"So what is it with you and bimbos, anyway?"

"Dey're fun ta look at. Why? Does it bother ya?" Steelbeak replied with a smirk.

"No." Gabriel paused with the key in her apartment door's deadbolt to glance at her partner. "I've just been trying to give you credit for having some standards and you're making it hard!"

Steelbeak smiled. "I don' really need yer credit, but t'anks anyway."

Gabriel scowled, throwing her apartment door open. Something was truly bothering her and Steelbeak was glad for it. If she was going to continue to receive these special assignments from High Command, it was the least he could do to share in his frustrations.

She went straight to her closet, treating the closet door as aggressively as she'd treated the front door. Steelbeak, meanwhile, took the opportunity to study her gun collection.

Gabriel had everything a collector could possibly want, from the smallest derringer to an unreasonably enormous bazooka propped in a corner of her living room like it was a vase of something that would normally be found in a woman's home. Steelbeak made a note to himself that maybe it would be wise for his longevity to be a smidgen nicer to her.

Each gun situated on a plaque had a name and, Steelbeak assumed, a story. He sensed a theme:

Gaetano, Gaspard, Gavino, Gennaro, Geoffroi, Georges, Georgio, Giacobbe, Gilbert, Gilles, Gino, Giovanni, Guiseppe, Graziano, Grégoire, Gregorio, Gualtiero, Guilhermo, Guillaume, Gustavo. Alphabetized, all male -- some Italian, some French -- and all starting with the letter G.

Then Steelbeak noticed one plaque that was not only missing its gun, but whose name didn't belong with the theme: Marie. He glanced at Gabriel. Marie must have been the one she always kept on her person. Small world, he thought. I had a gun named Marie. While he didn't think about his gun very often, when he did, he found that he missed it.

"What're ya doin' over dere?" Steelbeak asked, watching Gabriel weed frantically through her closet, pitching things from it as she went along.

There were bright yellow rubber cleaning gloves and an apron -- holdovers from training with Ammonia Pine, undoubtedly -- and a sunflower yellow spandex jumpsuit. Steelbeak smiled despite himself. That had to have looked good on her. If I could just win her over, maybe I'll ask her to wear that sometime.

Gabriel glared at him, noticing his stare. "I will thank you to put your eyeballs back in their sockets! And I need to find something for H.C.!" She collapsed to the floor in a cross-legged position, slapping her palms on her thighs. "And I can't find it!"

"Did ya lose some paperwork or somet'in'?"

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