Movement

Chapter One.

SHE didn't hate her partner, that was for sure. Hatred was a very powerful word in her eyes, and it wasn't  that she didn't believe in hatred, she just reserved it for things that deserved it more: poachers, the patriarchy, white supremacy, seafood- things that deserved to be hated.

    Harry was way too difficult to hate- he was, in fact, a good person. He possessed a lovely heart- passionate in the things he did, precise in the ways he did them and always doing his best to minimize casualties within situations. He had a fantastic, breathtaking smile and an aura that grappled the attention of everyone within close radius to him. He was captivating, charming, and a generally, all-around positive person. He loved openly and made sure people around him knew they were appreciated. In short, Harry Styles was everything Brady was not.

    Brady had been this way for as long as she could remember, moving so quietly through life to the point where she blended in, kept her voice down, her attitude short, and her actions to be just mildly appreciated. She graduated at the top of her class at John Jay's Criminal Justice School and took the NYPD by storm with her way of silently assessing a situation so quickly and in such a calculated, neat manner. She worked her way up quickly and efficiently to the point where when she got the knock on the front door of her shabby, East Harlem apartment by the FBI's top recruiters, none of her superiors were surprised when she left the NYPD for bigger and better cases.

They immediately placed her in a position where her main job was to find people, blend into the background, gather Intel on them, and bring it back to HQ where field agents studied her findings and carried out missions. Her ability to blend in was something she was subconsciously inhibited by all her life, but it seemed to come in handy enough for her yearly salary of almost 200k yearly to keep her comfortable, and so she knew she was on the right path.

The thing is, Brady has always been beautiful in the way that she's always been overlooked- classic, wavy dishwater blonde hair that was neither too bright nor too dim that reached down nearly to her pinched waist. Freckles scattered sporadically across her even-toned skin, a small, average nose and lips that were neither too plump nor too thin- they just were. Her eyes, she had decided long ago, were the only special feature that she possessed- blue but not so blue it could be compared to tropical waters or sunny afternoons, just dim enough to remind you of an average ocean on an average beach on an average day- gray in a sort of way that made them stand out ever so slightly, large and expressive and always glassy. She liked her eyes, but that was about it.

It wasn't that she was insecure in any way, it was just that she was so horribly average that she didn't feel she was all that special. But, she thought average was just fine.

Besides, it wasn't as if she was trying to impress people, anyways. She'd hardly have time for anyone special in her life, keeping friends limited to her childhood best friend, Daniel and the bartender at the dive bar below her apartment, whose name she'd asked for every night she'd been there (she goes often) and forgotten by the next morning (who needs to know names anyways?), and her over-sized German Shepherd, Apollo. She can confidently tell people she's never been infatuated enough with anyone long enough to keep them around for more than one night and she doesn't plan on falling into the trap of a relationship anytime soon.

It wasn't as if she didn't believe in love, because she's seen it- in airports, hospitals, overcrowded parks and even dimly lit dive bars. She's seen it in friends, her parents, her sister and her wife, but she hasn't understood it and has never felt an urge to give it a go in her 26 years of living. She's loved her family, her friends and her dog, but she's never felt such an overwhelming desire that makes you want to spend all of your waking (and sleeping) hours with someone, never wanted to write a cheesy but endearing post underneath a picture on Instagram, never wanted to accept someone in such a vulnerable and intense fashion that it overrides your every thought, your every decision.