition. He didn't usually think about the people behind the systems; it was all about the puzzle.

Danny - or whoever - was showing himself to be an intricate sort of puzzle.

Interrogation was a matter of just sticking to your story- simple, few details that were out right lies, and never offering up more than you were asked. Either way, he didn't plan on being interrogated either. And Danny kept quiet until they were alone in a darkened apartment.

And remained silent as he pulled the blinds down and carefully flipped them so he could peek down to the street below. It remained empty, but his guard did not fall. They were out there, even if they weren't there yet. Time was ticking.

"Do you really want to know?" He asked, glancing at Miles before he chewed his lip a little. He had a mission, he told himself. He had an obligation to finish... Or he could be putting his family at risk for his failure. Not to mention a myriad of other complicated...situations.

"You have something I need." He said finally, reaching around to his back and pulling his gun out from under his shirt. "You wrote a program, and you stole something...I am here to take both back." Before someone else got their hands on it.

The gun wasn't a surprise, considering the rest of the afternoon. But he still flinched and took a half step back. "I write a lot of programs," he said, dryly. "And at this point in the day, it's not worth pretending that I don't steal a lot of things. So you're going to have to be a little more specific."

His mind was flying through his recent projects, though. It was mostly a game for him, but lately it had been a game that had gotten him into more than one government agency of the clandestine variety. Was it the missile schema? He wondered. Well, he wasn't stupid. He wasn't going to volunteer that.

"You stole files from a Chinese agency. You have no idea what it is, or you would have sold it by now." It had taken Danny a year to settle into his life in the U.S., but he had always had Miles as his mark. To be far, China wanted the program more than North Korea, but what his government did with it didn't matter in the end. At least not to him.

Granted, he didn't think good could come of it. Especially with how badly Pyongyang wanted their list and the program. And a way to break Western governments. Particularly the US.

"You can give it to me, or I can shoot you and take it." He was trained for it. He had spent many of his formative years trying with computers in China. Almost as many years as he had spent learning to pass as 'American.' His road to now had started, after all, in childhood. A cliché, maybe.

"I do not want to hurt you," he said after a moment. "But I will."

"That's a pretty poor way of getting what you want," Miles said. A little more tense, now. He liked to think he could comport himself like he was a badass hacker from some spy show on tv, but the fact of the matter was. Well, he was a bored computer geek who'd been stumbling into places he shouldn't since college.

And was smart enough to mostly get away with it. "Fine," he said. "Chinese agency. You want to lower that so I can get you what you want, or not?" Danny, he calculated, probably wouldn't know exactly what he was looking for; hell, he didn't know exactly what Danny was looking for. But maybe he could get away with a decoy while he tried to figure it out.

Danny had only been told that he would know it when he saw it. Pyongyang liked to keep its secrets, even from the ones they tasked with safe guarding them. And for a moment, he seemed slightly unsure of what he was supposed to do. The plan had never been to hold a gun to Miles' head. He had intended to worm his way into the man's life, become friends. Earn trust. None of that was possible now, he thought.

"Okay," he said, lowering the gun, though he didn't give it up. Chewing his lip, he peeked out the window again.

"November, two years ago." He said, finally. "You had just started your job here, and you broke into a Chinese front company, copied files, and left." It was clinical, his explanation. "You get me those files, and I leave. You try to trick me, and you will find that it is not just you that suffers." It would be both of their families.

The...list, Miles thought. At least he thought it was a list. It wasn't really anything he could discern meaning out of, even after he'd run it through as many codebreakers as he'd had. So he'd moved on to something else, and left it to gather dust on the hard drive.

The program he'd used, though - he wasn't willing to give that up. He might have wandered into a criminal life of sorts here, but even he had limits. The worm he'd written to get into that company was capable of opening up the systems of pretty much any government in the world. In the wrong hands...

Well, he wasn't letting it happen. Danny wasn't the first person to threaten him in the last few years.

He walked over to his desk and pushed down on a troll doll sitting on top among the rest of the clutter. The side of the desk slid up and out and he crouched down to run his fingers along the slim hard drives stored there. The one he pulled out would...pass a cursory look, he thought. It depended how good Danny was.

