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It’s a miracle that the letter even gets to Denise.
She’s not at DEA headquarters a lot, spending most of her time traveling around the country, moving from one bad motel to the next. She prefers it this way, she tells herself sometimes, lying on another shitty bed in another unfamiliar-yet-familiar room after a particularly hard week. And it has nothing to do with the lack of people welcoming her home, with the fact the only the familiar-yet-empty apartment and the impersonal desk she calls her office are waiting for her in D.C..
She has a secretary who reads her mail for her, sorts out the important bits and pieces, forwards it to whatever regional DEA office building is closest to her current assignment. Somehow, her secretary must have seen the importance of the letter, or maybe she just thought it was a friend of Denise’s - either way, when Denise picks up a stack of mostly-bills, she finds a letter written in prettily loopy handwriting.
Dear Agent Bryson, it reads.
I don’t know if you remember me, but we met, briefly, in Agent Cooper’s bedroom a few months ago. I hope you won’t find my inquiry too forward but since I will soon finish High School I find it imperative to look towards my future - which, especially now that Agent Cooper has disappeared and since, well, things have been going wrong in Twin Peaks for a while now, cannot be in my home town. Since you are a female agent, my question from one woman to another: how do I become an FBI agent? I don’t think signing up to be a police woman is the way to do it but I don’t know the way - it would mean the world to me if you could point me in the right direction.
Kindest regards
Audrey Horne.
Denise finds herself reading and rereading the letter that evening, going back to it the next day when she comes home after twelve grueling hours of a stake-out that lead to no new results.
There’s something about the tightness of Audrey’s letters, the rush she seems to have been in when scribbling her return address on the back of the envelope, something about the urgency of her words that catches Denise’s attention. It might just be that Audrey was so captivated by the idea of female agents when they met, or that she is connected to the last time Denise saw Coop before he disappeared, but that doesn’t matter, in the end, because for some reason unknown to herself, Denise decides that she will help Audrey get to her dream in any way she can.
They arrange to meet in Seattle for coffee the next time Denise is in the area.
Audrey greets her with the same adorably teen-aged sparkle in her eye as they shake hands and tells Denise she has business for her father to attend to anyway, and Denise doesn’t ask her about how that is going, or if she really is making meetings up just so she doesn’t seem too desperate to get away from all of it. Denise doesn’t mention that she took a four-hour detour to make this meeting happen, either.
“I know someone who works at the FBI registration office. I can arrange for your application to be fast-tracked. If you send it in by the end of the month, you could be off to Quantico just in time to join the other autumn recruits.”
Audrey stares, and stares, and when Denise hands her the application forms she’ll have to fill out and the list of criteria she’ll have to fulfill, she asks a million questions about what best to write, how to go about things.
At some point, she asks, “What about, well, being a woman?”
Denise frowns. “What do you mean?”
“Well, how do the other recruits treat you? I assume it’s mostly men? Were they decent to you or did you have to prove yourself?”
Denise can’t help the laugh that escapes her, and decides not to educate Audrey on too much of the world just yet - from what she knows about Twin Peaks, the poor girl probably already knows enough of the world’s dark secrets as it is.
“I did have to prove myself,” she finds herself saying. “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any decent people there. Agent Cooper, being one of them. Regional Director Cole, another. You’ll find them - and if anyone gives you too much shit, you know where to find me and I’ll take care of it.”
Audrey stares, cheeks flushed, eyes wide. “You’re so cool,” she whispers under her breath, and Denise winks at her.
“And you haven’t even seen me in the field yet.”
Audrey sends in her application, Denise makes a few calls, and the next thing she knows she’s picking up her mail at the Houston office and finds a postcard from beautiful Virginia in that distinctive loopy handwriting.
Made it - wish me luck! is all Audrey wrote on it, and Denise sends a silent prayer to whatever good forces are out there (maybe even Coop, a voice in her head whispers, and she does her best to banish the thought of her still-missing friend) that they’ll take care of Audrey Horne as she makes her way in the world.
Then, she makes a call to the current Quantico supervisor and promises him that if he doesn’t make sure that nothing bad happens to this recruit, in particular, Denise will kick him in the balls so hard that he’ll be permanently joining the local tenor choir.
Denise is nothing if not thorough.
The next time she passes through D.C. on a work trip, she calls Audrey, picks her up at the train station when she comes down from Quantico for the weekend.
“I’m taking you out for a drink. You need to loosen up,” she says, when Audrey has put her overnight bag down on the pull-out couch in Denise’s characterless DC apartment.
Audrey stares at her, wide-eyed.
