Drorit Nitzani | 26 | Just a secretary at the Israeli embassy | Citizen of the world | Language nerd | Martial artist | Engaged to the most beautiful woman on the planet And I don't care if I don’t look pretty Big girls cry when their hearts are breaking
Drorit tried her best to put on a brave face as she entered the Israeli consulate on what felt like her first day of work, telling herself that she would only be here for a couple of months longer until she’d found something that would fit her interests more than being a mere secretary. She showed the key card to the grumpy security guard and was promptly led inside, thankful for the plate in the elevator that told her where her office was. Stepping out of the elevator, Drorit was surprised to find a young girl already staffing the reception - she’d have assumed that this was her job. Maybe this was her secretary colleague? But then the girl smiled and handed her an envelope.
“Fifty-four”.
What in the world...? Drorit just nodded, letting a greeting slip out. Thankfully the Hebrew still came out natural, thanks to her father’s efforts to help Drorit maintain what she thought of as her mother tongue even after their move to the States.
The door to the office with her name on it opened easily once she had swiped her key card, and Drorit first turned to the computer, which greeted her with an already-entered user name but then demanded a password. What did you care about at 26 to a point where you made it your password? Drorit tried “Jordanna”, but failed, before trying a number of other options involving her fiancée’s name, none of which the computer accepted. The envelope! Of course! It contained rows of number combinations, of which Drorit now entered the fifty-fourth one. Gotcha! This seemed an awful lot of secrecy for the computer of a person who was only processing passport renewal applications.
Drorit first turned to her e-mails, scanning the subject lines. Meeting memos in Hebrew - fine. News digests in English and Hebrew - probably subscribed to on some list of the diplomatic services - fine. Arabic? Drorit felt a sense of panic rise in her. She’d been conversational in the language back in Israel, thanks to classes at school and having had some of the language around her back then, but ever since she’d come to the States, her knowledge had faded. She tried her best to parse as much of the first Arabic-language e-mail she found: “(Some name(?)) work ‘December’ (some name-mosque) (some name(?)) organization talks”?
She usually wasn’t a religious person, and school had taught her not to ever show the last vestiges of Judaism she had taken along from Israel, but if Drorit was honest, she’d always thought it a blessing, albeit in a strange way, that her parents’ religion had bestowed upon her a God who was always listening. Let me get out of this somehow. Please. I promise I’ll work hard from now on.
The next e-mail was in German, and Drorit breathed a sigh of relief. A long chain of forward-commands she’d never seen before in this form, and then a short message: “Meeting cancelled. Think someone knows about this. Will get in touch later.” That was when what felt like an ugly truth started to dawn on her, and Drorit slipped out into the hallway, careful to lock her office behind her.
“I need the file of a former employee,” she prompted the girl at reception. “Where do we keep them again...?”
The elevator took her to the cellar, and the metal door to the room of the archives opened with a squeak. Papers stacked high, but thankfully well-organized. It only took Drorit a few moments to find the file they had on her. Accurately typed Hebrew that described her life story up until six years ago: Israeli mother from Germany, Israeli father from Latvia. Hebrew-, German-, Latvian-, English- and Arabic-speaker. Krav Maga expert. Excelled at combat training. Taken in for an interview on July 15, 2012. Clear record. Recommended assignment North America/Central Europe/Eastern Europe. And the whole thing stamped in ink in a sign she’d only ever seen in school books and on the news: המוסד למודיעין ולתפקידים מיוחדים. Institute for information and special assignments.
Drorit sat on the floor for a long moment longer, watching her fingers tremble, before starting to beat her palms against her head. That was what you got for wanting to be better, for wanting to be special. You got being arrested and potentially executed in Iran. You got chasing people around the world who would murder you at the drop of a hat. And that was just the things she, who at the end of the day was just a dumb cheerleader-school girl with a bad dye job and delusions of grandeur, knew about.
Drorit was about to whip out her phone to start googling, before she caught herself: Google saved your info - did Mossad agents use Google? Instead, she rode the elevator back to her office, where she supposed she had a secure connection, closing the door behind her and blocking it with a chair under the handle before finally opening the search engine.
