All's Fair [ A Harry Styles AU ]

prologue

A/N: Ah! I am very excited to start this story. It's a little different from what I usually write, so I hope everyone enjoys it. That being said - I do want to warn you guys beforehand that this story will contain stalking, physical violence, and a character death. Anyway, I WANT to hear all your theories for this story, so please comment and tell me what you think!

Work meetings are horrendous.

Even in the most interesting of workplaces, like MI5 in London  where something is always going on. Yes, even world class spies have to sit through long, mind numbing meetings going over what went wrong,  how to fix it,  and who isn't pulling their fair share of the load.  Just like everyone else in the world, the employees of UK Military intelligence have to force themselves to blink past their glazed eyes and focus on what the angry person at the front of the conference room is rambling on about.

The meetings aren't exactly fun, they don't cover the cool things like mission logistics or stuff like that. Not in this department, where words hold  the highest level of importance. Perhaps it's a bit paradoxical, that the dedicated agents of the language department are shit at paying attention to what words  their higher up's speak at these monthly review meetings, but c'est la vie.

Amongst the crowded room of language agents, Priya Rai is slowly losing her determination to listen. She chews on the inside of her cheek and taps her coveted fine ink pen against the stack of case files that she's supposed to familiarize herself with before she heads home today.

February isn't the best month for language intelligence. That's what she can conclude from all the yelling and chastising that's taken place within the last hour. Her eyes are starting to strain from how hard they are focused on the large presentation screen in the colossal conference room. She tears them away, blinking a few times as she glances around the room.

The language department of MI5 is state of the art, every inch of it crafted in glorious perfection so the agents can work in comfort. From the towering library crammed with  shelves containing row after row of dialogue, language, and translation books to the high tech lab added in the last few months for analyzing audio,  they have everything they could possibly need  to assist on missions. The conference room is no exception, full of half a dozen long tables spread across the length of the wide room. Each table has plush chairs all around and the tables are filled with pastries and stale coffee.

While every table is the same, they are divided by the small groups that make up the department. The department works together as a whole, but in recent years the agency decided work is best done when they put together small groups of three or four agents who have specific tasks/missions they work on together. Each group has a team leader that reports to the same director, Zayn Malik, who is currently pointing to statistics on the large screen from a huge covert operation from this last month.

Priya is about to turn back to the screen when she spots a paper sliding into her peripheral vision. She turns her head slightly, raising a brow at Liam Payne whose hand is moving the paper towards her. He's wearing his round glasses today and they catch the fluorescent lights that are on the vaulted ceiling of the conference room. Instead of giving her an indication of what he's doing, he simply gives her a pointed look. A raise of his brow, a glimmer in his eyes. Priya knows all too well what that means — he's challenging her.