“I’m not 21 yet, will I even get in?”
Denise winks at her. “Well, luckily you’re looking at DEA agent.”
She ignores the way Audrey stares and leaves the room to get ready. She remembers all-too-well her first years away from home, first at Quantico and then in D.C. at headquarters before she was let out into the field, remembers the first crushes on men that she let herself have because her parents would never find out about them - which, in hindsight, is pretty funny considering that now, her liking men is the heterosexual option and that her parents should have actually worried about her crushes on girls.
So she notices Audrey’s staring, has felt her eyes linger on her time and time again, and doesn’t say anything about it. Lets Audrey have a silly adolescent crush without fear of repercussions.
So, that evening, she takes Audrey to a gay bar.
She remembers her own first time at a gay bar.
She’d seen it in passing on her way home to her shitty apartment every day and finally dared to enter one random weekend, ignoring her pounding heart as she passed through the crowd of queens and leather butches and gays still in their work clothes but clearly exactly that - gay - and settled at the bar to order a drink.
Coop had spotted her first, calling her name out from a few seats down the bar where he had been nursing an espresso martini - always the coffee addict, even back then - and before she knew it, the two of them had struck up a pretty fun conversation about all their shared instructors in their first year bootcamp, the annoying janitor with his loud music at the office, the charming oddity of Gordon Cole.
Denise had found herself leaning in, had felt the way Coop was leaning in, too, and even years, and many nights shared with Dale Cooper later, she can still feel the way his hand had come up to cradle her jaw to pull her closer into that first kiss.
She doesn’t tell Audrey that, though. She reckons the poor kid already has a big enough crush on Dale Cooper - no need to indulge the fantasy even further with details of what a perfect gentleman could be.
The bar she takes Audrey to is not the same one, far from it - it’s definitely less dingy, because Denise is a classy broad now and Audrey, despite her many worldly experiences, is still so young.
She orders a martini, tells Audrey to order anything off the menu that she desires, which turns out to be a strawberry margarita, and then Denise just sips her drink and watches as Audrey stares at everything around them for a while - the queen with the seven-inch stilettos covered in pink fur, the two women canoodling at the bar, the twink with the sheer tank top swaying along to the music.
Audrey’s mouth barely closes, her eyes glimmering with something Denise can only describe as hope.
“This sure is an interesting place you’ve taken me to,” she says, when at least ten minutes have passed and most of their drinks have disappeared.
It makes Denise chuckle. “You could say that.”
“Are all bars like this in D.C.?”
“Just ones I particularly like.”
Audrey doesn’t say anything in response, eyes caught on something across the room. When Denise turns to look over her shoulder, she can guess what caught Audrey’s eye - a flannel-clad, baggy jeans-wearing butch with slicked-back hair that must be just a few years older than Audrey herself is ordering a drink at the bar.
Denise turns back to grin at Audrey.
“You’ve got taste,” she says and watches Audrey flush red.
“I don’t - I mean, I’m not -“
Denise leans forward, places a hand over Audrey’s.
“Relax, kid. It’s all good here.”
She wishes she could say something else, something more encouraging or motivational, but words was never her strong suit. Coop would know what to say, she muses, but Coop is gone, so Audrey will just have to survive with Denise’s subpar life advice skills and the free drinks. It’s more than Denise ever had at her age and Audrey already has more grit than Denise had back then. She’ll be fine.
She gives the kid’s hand a squeeze and leans back again, draining the last of her martini just in time for someone to slide into the booth next to her.
“Can’t believe you’d start without me.”
Denise gives the newcomer’s thigh a squeeze where it’s pressed against hers, turns to him with a smirk.
“Don’t worry, Albert, darling, we were just warming up.”
Albert scowls, flags a waiter down.
“A scotch for me, neat. Another martini for the lady, and…?”
Audrey purses her lips in thought, then orders, “strawberry daiquiri, please.”
Albert squints at the last drops of pink in her glass.
“Strawberries are your thing, huh. Aren’t you sweet enough by yourself?”
“Don’t even try, you’re not my type,” Audrey bites back.
“Well, thank the heavens, because you’re definitely not mine.”
Denise stops Audrey’s reply with a wave of her hand, deciding to diffuse the situation before Albert’s sometime-endearing hostility can ruin the night.
“Don’t mind Albert. That’s his way of showing affection.”
The look Albert sends her in return is almost a smile, which for him might as well be beaming.
He turns back to Audrey. “Albert Rosenfield,” he introduces himself.