Mossad history
What does Mossad do
What is Krav Maga
How to not get murdered when people are trying to murder you
Emily was having the weirdest fucking day. First, something explodes in the high school, she’d screamed and (may or may not have) blacked out. Then just as quickly, she’d woken up in the morning. Actually, pause, rephrase that: she’d woken up with the sun. Which was the strangest feeling ever, if she didn’t mind saying herself. On top of her weird waking schedule (and to her it was very weird) she’d found herself lying on a rather comfy bed, tangled up with…
“What the hell…” Emily mumbled, twisting the wedding ring on her finger. Somehow, between her blacking out and now, she’d gotten married. She had a wife. Once her … wife (she was going to have to get used to that word) had awoken, Emily noticed the date: ten years after the moment she’d blacked. So overcome with confusion, Emily had ran out the door (ran back in for pants because well, shit, she didn’t know what to think about that) and to the nearest cafe to just sit and think. Which was hard because thinking wasn’t something that she’d had to do in a while, or at least, it had been a while for past her. She had no idea who she was now.
Glancing up, she noticed another patron in the cafe, and she suddenly realized that she may have made a bit of a scene, just running in and sitting down. “Oh! Um,” she stammered out. “I’m just having a bad day, I’ll order something in a moment.”
She’d need time to think, and on top of that, space. Their apartment would have been big enough for five people, but just having another person in there to theoretically question why she was going through e-mails from years ago felt limiting to a point where Drorit rather wouldn’t attempt it. Instead, she set out for a coffee shop, proclaiming that she was going to do work. If coffee shops were anything like they used to be back then, people wouldn’t bother her too much there. Drorit got a black coffee, capuccinos would be banned until she got to the low 130s, she’d decided this morning, and set out to look for messages from her parents first. She’d need to know if they were still in her life or if they’d given up on her for coming out.
Startled, Drorit looked up when someone plunked into the seat opposite her. For a moment, her heart lurched, remembering the pictures of Iranian security services she’d been making up since this morning, and she actually sprang up half-way, stopping in her tracks once the woman opposite her explained herself. Drorit forced a weak smile. “Not just you. What happened to you to ruin your day?”
Bennett couldn’t help but let out a lout laugh at her words–specifically the whole–yay more time for work–thing. Wether she was being sarcastic or not, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been the least bit excited to go to work. “I guess it does,” he replied, offering a smile, “but that’s life, it’s inevitable.” Hearing her talk so highly of her fiancee made him smile, happy that people he knew could find happiness with each other. “I wish I could say I have,” the male admitted. “Uh, the other day…? My old friend Jax got a hold of me. It was nice but… kind of weird,” he shrugged.
Drorit was taking a gulp of her drink, hoping that at some point the alcohol would have the effect she’d always been promised, when she almost choked on it and had to cough, covering her hand with her mouth: Maybe that was it! Maybe whatever was happening was actually a chance for her, something to help save her from giving up something from her youth she otherwise would have lost! But...what? “Sorry,” she coughed, “but do you really think that’s inevitable? I mean, something must happen to people when they grow up.” She shoved aside her drink: “How is it weird? Just cause you feel like he changed surprisingly much?”
Jax watched quietly as Marc started suddenly spitting out everything he had and knew, his lips pressed together with a crease on his forehead in concentration. Part of him felt actually proud to get something out of the kid. So far he had been attending different kind of appointments pre-scheduled, group meetings, creative activities. Marc had been his first real case. He was probably just as nervous as the other boy when it came to being in that interrogation but he played it cool. He was actually not that bad, he thought to himself, moving away from the table as he called the guard to take Marc back. He slipped out of the room, holding on to his promised, and grabbing a soda from the machine down the hall. “Here you go, I’ll see you in a couple of days, alright? Have them call me if you need anything, got it?” Giving Marc’s shoulders a squeeze and a nod, he watched him leave before turning to Drorit. He wanted to sigh and breathe and maybe even high five her for pulling through but then thought that wasn’t really how it was supposed to go so he just collected his things and nodded, holding the door for the agent. “There’s a nice coffee shop not too far away… I think. I hope it’s still open. Come on, it’s on me.”
Walking to the coffee shop felt like a good idea. If his memory didn’t fail him—which shouldn’t really much more than it already was, the chain coffee shop was less than two blocks away. “That went well.” Jax commented, smiling at the woman, though what he really wanted to say was that went better than I thought! “How you’ve been, though, you know, aside from work and all things?” He was curious to know. After all, he had missed a whole ten years of his life. He didn’t know what everyone else he knew were up to either.
Drorit watched Jackson walk to the soda machine, then stole a glance at the teenager who still sat as inscrutable as he had when she’d first arrived. But somehow, somewhere, they’d gotten something out of him. Or was it she? Watching Jackson squeeze the .... kid would have sounded wrong ... Marc’s shoulder sent a short pang of jealousy through her. How she would have longed for such a place where she felt like she was in the right one, where she was doing something that she knew she was good at. But then again, for some reason, whoever had become of her had picked this job for a reason. So maybe this was a case of “fake it till you make it”, even though she could feel the desire to spill her insecurity mounting by the second. For the moment, she contended herself with trying to maintain a semblance of order by carefully stacking up her documents and placing them into a briefcase which she didn’t even feel belonged to her, and then forced a smile when Jackson came to open the door for her. “So I take it you come here a lot if you know the place well? Doesn’t that get depressing at times?”
