crossing_lostrp | (Flashback) Everybody Loves a Hero...yeah. Right. (tag Methos) (Reply)

Clarice was nursing a slight hangover by the time she shuffled her way through the boarding tube and into Commercial Class. Last night’s would-be date had bombed--like the other two she had attempted during her trip to Sydney. It wasn’t even for a good reason; but it was the same reason every single time. Just like back home.

When they found out what she did, they were fascinated. When they found out that she took it seriously, and would never be comfortable in a non-front-lines profession, they were troubled. When they got troubled, they either ended the date early, or drank some more and asked more questions. What about when she got married? Would she give it up then? What about when kids came? What about then? When potential one-night stands turned into a Spanish Inquisition about her life and career, and then degenerated into snide and dismissive comments...it was far better to go up to her hotel room alone no matter how hard-up she was. Clarice didn’t settle. So she got to be lonely a lot.

Men outside her field couldn’t handle her career because they saw a divide between law enforcement and civilians that somehow bled over into their private lives. To them, she was a “cop” and thus “other” and probably suspect. Men inside her field were usually more conservative than their civilian counterparts, and didn’t like the idea of a teeny li’l woman competing with them. Those who tried--and there had been an obnoxious many for about her first year--seemed primarily concerned with “taming” her. Both sides wanted her to shed her degrees and her qualifications and everything she’d done to get through Quantico, and ignore her own principles, family tradition and the kind of work she’d been born for, in order to go do something “safer” and more “womanly”. You couldn’t be a lady and a cop at once, as far as men seemed to be concerned. Of course...she could have been just spectacularly unlucky. Either way, she felt kind of screwed at the moment.

The last one had ended especially badly; she had felt sorry for herself up in her room and drunk too much from the in-room wetbar. Her dreams had been full of darkness and the smell of damp earth, corpses, and tannic acid. She had woken shaking again, and held herself, and then stared at the empty patch of moonlit blankets beside her, wondering in a moment of weakness whether all this crap she went through was worth it.

Maybe she should lie about her job next vacation--or just not tell people. But in the end...that would backfire.

/At least it would have gotten me a date to the damn opera, though,/ she thought bitterly as she lugged her bag down the aisle. She had the book she had been reading--Moreno’s /Arguing Euthanasia/, nearly finished thanks to her partial insomnia, in one hand. She was almost to her seat when some beefy blond asshole came shoving past her on his way to his. The book, of course, went sailing into the air. “Dammit!” She watched in horror as it went right past the ear of a thin dark-haired man in a seat ahead of her, bouncing off the chairback and landing unceremoniously at his feet.

This was definitely not her year.