"Diane-" Fran was saying, and her tone sounded dangerously like she was about to launch into something resembling a pep talk.
Diane silenced her with a glare, and for good measure, asked, "Have you compiled the data from the infrared spectral testing yet?"
She knew Fran hadn't done that yet -- it was a low priority, so she didn't even particularly care that Fran hadn't done that yet -- but after sixteen phone calls from her mother in the past hour and a half, Diane was feeling the need to put someone else on the defensive for a while.
Not brave enough to continue bothering her, Fran mumbled something about working on it and slunk away to the other side of the lab.
Diane's cell phone rang. She stabbed a finger at the ignore button and turned back to her computer, studiously avoiding her personal email, knowing her mother was probably waging an all-out war on that front, too. She was at work. She didn't need to feel guilty about this.
She also didn't need to feel guilty about the source of all the familial unrest, either. Because she was working. She was always working, and if her cousin wanted to get married on two weeks' notice and didn't have the basic human decency to elope, that certainly wasn't Diane's problem.
She might, might have even considered attending without a fuss if it wasn't in Maine in the absolute dead of winter, if it wasn't literally four days away, and if the second words out of her mother's mouth (after "I can't believe your cousin Rachel! This is so like her! She's going to be the death of your Aunt Linda...") weren't: There are going to be lots of eligible men there, dear.
Diane really didn't have time for eligible men. In fact, she was on complete strike from eligible anythings, considering the last time she'd gone out on anything like an Official Date she'd ended up about five seconds from a think tank in the former Eastern Bloc.
She had her job -- something that had exploded into an all-consuming monstrosity of her time, energy and emotions in the past eight months, since she'd gone from an overeducated and underappreciated lab gofer for Dr. Gage to the head researcher of a cutting-edge nanotechnology project with a real live human subject.
So, yes, she had her work. She had the NSA, and the unexpected political infighting inside the NSA that had her waking up in the middle of the night with the nearly irrepressible urge to pick up the phone and call Jake to make sure he hadn't been whisked off to some secret underground lab under the purview of Executive Director Warner. She had nanites to monitor all the time, including weekends, just in case.
She had Jake.
She didn't need her mother's guilt-trips or her father's quiet worry that she wasn't 'fulfilled' or her cousin Rachel's shining example, and she certainly didn't need an entire, uninterrupted weekend of those things.
snippet #1: (cheating, because I already wrote part of that fic) :-P
"Diane-" Fran was saying, and her tone sounded dangerously like she was about to launch into something resembling a pep talk.
Diane silenced her with a glare, and for good measure, asked, "Have you compiled the data from the infrared spectral testing yet?"
She knew Fran hadn't done that yet -- it was a low priority, so she didn't even particularly care that Fran hadn't done that yet -- but after sixteen phone calls from her mother in the past hour and a half, Diane was feeling the need to put someone else on the defensive for a while.
Not brave enough to continue bothering her, Fran mumbled something about working on it and slunk away to the other side of the lab.
Diane's cell phone rang. She stabbed a finger at the ignore button and turned back to her computer, studiously avoiding her personal email, knowing her mother was probably waging an all-out war on that front, too. She was at work. She didn't need to feel guilty about this.
She also didn't need to feel guilty about the source of all the familial unrest, either. Because she was working. She was always working, and if her cousin wanted to get married on two weeks' notice and didn't have the basic human decency to elope, that certainly wasn't Diane's problem.
She might, might have even considered attending without a fuss if it wasn't in Maine in the absolute dead of winter, if it wasn't literally four days away, and if the second words out of her mother's mouth (after "I can't believe your cousin Rachel! This is so like her! She's going to be the death of your Aunt Linda...") weren't: There are going to be lots of eligible men there, dear.
Diane really didn't have time for eligible men. In fact, she was on complete strike from eligible anythings, considering the last time she'd gone out on anything like an Official Date she'd ended up about five seconds from a think tank in the former Eastern Bloc.
She had her job -- something that had exploded into an all-consuming monstrosity of her time, energy and emotions in the past eight months, since she'd gone from an overeducated and underappreciated lab gofer for Dr. Gage to the head researcher of a cutting-edge nanotechnology project with a real live human subject.
So, yes, she had her work. She had the NSA, and the unexpected political infighting inside the NSA that had her waking up in the middle of the night with the nearly irrepressible urge to pick up the phone and call Jake to make sure he hadn't been whisked off to some secret underground lab under the purview of Executive Director Warner. She had nanites to monitor all the time, including weekends, just in case.
She had Jake.
She didn't need her mother's guilt-trips or her father's quiet worry that she wasn't 'fulfilled' or her cousin Rachel's shining example, and she certainly didn't need an entire, uninterrupted weekend of those things.
End of story. Finito.
She still felt guilty.