“Audrey Horne,” Audrey says, quirking an eyebrow and seeming relatively unimpressed with his general Albert-ness. Denise is growing fond of this young woman very quickly.
“So, I hear Bryson got you into Quantico. How’s training going?”
Audrey shrugs. “It’s fun. Some of my classmates are nice.”
Albert snorts. “And some of them are the biggest dumbasses you’ve ever met.”
Audrey cracks a grin. “Yeah, how’d you know?”
“Kid, I have to work with those dumbasses every day. I thank the universe in all my prayers that being a doctor and working in forensics meant I could skip all the field agent training. Not that I don’t know my way around a gun.”
“Oh, believe me, no-one would ever imply you don’t know your way around a gun,” Denise murmurs, letting the innuendo drip through her words.
“Says you,” Albert quips back.
They haven’t seen each other in a few months, and Denise realizes she has really missed his bitchiness.
Audrey, looking from one to the other, speaks up, “do you want me to leave you two alone?”
Denise snorts, and even Albert can’t bite back the low chuckle.
“Thanks, but no thanks. My type does not include gorgeous ladies like Denise.”
“Why, Albert.” Denise flutters her lashes at him.
There’s a frown on Audrey’s pretty face, like she’s trying to put together the puzzle pieces and can’t quite arrive there, yet. Denise decides to put her out of her misery.
“Albert here,” she puts a hand on Albert’s shoulder, squeezing it, “only likes pretty men who are smaller than him and let him boss them around.”
She doesn’t mention that that description fits her type, too, and, to be more precise, fits one specific man, in particular. Apart from their mutual bitchiness, her and Albert have always bonded over their shared adoration for one Dale Cooper, and now that he’s not around anymore, any outright mention of him would feel like poking a wound that she’s not sure has healed yet - and she definitely won’t do it in front of a kid like Audrey.
Audrey, who is gaping at her words, looking from Albert to Denise and back, and clearly tries to school her expression into something natural -
Denise remembers this, too, the first time someone explicitly told her about being queer to her face and didn’t just imply it, and she knows how Audrey feels. She lets the moment sit in silence.
Albert, however, has less tact than Denise does, so he adds, “And seeing as your type clearly includes that butch at the bar you keep glancing at, you should probably make a move before someone else does.”
Denise elbows him, and he nudges her back with his shoulder.
Audrey, flushed red, takes a sip of the drink the waiter placed in front of her somewhen during their conversation, straightens up, visibly steels herself and then gets up with her glass. “See you two later,” she says, voice barely betraying her nerves, and makes her way over to the bar.
Denise watches her slide onto the chair next to the cute butch and whistles under her breath, impressed.
Albert leans back in the both, lets his arm drape over the back seat clearly pleased as Punch with himself. “Sometimes people need a little challenge,” he says.
“I sometimes forget that you do actually have fantastic people skills, you just chose not to use them most days.”
Albert’s arm is almost falling around her shoulders, not touching but present. He takes a sip of his scotch. “She’ll make a great agent,” he remarks.
Denise hums in agreement. “Coop did always know how to pick them.”
Albert’s fingers graze over her shoulders, briefly, a minuscule gesture of comfort that means more to the two of them than any outsider could probably discern.
By the end of the night, when they have bitched their way through their entire shared address book and Audrey has one phone number scrawled onto a napkin and one strawberry-flavored drink too many in her bloodstream, Albert hails down a taxi and helps Denise stow away the giggling woman in the back seat.
“I’ll be seeing you,” he says before Denise gets into the cab herself, hands deep in the pockets of his coat.
“Yeah,” Denise answers, and presses a quick kiss to his cheek that leaves a smudge of red lipstick.
She’s sent on a series of assignments all over the southern states, chasing down multiple similar-but-different drug-smuggling rings along the border, and she doesn’t make it back to D.C. for several months. When she finally does, she calls up Albert to see if he’s in town and wants to join her when she takes Audrey out for drinks again and, to her surprise, finds out that their evening plans are already taken care of.
“I saw your meeting with George in his calendar,” he vaguely explains over the phone, referring to the appointment she just finished with a member of the FBI tech department regarding a case of hers. “Audrey and I talked earlier, we’re taking you out for dinner tonight.”
Denise wasn’t aware that he and Audrey were close enough for them to take her out to dinner, but it seems that things have changed in the months she was away.
When she gets to the Mexican restaurant Albert told her to come to, she finds the two of them already at a little table, matching cocktail glasses in front of them. Audrey gets up to - adorably - shake Denise’s hand while Albert just nods at her, but the corner of his mouth lifts up higher as he returns Denise’s grin.
