macheresin for the macherewin

today's snippet is more of the briggsthan than degaris variety, buuuut:

Paris cannot believe she is admitting this (even in the privacy of her own head), but Briggs actually looks rather rakish, with the collar of his shirt popped and his suit dark and crisp and his hair swept high off his forehead, not at all how he looked at the Embassy party in London, hair gelled flat and jaw clenched tight. Tonight he looks confident and surprisingly at ease, making his way through the crowd of civilians to the bar, where he takes the open spot beside Jones. She’s just starting to think that maybe this will actually go according to plan when Briggs reaches inside his jacket, pulls out his cigarettes and lighter, and starts smoking right then and there. “What the hell is he doing?” Grace says over the radio, giving panicked voice to Paris’s exact thoughts. Across the room, Ethan pushes himself off a column and starts making his way towards the bar to intervene. Degas leans in to grab a napkin and whispers in Paris’s ear, “It’s alright, let him cook.” At the same time, Jones sets down his martini and says, “You can’t smoke in here.” “That right?” Briggs says, and blows a smoke ring. “You gonna stop me?” That gets Jones’s attention. He looks at Briggs head-on, and just as suddenly does not look away. He sounds a little winded when he says, “You know, I can’t think of any reason why I should.” Briggs smirks, slow and careless and seductive, and blows another smoke ring, lips pursed. Then he looks away and hails the bartender. When she comes by, Briggs orders a whiskey on the rocks, and Jones says, “Put his on my tab, Elizabeth.” Briggs doesn’t look at Jones again until Elizabeth has set his requested drink in front of him. “I guess you want me to thank you, huh.” “It wouldn’t go amiss,” Jones says. “Yeah, I bet it wouldn’t,” Briggs says. He takes another long drag off his cigarette, giving Jones a onceover that makes Paris feel both like a voyeur and very grateful that she and Degas are hidden from view. “You gonna introduce yourself, or does that come after you pay for round two?” “Are you really going to pretend you don’t know who I am?” Jones says. Briggs hums and gives a lazy, one-shouldered shrug. “Maybe I’m still deciding if you’re worth remembering,” he says. “Are you?” “I’d say so,” Jones says. “Why don’t you be a good boy and prove it to me, then.” Ears redder than Paris’s face, Jones reaches out and takes Briggs’s cigarette out from between his fingers, and takes a long drag of his own. “I’m Matthew Jones.” “Jim Phelps,” Briggs says. Paris doesn’t think she’s imagining Ethan’s sharp, pained intake of breath over the radio. Jones offers him the cigarette back, and Briggs shakes his head. “No, keep it.” He smiles, but it’s nothing like the small crooked smiles Paris has seen him bestow upon Ethan or Degas or even Paris herself: this one can only be described as obscene. “I like a man who knows how to use his mouth for more than just talking.”

oh this fic has been FUN to write. established ronjoyce + ron being insecure about their age difference (specifically vis a vis how he's aged) is something that can actually be so personal.

snippet:

It’s not that their age gap bothers Ron, exactly. He’s dated women younger than Joyce before—not that much younger, Serena, he’s not a goddamned cradle snatcher, Jesus Christ—and when things ended between them it was never because of how old he was in comparison, it was always for a perfectly legitimate reason, like how he’d dumped Raquel because at dinner she used a fork even after it fell on the floor, and Alyx, who didn’t tell him she rooted for the Warriors until their fourth date. Admittedly it was a little weird at first dating a woman in her late fifties after spending so long in his Late Thirties to Late Forties Tops comfort zone, but Joyce can’t help when she was born, and anyway, Ron kind of likes that she almost always gets the references he drops, because she lived through them too. Either that or it’s just because she’s known him for so long, and an old doctor doesn’t change his stethoscope. (Literally. Once you go with a Littman Cardiology, you never go back.) The point is, his and Joyce’s age gap isn’t what’s bothering him. It’s their ages in general. It’s the passage of time, if you want to get philosophical like Bruce did that one time he ate a brownie that Matt said had the good stuff (wink wink), only the good stuff turned out to be kale and Bruce’s high turned out to be entirely placebo. He watched Joyce grow up, is the thing (not in a creepy way, Tonya). He was already an EM attending when she showed up at St. Denis in ‘92 as a first-year resident with her adult braces and dorky perkiness and magenta scrubs with the shoulder pads, eager to learn and impossible to shake, like a fungus. He thought, honestly, that she’d faint the first time she saw something really gross, like third degree burns or a degloved finger or a man’s wedding ring stuck in his mistress’s vagina—but as socially awkward as Joyce was, she had guts, and she stuck around. Over the next thirty-four years, Ron watched as Joyce got her braces off, swapped the Aqua-net bangs for a chignon that meant business and the magenta scrubs for a bedazzled and crisply tailored white coat (and later admin-approved pantsuits and high heels), and grew into herself, became more confident. Time’s been kind to her; she’s aged well. Joyce might be over the hill and then some, but she’s a bona fide catch. He’s got no problem admitting that. Ron himself, on the other hand. Well. Yikes.