"You must be a pretty good spy," he said as he held it out. "I really fell for it."

"Don't be bitter." Danny said, frowning as he looked at the hard drive. "I warned you that your 'fine' would get you into trouble." It didn't matter much, really. Miles had already gotten the wrong sort of attention as the moment here proved.

As long as it was just the list, he thought, maybe that would be enough. Or his handlers would let him get shot and then it was all over. Hell, Danny thought, they probably shot his family year ago. He hadn't seen them since he'd been a teenager. Was North Korea really worth all this?

Rubbing his lips as he thought, Danny glanced out the window again. He could remember his father talking about trying to out of North Korea. The man had been a mid-level bureaucrat, and their family had done...okay for it. It certainly had paid for a better education for Danny and his older brother.

"I'm sorry," he said, without looking back. "I did not want to do it this way." Not that just....stealing it would have probably been better.

Miles rolled his eyes as he stood up. "You don't have any right to tell me not to be bitter," he pointed out. It would be painfully melodramatic to say that Danny had used him, not to mention obvious, so he kept his mouth shut beyond that.

He flicked a look over at Danny before checking the window through his mostly shut blinds, and sighed. "Where are you going to go?" He asked a bit stiffly. Most of him wanted to kick Danny out, and no one would blame him for it, but there was a piece that couldn't quite stop giving a shit.

"I did not use you," Danny pointed out. Granted, he supposed he had...lead Miles on with what the other had seen as flirting. Personally, Danny had never spent much time considering feelings. Such entanglements were not encouraged in his extensive training, and truthfully he had never had much in the way of relationships. But in the case of using... Well, they hadn't really gotten to any sort of point in that regard, yet.

"I will give this list to my government." He said, shrugging a little. "Then they will most likely kill me before your government can catch me." Such was the way of Their Great Leader. Or at least that was what Danny assumed would happen. A known spy wasn't really useful in that regard. And while he believed he could handle any torture the CIA could throw at him- he knew that the government would not risk it.

"What does it matter?" He said, moving away from the window. "Put the drive in. Show it to me. I will show you what you found."

"Then why would you even bother giving it to them?" Miles asked, more than a little incredulous. "What's the point in serving a government that's just going to put you down like an old dog?"

He was spoiled, in a way. He'd always been able to make choices, and the worst he was was a disappointment.

He shook his head. "I don't care," he said. Though that was a lie. He was interested in what was on the real hard drive - but he knew exactly what was on the one he'd handed over. "You should get going. No doubt my government knows exactly who I am, and they'll circle back eventually."

"And your government won't?" He asked, curious. He had always had been taught to fear the evils of Western governments- it was enough to make someone believe there was no government worth serving and all were evil. "If I give it to them, they will not kill my family. If I fail, they will likely die as well. Either way, I die."

Taking the hard drive, Danny sighed just a little. It wasn't likely the one he wanted, and they both knew it. Miles kept dodging it, and that was enough of a clue that Danny almost wanted to knock the man upside the head.

"Okay," he said, tucking the hard drive away under his shirt against his back. "You should be more careful."

Miles shrugged. "Jail, probably," he said. "Or flip you if they think they can something out of it. But probably not kill you straight out."

Danny didn't really believe him, he thought. It wasn't particularly a surprise; he wasn't good at lying. He was better at sneaking. In reality, he was just better at being online than in the real world.

"I'll take that under advisement," he said, and pushed his hair out of his face.Danny would be back, he thought, if he left now. The smart thing to do would be to move everything. "We wouldn't want someone else running me through Santa Barbara and then pointing a gun at me in my living room."

[ no gender prefs. most likely the one with the mission, but easily discussable. assumed cr and cross-canon are a-ok. ]

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( you're my mission. )

Natasha Romanoff | Marvel Cinematic | M/F

Raven/Mystique | X-men Movie Universe | OTA

Rey | SW:TFA | OTA

Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier | MCU | OTA

Wanda Maximoff || MCU || F/M

Rey || Star Wars: The Force Awakens || F/M

Miles Desai | OC | OTA

~making things up~

~as one does~

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Agent Washington | Red vs Blue | ota