“What are we having?” she asks, nodding at the glasses and not mentioning that she hasn’t seen Albert drink anything other than scotch or wine in a long time, their days of shared frilly cocktails seemingly long behind them.
“Margaritas,” Audrey replies with a grin, and adds, “I’ve been talking Albert into ordering them. They’re growing on him.”
Denise looks from one to the other. “How often have you two gone out while I was gone, exactly?”
Audrey shrugs. “Quantico is boring on the weekends, okay? And my dearest Albert secretly loves all the gossip I bring him about my classmates and instructors.”
Prompted by Denise’s eyebrow raise, Albert pulls a face, elaborates, “I just thought that kids as young as Audrey shouldn’t be left unsupervised on the weekends. I’ve done one too many autopsies on teenagers to trust their instincts.”
“Oh, yeah, this is all out of the goodness of your heart.” Audrey’s words are practically dripping with irony.
“No other reason to put up with your annoying ass, otherwise,” Albert snaps back, but Denise watches in amazement as a fond smile slips on his face, as if without him noticing.
Coop did always know how to pick them, she muses to herself.
Before she knows what’s happening, it turns into a regular thing.
More so for Audrey and Albert, because they’re both in the larger D.C. area most of the time, but Denise starts making a point of returning to her apartment between cases instead of just flitting off to the next assignment, calls up the two of them whenever she can to ask if they have time for dinner, for drinks, for an early morning croissant-and-coffee before she has to rush off to catch another flight.
It feels good, to be in one place more regularly, something that she hasn’t been doing lately. As the months pass by, she watches Audrey change. She becomes more confident, grows into her body, learns all the ways to fling someone over her shoulder and shoot a gun and interrogate suspects without flinching. Her style changes into something butcher, at least at times, plaid suits replacing her mini-skirts, hair growing out long enough that she can pull it back into practical ponytails when she doesn’t have the time to style it in the morning.
One Saturday evening, she shows up to dinner with a new golden stud flashing on her right ear, above her normal earring. When Albert and Denise whistle, almost in unison - they have been spending a lot of time together recently -, she grins.
“Katie did it for me last week in our dorm when we were bored,” she explains, and then has to settle in for an evening of gentle ribbing about how often she mentions her classmate Katie.
It’s no surprise to Denise that when she calls Albert to chat a few weeks later from a mind-numbingly boring town in Bumfuck, Nowhere, Nevada, he tells her that Audrey seems to have gotten her nerves together and made a move on Katie, and that he met Katie, and that she seemed “not entirely, completely idiotic” - which, in Albert language, means that he approves.
Sadly, but, again, not surprisingly, Katie is no longer an acceptable topic of conversation by the time Denise makes it back to D.C., her name now only mentionable with regards to how fucking stupid and annoying and stupid she is, and even that only after Denise has bought Audrey multiple strawberry-flavored drinks and let her ramble on about other, nonsensical things for a good hour.
Albert, out of town himself for once, asks her how Audrey is doing when they briefly pass each other at the regional offices in Memphis two weeks later, and winces when Denise catches him up to speed. “Young love,” he says, shaking his head as if he, himself, was never stupid enough to indulge in said young love, something that Denise knows is a lie. She has known him for long enough, has seen him around Coop, has heard enough stories to know that Albert, too, is capable of doing stupid things when it comes to people he cares about.
She doesn’t tell him so in as many words, but, before parting ways in a seemingly endless hallway to head towards their separate meetings, whispers, “I think we both remember that night out in New Orleans in ’89.”
She watches Albert’s head whip around, aghast, and sends him her widest grin before disappearing into a conference room.
Denise can tell Audrey has been stewing on a question all evening. They haven’t seen each other in a while, Denise stuck on a case in New Mexico and the second year of Audrey’s training taking off running, so it’s a treat to be able to finally have found a date that suited them both.
They’re back at the gay bar Denise first took her to, now seemingly a familiar spot to Audrey, who greeted several people as they made their way through the crowd towards a booth. They’re two drinks in, and despite the amicable conversation as they catch each other up, Denise can tell Audrey is gearing up to ask something.
Finally, Audrey drains the bottom of her cocktail glass with a loud slurp through her straw and takes a deep breath. “Why’d you choose Denise?”
Denise looks at her, considering the right way to handle this topic, then decides that she doesn’t mind Audrey knowing. It’s an open secret at the DEA and the FBI anyway, with how many people knew her before, and she trust Audrey not to use this against her.
“I was Dennis before,” she says. “Seemed like the logical choice at the time.”