She could feel some of the tension washing away with every step she took, and Drorit had to remind herself that she’d have to keep herself together even during this informal conversation. Even a misstep here could get her fired, though the relief also gave her a twitching mouth born from the attempt at trying to suppress a grin of relief. It didn’t help that now that they were out of the school environment, Drorit no longer felt like Jackson was one of the people who could help her maintain an aura of popularity. “Yeah, it’s much more pleasant to talk to someone who didn’t even know what they’re doing than to talk to someone who would probably want to murder you for something you were born into,” she commented, with the cynicism that she assumed someone in her position would have collected by now. “I’m just really hoping he’ll come around. Not do that again. What do you think? He’s gonna manage?”
Talking about work was hard. Talking about herself might be even harder. Drorit shrugged to signify You know, but then realized that was not enough. “I’m engaged now,” she said, looking up with a nervous grin. “To Jordanna? I don’t know if you remember her from school? She was a year below me.” A clownish gesture, because in school her popularity probably would have been completely eroded by that confession: “Went to the IDF and that’s what happened.” Even though she knew fuck-all about when and how she had actually come out.
“It just gets nice to look at things when you get older,” he mused. At her question, the male nodded. “Yeah, it makes me feel all luxurious and important. Plus, not driving? That’s amazing. I can do whatever I want back there. I mean, most of the time I’m just on my phone, but…? There are endless possibilities,” Ben grinned her way. At the look Drorit had given him, he let out an awkward laugh, rubbing the back of his neck. “I… sorry. I just meant that I might know her, but I don’t want to say I do, just in case I don’t,” he let out, hoping that was more clear. At the mention of her being a model, he pursed his lips. “A model, really? Well, It’s nice to know that my former classmates have come into some success. Or you know, a lot of it.”
Drorit rolled her eyes, but forced a grin, even though this conversation was a painful reminder that pretending to be 26 would be about more than just doing her job and knowing how to file her taxes. She was at an age now where she’d always thought she’d be living in her own house, working in her dream job and maybe raising some kids. “It’s so depressing that in high school I would have been so creative with what to do there and now my first thought is just Yay more time for work. Getting older sucks sometimes, right?” Thinking of Jordanna brought a genuine grin back to her face, even a slight trace of blush: “Well, she totally deserves it, you know. You’d just have to see her, she’s become....well...she’s my fiancée, you know?” She leant forward, crossing her arms and hoping to change the topic: “Hey, you still been in contat with some people from our school? I mean, since graduation?”
Jackson was still learning what his place in all of this was, what was expected of him, how people looked at him. It had occurred to him that this 27-year-old version of himself was respected and well-liked not only at home but at his job, too. Most people he had encountered, including his clients which were underage and already with criminal records, seemed to take a different attitude when he walked into the room. It made him feel uneasy because he didn’t understand it. It also made him like himself, too. So far he had just been, well, himself. With the teenagers he talked just as he would his friends back in school—not the ones he tormented, though. That’s what got the kid talking now, cooperating, and he tried to hide the smirk on his face as he looked back to Drorit, blue eyes gleaming under the dull lights of the interrogation room, as if to say here we go! We did it.
Eyes scanning the computer’s screen as his client started producing the group he had been involved in, Jackson tried his best not to react or pass judgement. That alone was impressive, considering he had never really been good at controlling himself before. Maybe it was something he had learned in the 10 year span and though his mind didn’t quite grasp the concept, his body reacted instinctively to a routine he had put in place. “I haven’t.” His voice sounded distant as he replied to the agent, turning the notebook towards him and scrolling down its content. He looked from Marc to Drorit and back to the teen before sighing. “Do you know who runs it? Where it’s based? Did you have any other sort of contact past social media? Any phone number? Location? Anything?” He asked though that, he thought, wasn’t part of his job. He couldn’t help it. Maybe this is also what he was supposed to do in such situations. If the client trusted him, perhaps he could help further the investigation. He looked at Drorit as the kid spoke, not knowing anything else. Jax gave Marc’s shoulder a light squeeze, almost a fatherly gesture foreign to him. “You think that’s good for now? He’s been here for a while.”
