Glass Half Empty

Chapter 4.3

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Marlow stood in front of the glass doors of the training room again. This time she hesitated however, knowing June would be in there somewhere, waiting for her. She already felt uncomfortable and hadn't even laid eyes on him yet. This training session, that Lieutenant Hayes had ordered her to attend the day before, was not something she was looking forward to.

Yet there was no point in delaying it even further and she didn't want to be late either. She was bent on allowing as little complaints about her performance as possible. So with one last deep breath she pushed the door open to let herself into the large space.

It didn't take her long to catch sight of the figure in the corner of the training room beside the shooting range. There was a table set out in front of the usual lineups and the ravenette sat leaning over it with his dark locks hanging down into his narrowed eyes. When she moved to step up to the table, that seemed to be filled with various different mechanical parts, he eyed her closely.

"Look who finally arrived", was the first thing out of his frowning mouth.

"I'm not late", she immediately replied, knowing for a fact she was quite on-time.

"I didn't say you were", he shot back, crossing his arms over the black sweatshirt he was wearing as he leaned back in his steel chair.

"That's what you were implying", she scowled, growing more defensive by the second. She didn't like the way he spoke to her, the way everything he said was an implication that she was doing something wrong. And the blatant distaste in his tone didn't exactly help her warm up to him either.

"Just sit down", he muttered, nodding to the small metal chair across from him.

She followed his directions, finally seating herself at the table. Any movement she made, she could feel his beady little eyes on her the entire time, fixated on her with obvious discontentment. It made it difficult to look up at him when she would feel annoyance rise up within her every time to the point of snapping. On the other hand, she could examine the objects laying out in front of her instead, which looked a lot like the components of a gun.

"Hayes ordered me to teach you how to put a gun together", he pulled her from her thoughts, grabbing one of the gun frames from the table, "Let's start with a simple handgun. Semi-automatic."

She watched as he grabbed another piece of black steel, this one of a long and more narrow shape, "Can you tell me what this is?"

"The barrel", the answer rolled off her tongue, her mind buzzing with the new information she had memorized religiously over the past weeks.

There was hardly any acknowledgment that her answer had been correct, but he just continued by picking up a small spring and another cylinder, "What about these?"

"The recoil spring and the recoil guide", she replied monotonously.

His questions were to the point and left little room of further discourse that might cause problems. Words other than concise questions and their answers were not exchanged. If the training session continued like this, she would be just fine.

After going over all the components of the pistol however, he bluntly shoved them across the surface between them, "Put it together now."

Her eyes travelled from the steel parts in front of her back up to his intent stare. There was hesitance in her movements as she put her hands on the table, as if she were waiting for further instruction, but he had been quite clear. Turning her attention back to the components, she started picking up the smaller pieces and putting the recoil together properly. She had never put a gun together before, but a handgun seemed simple enough to figure out and so she did. The slide was more or less easy to click into place along with the barrel on the frame and she looked over her handiwork before reaching to connect the magazine. In the end, it resembled any other handgun she had trained with so far.