A Change in Perspective

Mary – no, Vega. Her name is Vega now. Vega spares an anxious glance around the ballroom. She smooths down the dress suit that her mother helped pick out for her; then carefully touches her smooth locks that have been done up in a cute bun courtesy of Goldie. She doesn’t like dressing up and she dislikes formal settings even more, but this is her first big event as a villainous mastermind and every good upstart villain needs to make good connections.

She moves slowly, already regretting her decision to wear heels to the event. She picked the lowest height available, but she still struggles to walk around in them at a normal pace. Women who wear this on a day to day basis are amazing, she finds herself idly thinking.

She drew the line at make-up, however. The most she would allow was some light blush and lip gloss. She kept her glasses as well, as contact lenses have never agreed with her – although she traded in her usual pair for something more formal-looking and less “needlessly flashy”, as Goldie put it.

She feels like a doll in the way she’s been done up and silently promises herself that this will be the last time she comes to an event dressed like this. Next time, she’ll come in her usual colorful suit and barely brushed hair and the attendees are just going to have to deal with it.

She takes a small, tentative step forward, and despite how careful she’s being, she still manages to trip. She’s currently at a more secluded area, so thankfully not many have noticed her make a fool of herself. She gets ready to pull herself up when a hand enters her line of sight.

“Are you alright?”

She looks up and finds a handsome young man with dark, slicked back hair and bright green eyes. She takes his offered hand and mumbles out a thanks. Okay, so this area wasn’t as secluded as she thought. Well that’s just great.

But that’s weird. She’s pretty sure she’s never met this guy before but something about him seems familiar.

“Derrick, over here!” A voice calls. A woman with red hair is tapping her foot impatiently as she waits by the refreshment table.

“Coming!” Derrick yells back. He turns back to look at her. “Are you gonna be okay?”

Vega nods wordlessly and he gives her one last smile before turning away to join the redhead. A date, maybe? While she’s not so sure about the young man’s identity, she does recognize his companion.

She’s the daughter of one of the biggest players in the crime world and known to be notoriously picky when it comes to anything and everything, including the men she dates.

That guy must be something else if he could convince that spoiled brat to take him to an event like this.

Vega shakes her head. She has more important things to focus on right now, like making connections. Actually, making a connection with that redhead and her current boyfriend(?) might be a good start. Or would that be aiming too high? Before she can make decision, she’s eventually approached by an older gentleman who offers to help her find a place to sit.

Vega is wary at first as all of her minions had warned her of some villains that may approach her with ulterior motives, but thankfully this doesn’t turn out to be the case. The man had approached her because she had apparently reminded him of his late daughter, and from there, they got to talking. Within just a few minutes, Vega manages to successfully make her first connection.

As the night goes on, Vega meets with more people and nearly forgets about her encounter with that nice guy and his spoiled date. Almost. Because the whole night, every time she hears his voice or spares a glance at him, she keeps getting this nagging feeling that they’ve met somewhere before.

She’s on her way to the bathroom when a quiet whisper makes her stop in her tracks. She looks around. The halls are empty. She carefully takes her heels off and tiptoes to the closest pillar. She strains her ear. It’s faint, but she can pick up a voice. As quietly as she can, Vega moves to follow the source of the voice.

“— yes, I’m in position.”

It’s starting to get clearer now. She stops and carefully looks past the wall she’s hiding behind. Her eyes nearly bulge out of her sockets. It’s Derrick. He’s in the midst of taking what appears to be a black wig off, revealing fluffy brown hair underneath. He’s talking to someone, probably on an earpiece judging by the way his fingers periodically press against his ear.

This isn’t good. He’s probably a spy and he’s going to ruin this whole night! Vega pauses.

Hold on, this is a great opportunity. If I warn the host about this spy then he’ll owe me and badabing badaboom, insta-success! I’ll be climbing up the villainous social ladder before you know it!

She gives the unfortunate spy one last look before turning to leave, and that’s all it takes to stop her in her tracks. His eyes no longer sport the green color they had earlier. They’re brown. A very familiar shade of brown.

Vega lets out a soft gasp and remembers.

A short boy shyly offering her part of his lunch. Bygone days spent in grassy fields and playgrounds. Smiles and laughter amidst discussions of future dreams and aspirations.