She probably looked like an idiot, jotting the name of the group down into her files when she could’ve just screenshotted it or .... something, but whatever had happened to computers in the meantime had not exactly made them more user-friendly. Drorit tried her best to balance that air of idiocy with a serious, concentrated facial expression, though the extent to which that matched how she was feeling about her job varied greatly, moment by moment. Ever since she’d learned what she truly did for a living now, she had gone through bouts of self-importance, alternating with a sentiment of utter defeat . But just jotting down the Facebook page’s name felt like glorious victory.
Jackson asked good questions, questions she probably should have asked, but Drorit simply had to acknowledge that if her main goal was surviving this conversation, she couldn’t ask for being a hero in it as well. As she nervously tapped her pencil on the table, the teenager shrugged. “They sent me a Facebook message. That’s all I have.” He clicked through to his messages faster than Drorit could follow, and she couldn’t come up with a better solution than taking a picture of the message with her phone. “I even had to get all the spray cans and stuff myself.” “So they picked the place?” Drorit asked with narrowed eyes. Marc just nodded.
Drorit leant back in her seat, a feeling of relief washing over her. She had something. She wouldn’t get fired today. When Jackson hinted at ending the interrogation, there even was a dumb smile on her face for a short moment, before she realized that she would have to bring some sort of closure to this - which she didn’t really know how to do graciously. “Yes, we have a lead now, they can probably work with that. I’m really...” how to say this? “...I’m not the person responsible for any sentencing, and there will probably be someone else dropping by with some further questions at some point, but this here...” she gestured to the notebook she was now closing, “...was a very good decision on your part.” And just because she was apparently riding the wave of delusional superiority right now, Drorit added: “You’ll probably wake up in ten years and be glad these people are not in your life anymore.” Only after she’d gotten up and already moved towards the door was there tiredness in the glance she threw Jackson: “Know a good place? I have a couple of moments, and I’d love to ...reminisce a bit.”
Jordanna didn’t know what she was doing, this wasn’t like those times in school with boys like Jax, this kiss sent tingles through her entire body, it was almost like a shock. Just as Jo was starting to get more comfortable with the kiss Drorit pulled back, and for a moment it felt like their lips were still on each others and the girls eyes flitted open, a sigh escaping as she felt Drorit’s lips trail to her ear. When she thanked her she simply shook her head. “Of course I’m here. We’re engaged.” She had figured out that they weren’t married when looking at their hands, they each had a ring but only one, there was no wedding band.
“You don’t want to leave the house at all?” Jo asked softly, looking at the other woman and smiling. “Then let’s stay in, all day, just me and you.” She mumbled softly.
Drorit stayed with her chin resting on Jordanna’s shoulder, taking in deep breaths. This undoubtedly was her reality now, the world in which she lived and breathed. And what felt, for some stupid reason, even more important now, was that this was the best kiss she could remember to ever have had, in spite of the numerous attempts she’d forced herself into in high school. Her right hand left Jordanna’s hair and traveled through the air next to them, searching for Jordanna’s hand, and Drorit threaded her fingers into Jordanna’s. “I know,” she breathed. “But do you ever feel like things just went so fast? Like you barely remember how we ended up here.” She forced a smile because Jordanna was the only person she now had in the world, to her knowledge: “Not that I don’t cherish these memories.”
When Jordanna asked her if she wanted to stay at home, Drorit couldn’t force a smile anymore. The prospect of leaving the house sounded so daunting, but she’d have to figure out the rest of the world around her as well, didn’t she? How long could she postpone that for? Currently, she felt incredibly anxious. “I don’t want to, no. But I have to go to work, I think? I’ll go check my calendar what things look like today. You having a day off?”
Eyeing the girl after she said what she did, Bennett grew confused for a moment, but once the topic went back onto cars, he grinned. “Oh, you didn’t miss out on much. Ferrari’s aren’t that great–!” He paused, making a face that showed pure disgust towards himself. “Did I just say… Ferrari’s aren’t that great?! Oh my god! My father would kill me if he ever heard me say that,” he laughed, joking with her. “But… it’s kind of true. They’re kind of loud and noisy. But, I stopped driving when I hit twenty-three, I think. It’s a lot more fun to have people drive you around,” he pointed out, the same cocky grin returning to his face. At the mention of Jordanna, Bennett thought for a few seconds, staring off to space before looking back to Drorit. “Maybe, yeah? But I don’t want to go off and say a positively do. So for now, it’s just a maybe.”
