All's Fair [ A Harry Styles AU ]

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warning that this story will contain stalking, physical violence, and a character death.

The debriefing process on the new mission begins  right away, in hopes that the rigorous attention and analysis will turn up something about what Evans' motives are. While Harry only has this case to worry about for now, Priya is still working on the cases her team usually covers during the month. As a  team leader, she's expected to keep up with the work. She doesn't mind, though, it's a welcome distraction from all the history and reading she's doing for the Evans' case — which has officially been named "Operation Bang & Burn."

In all honesty, Priya is having a hard time trying to understand why she's on this case. The language aspects that she has come across so far aren't too difficult, something any other agent in her department can handle. Someone who is much more willing to put their life at risk on a field mission with Harry Styles, the covert operations golden boy.

That was the other thing.

Priya spent so many of her nights praying that she never had to see Harry again after their last mission, pleading with whatever higher power there was and being insistent about the fact that she didn't want to do fieldwork at all. It seemed it was all in vain, though. He is just how she remembered him, obnoxious and arrogant — acting as if he is the king of the agency and everyone else just works at his whim. How she is going to survive yet another mission alongside him when she can barely handle spending a few hours a day with him going over the mission logistics, is beyond her.

It's a considerably harder feat than usual for Priya because she can't talk to Liam and Anna openly about the mission. While it's something that she's become used to hiding from  her family, who think she works at a translation agency in downtown London, it's nearly impossible with her friends. They spend all their time pouring over the same cases, in similar mindsets. Nor could Priya complain about Harry to them. They knew what had happened on the last mission, but she was too afraid of slipping up and giving away something about the case in her long winded complaints about him. For all intents and purposes, Anna and Liam were her family away from home.  The cover story which they and Harry's partner, some bloke named Niall Horan, had been told was that they were working together to crack some complicated language code that was suspicious. None of them were aware about Evans' involvement in the case or that he is an active security threat.

In fact, there was only a handful of people besides Priya and Harry who knew the truth of the mission. The dozen or so individuals included key directors and people in charge at the agency. Since Mi5 and Mi6 are working on this case together, there is about 5 high class directors from each.All of whom were old graying men who looked so serious every moment that Priya felt the need to purposely keep her brows narrowed together to fit the bill at meetings.

At the start of each meeting, they would all huddle around and talk about their cases while Priya tried to look busy flipping through her files. She isn't intimidated by being the only woman in the room, but the humdrum of chit chat before the meetings get started always makes her anxious. Tonight is no exception and she goes over the notes she's made in the file that Director Tomlinson gave them last week. She's colored coded the notes: blue for immediate concern, green for possible motives, and pink for things she needs to touch on again.