Altair. So he really went and became a spy.

Ugh. And he went and helped her out earlier too. Even if they eventually drifted apart, he was a really good friend to her and some of her fondest childhood memories were spent with him and Cobalt (and upon remembering her other old friend, Vega finds herself wondering if Cobalt made good on his word and became a spy as well).

Plus, she may or may not have had a huge crush on him when they were kids. He was cute, okay?! And really, really nice. So sue her if she likes cute, nice guys!

“Yes, understood,” she hears Altair say, still blissfully unaware that his cover had already been blown, “This is my first mission after all. I’ll make sure all goes as planned.”

Aww, baby’s first mission?! It would be just plain rude to mess that up now. I’m evil, but not that evil.

Letting out a defeated sigh, Vega tip toes away until she’s far enough that she’s sure Altair won’t hear her. She doesn’t bother putting her shoes back on and tells her newfound friends and allies that she’s not feeling well, giving her an easy out to leave earlier than planned.

Eh, she’s sure they’ll be fine. Most of them, anyway. She can hear about the aftermath on the news tomorrow. For now, she’s looking forward to soaking her feet in a bucket of ice once she gets home.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Vega encounters Altair again when she’s at a small gathering in London. She’s started to make a name for herself and her workforce has been steadily going. This gathering is for the best of the best of up and coming villains, in other words, they’re all Vega’s greatest rivals.

But despite being surrounded by her competition on all sides, Vega feels anything but uncomfortable. In fact, she’s very comfortable at the moment. She’s dressed in her favorite hot pink suit and a comfy pair of loafers and had her hair specially dyed the same shade of hot pink as her suit. It’s all tied up in a fetching ponytail and there’s not a single blush on her cheeks. (She’s still wearing lip gloss though, because nobody deserves to suffer through a day with chapped lips.)

She surveys her surroundings, taking in the sights and sounds. She’s already given the other guests a good look so she chooses to focus her attention on the servers. They’re all wearing uniforms that consist of a plain white blouse, black pants, and a black bow tie. They all look relatively normal and none of them look to be a threat.

Altair had been successful on his first mission and while his cover was never blown (by anyone besides Vega herself), the host of that event and many others in attendance believed that stricter security measures needed to be put in place (which is rather ironic, given how most of them work very hard to destroy security measures for a living). As such, events such as this have become invitation only. No more dates or plus twos or what have you.

So Vega’s instincts tells her that if anyone is trying to infiltrate this shindig tonight, it’ll be someone in the staff. This party’s particular host has been in the game for a while now, so not just anyone can get hired by him. But all the same, one can never be too sure.

She’s so focused on the task at hand that she doesn’t notice the waiter sneak up on her.

“Excuse me ma’am, you dropped this.

“Huh?”

She turns around and meets baby blue eyes framed by black glasses and sandy blond hair. The waiter is holding one of her earrings, one of the only heirlooms in her family. She takes it back gratefully.

“Thanks, I didn’t even notice.”

“It’s no problem,” he says with a dazzling smile that nearly catches Vega off guard. But there’s something about the smile and the voice that seem all too familiar.

“Would you like a drink?” He offers her one of the glasses of cider on his tray.

“Oh, yes please,” she takes it and the waiter smiles at her again before moving along. She stares back at his retreating form before turning to look at the drink she’d just accepted. Wait…why did she take it? She doesn’t even like cider. But the waiter has already moved on before she can ask to return the drink.

Oh well. She looks around for a potted plant or nearby trash can that she could dump the offending drink on. She finds one close to the main entrance and makes a beeline for it, but she’s accosted by two other party guests before she can make it to her destination.

They both attempt to strike up pleasant conversation with her, but Vega can quickly tell that their main purpose for approaching her is to size her up. Well, take it all in baby! She has nothing to hide and nothing to lose. They talk for a few minutes before the pair decide to move on and size up the rest of their competition. Vega lets them go, not feeling the slightest bit intimidated by them.

Now what was she supposed to do again? She looks back down at the glass in her hand. Oh, right. She was gonna go dump this drink. Actually, on second thought, it would probably be best to dump it where nobody would see her. Others might assume that her refusal to drink is because she tampered with the refreshments or something.