This felt almost like watching a movie had felt, where you leant back in your PJs, picturing the life you would once have, comfortable in the knowledge that it was still a couple of years until you would have to think about things like what car would suit your lifestyle best. Only this was apparently her reality now, this is what people her age were like, and until she had made it there as well mentally, Drorit figured she’d have to fake it. So she laughed along: “Yeah, you really just said that, but i’m not judging you for it. Nothing tops a practical car, right? You have a private driver now or what?” At Bennett’s comments on Jordanna, Drorit narrowed her eyes - did he have to speak in riddles now? “What’s that supposed to mean? Honestly, I think you would remember if you had run into her recently? She’s a model now, really high-profile one.” She could think of other ways to describe her now-fiancée, but they were all more fitting for the Jordana she’d known until a few days ago, and thus weren’t things she could very well be saying now.
Israel! Right. He knew that, of course. Jax tried not to let it show too much on his face and kept nodding idly, as if it all made perfect sense. Little by little he began factoring the good and bad aspects of his job: moments like this one, where someone required something from him, an opinion, a reaction, a statement, he felt like he was screwing everything up. There were other times, counseling sessions as they would come up on his calendar, where it felt nice, like he could do it, like he knew what he was supposed to do. He found out he had scheduled different appointments, during and after office hours, sometimes in groups and sometimes individually with his clients, involving likes and skills and interests specific to them. It felt like he was good as what he did, like most of the other teenagers liked him. What truly worried him, though, was this close interaction with the law. He really couldn’t screw that up. They’d all be in trouble. Unless he could take a leave for a while, until everything got sorted… until he found a way to fix things. “Coffee sounds fucking good, yes. Let’s get this over with, then.” Jax couldn’t help but feel relief wash over him, turning back to the room and holding the door open for the woman.
Lingering around the table, still on his feet, Jackson crossed his arms as he watched the interrogation begin. He was pacing around the room behind Drorit, shaking his head as he noticed they were really not getting anywhere. It wasn’t until the agent turned to him, letting a sigh, that he moved to the teenager’s side, leaning against the table facing him. “Alright, buddy, here’s the deal.” Jax laid out the plans, unfolding his arms and moving them in explanatory gestures. “If you don’t answer Agent Nitzani’s questions here, you give us nothing to work with. If you give us nothing to work with, her notes will be same as mine. If we have nothing, if you’re not cooperative, you’ll end up in the juvenile court and be charged on all accounts. It’ll stick on your permanent record. Good luck trying to get into a good school or get a decent job. Hell, it’s not easy for people with a cleared background so, I don’t know, I wouldn’t like to be there, right?” He tried to sound casual, looking over his shoulders as if he was involving the agent in the conversation to though he was just trying to make a point. “Now, I don’t know about you but the lighting in this room is giving me a headache so, the sooner you give us some answer, the sooner we can all get out of here. Tell you what. You be nice to her and I’ll sneak you a can of soda on our way out. Deal?”
The perspective of getting coffee after all this helped. Every person she might have run into during whatever had happened could help, though so far their interaction had made it seem like Jackson didn’t know much about her post-high school life. First, she had to survive this though, preferably without being fired, arrested or having who knew what scary organization she hadn’t even heard of tailing her. She watched him from the corner of her eye as he talked to the teenager, impressed. He seemed to have a way with youngsters, and he did it without scary legal lingo, or even seeming to be aware of legal specifics. Problem was that she was the idiot stuck with the job where she had to know the specifics, right? For the moment, she contended herself with shooting the teenager a long glance, hoping 26-year-old her was more intimidating than 16-year-old-her felt right now, before prompting him: “So?”
Something must have happened in the teenager. It started with him shifting around his seat, and Drorit seized the opportunity: “Mr. Bracknell mentioned you saying something about Facbook earlier” - was that already breaking a fragile trust, her ruining things, or was that how she was supposed to do things? “Can you show me what you saw on there? If that’s easier?” That was more patience than she usually had, but she simply had to survive this somehow. Luckily, Drorit had alreay had a notebook back then, though her acquaintance with Facebook was limited to knowing what it was. So she pushed over her opened notebook and had the teenager log in with his own account, where he clicked through to a group called Soldiers of Odin, then pushed the notebook back. Drorit attempted a read of the group’s posts, but she already started feeling sick a few lines in. How had the person she had apparently become learned to stand this, this blatant hatred based on conspiracy theories and quotes that must have been culled from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (of which until a few days ago she’d just assumed that it would never have any bearing on her life - yes, she’d been made fun of so much in middle schol, but other people had been made fun of for being fat or having bad skin)? She had to assume that the kid she was sitting next to right now understod as little of the page’s contents as she herself would have before she had woken up in 2018. Which - did this make it her job to find the people who were running that page? She looked up at Jackson, hoping for his experience: “Have you heard of this group before? Could be part of their approach to contact teenagers through Facebook?”