That’s the thing about this business. It’s best to not trust anyone.With that in mind, she exits the party hall, finds a trashcan a ways away, and walks back to the main hall within a few minutes.

She opens the door and to her surprise, every single person in the room is unconscious. Guests, servers, even the host – who was, by the looks of it, about to make a speech on the extravagant stage before he unceremoniously passed out. She was only gone for a few minutes! What happened while she was away?!

She hears footsteps and Vega’s instincts tell her to run and hide. She scrambles under the closest table as the door creaks open. It’s eerily loud within the large room that was filled with chatter and noise mere minutes earlier.

“Yes, they’re all down,” the mystery man says. Probably a spy, Vega thinks, and a pretty good one if he made it through all of those security checks.

She quietly moves under the table so that she can get a better look at this party pooper. It would be too dangerous for her to act on her own now, but if she could just get a good picture of him with her phone…

Her eyes widen. It’s the waiter who offered her cider earlier. Wow, talking about dodging a bullet. He must have spiked all of the drinks.

Vega double checks to make sure that her phone is silent and that the flash is off before preparing to take a photo. Okay, angle it like so annnnd….

And he takes his wig off and a familiar head of fluffy brown hair emerges. The glasses come off and the blue colored contact lenses remain, but the voice and hair color are enough for Vega to figure out this mystery man’s identity.

“Yeah, I’m still not used to wearing wigs for that long. They’re so itchy!”

There’s a pause, then Altair tells whoever is on the other line to “kindly please shut up” before moving on to do whatever spy work he was sent here to do.

Well, Vega’s at a crossroads now. This is clearly not his first mission anymore so he doesn’t get a free pass for that. They are old friends, but she feels like that really shouldn’t matter if he’s here to sabotage her chances of climbing up the villainous ranks. She sighs. She wishes he wasn’t so quick to pull that wig off. That would have made this so much easier.

He places a USB port into the laptop on the stage, completely ignoring the unconscious host by his feet, and Vega realizes she’s running out of time. She should do something. She picks up her phone again and gets her camera ready, zooming in on Altair’s face. The years have been kind to him, he’s gotten really handsome. And he’s even humming while he’s stealing data, how cute is that!

Wait, no, that’s bad. Focus, Vega! She takes the picture. Altair takes his USB. It has a cat key chain attached to it and Vega tries her best not be charmed by it.

“Yeah, I got it,” he says into his earpiece. “Another successful job completed by the Flying Eagle.” He pauses, then turns bright red. The sight is cute beyond words. “I-it’s supposed to be a catchphrase! Don’t spies usually have one?! Ugh, forget it! No, I won’t do it anymore so stop laughing!”

He’s still chatting idly with the other person on the line like he’s just taking a walk around the neighborhood and not in the middle of a room filled with enemies on all sides (sure, they’re all knocked out, but still).

Altair leaves and Vega heaves a sigh of relief. She looks down at the photo she had taken and realizes belatedly that it’s too blurred to make out who it is. Well, that’s probably for the best.

She tries not to think too hard about how she made little effort to get a clearer picture when she had the chance.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Vega has a few more similar encounters with Altair. Each time, he’s wearing a different disguise. Sometimes he has freckles, sometimes he has red hair, and sometimes he speaks in a lower octave than usual. Each time, Vega figures out his identity by chance, and each time, for a reason she still can’t quite fathom, she lets him go.

They don’t always interact, at least, not enough for her to leave a lasting impression on him, which is probably why he still hasn’t reached a point where he can pick her out in a room. It probably doesn’t help that she keeps changing her hair color and hair styles. What? She’s in an experimental phase, okay!

Eventually, she comes to terms that maybe, just maybe, she’s fallen for the spy that takes his job a little too seriously and gets riled up too quickly and puffs out his cheeks like a chipmunk if he’s especially frustrated. Maybe she’s started to feel invested in his rise to power within the spy world, feeling a sense in companionship in the way that they’re both striving to reach their goals.

And yes, he is still very cute and he is still relentlessly kind in the way that he helps people up when they fall or pick up lost items that go ignored by everyone else.

She just wishes that they’d stop meeting like this and have a proper encounter under more mundane circumstances. No disguises, no missions, just the two of them in the middle of a boring errand.

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To her surprise, she gets her wish on a warm summer day in the middle of a grocery store.