“Oh, okay,” Audrey says, and doesn’t elaborate.
Denise has been noticing Audrey’s style changing into something more masculine, but she always assumed it had to do with her role in a male-dominated world, and her growing up from the starry-eyed teenage girl she was when they first met. Now, she takes in Audrey, who, since recently, is sporting short hair, curls framing her face in a way that could be styled both femininely or masculinely, depending on the occasion. Denise wonders if - she decides to prod a bit, just out of curiosity. “Why, are we choosing a new name for you, too?”
Audrey laughs. “Oh, no, I like Audrey.
Later, when Audrey has had another two cocktails and is clinging to Denise as she drags her off towards a cab in a now-familiar dance, she stops in the middle of the sidewalk to turn to Denise, her eyes wide, so, so young all of a sudden.
“I like Denise,” she mumbles. “It suits you.”
Denise smiles down at her fondly. “Thanks. I think so, too.”
Audrey grins up at her.
Then, she bends over into the bushes to throw up.
The day of Audrey’s graduation has been marked with a big blue X in Denise’s pocket calendar for months.
She meets Albert - and dozens of overly-excited people who she assumes are the families of Audrey’s classmates - in the Quantico parking lot and whistles at the sight of him in a new suit, well-tailored to his figure.
“Looking simply dashing, dearest,” she says as she kisses his cheeks.
“Right back at you,” Albert retorts, leering at her in the dress she bought just for this occasion, then places a hand at the small of her back as he guides her through the crowd.
They both flash their badges to get into the building, thankfully not having had to apply for visitor’s passes, and find seats in the back of the auditorium. Somewhere up front, they know that Audrey is sitting with the rest of her classmates, currently invisible to them in the sea of people.
They spend the time until the ceremony starts biting about the people in the crowd they recognize - more than one fellow agent is present, because there’s nothing FBI and DEA people love more than to force their kids into following their own footsteps.
“Look, Nicholson has a new girlfriend hanging off his arm,” Denise points out.
Albert scoffs. “What’s that, the third one in two years?”
“And all of them younger than his kids, right?”
Their bitching is interrupted by someone coughing into the microphone up front, and the next hour or so is spent listening to their superiors drone on about the responsibilities of an FBI agent and trying not to get too many angry looks from the parents around them as they whisper their comments on the speeches to each other.
The speeches do, in fact, end at some point, and then all the graduates get called up one by one to receive their sparkling new badges.
When Audrey walks up the stairs - looking fantastic in a suit Denise knows Albert helped her pick out - the two of them whistle and holler and applaud loud enough to make up for the fact that they’re just two people instead of the usual conglomeration of parents and brothers and grandmothers and aunts.
Audrey grins at them from the stage, waving in their direction, and Denise doesn’t worry about it being enough. She knows they are.
They find Audrey in the crowd at the reception later and she squeals as she throws herself into Denise’s arms.
“I can’t believe I made it!” she wheezes out as Denise squeezes her tightly.
“I never doubted you for a second,” Denise tells her when they pull away, presses a kiss to Audrey’s forehead that leaves a smudge of lipstick on her skin.
“Congratulations,” Albert says from the side, holding himself back in his usual Albert-ness, but he, too, is engulfed in a hug by Audrey and Denise bites back a laugh as he reluctantly brings his hands up around her shoulders for a few moments before letting go again, clearing his throat.
But then Audrey grins at him, and he grins back.
Letting them have their moment, Denise rummages around in her handbag. “We got you something.”
“Oh, you didn’t have to -“
“Nonsense. This kind of achievement needs to be celebrated.”
Finally, Denise finds the little box and hands it over to Audrey with little flourish, who, in turn, unwraps it excitedly with little flourish.
When she opens the box, she finds a watch that Albert and Denise had been planning to get her for months now, talking on the phone weekly, sending pictures of different models back and forth until they settled on something sleek, practical, robust enough for a field agent but still elegant enough to fit in with Audrey’s style.
Audrey gasps when she sees it, and Denise knows they made the right choice.
“This is beautiful! God, thank you guys.”
She’s still fantastic at controlling her emotions, even more so after years of field training, but Denise spots the wobble in her voice, the way her eyes are glistening.
“You deserve it,” she tells her, and shares a knowing look with Albert when Audrey breaks eye-contact to fasten the strap around her wrist, moving her hand around to admire the watch from every angle.
“Thank you,” she repeats, audibly choked up, and Albert, who has alway been better at defusing situations when they become too emotional, claps her shoulder.
“Come on, kid, let’s go get dinner. We made a reservation at that Mexican place.”
Audrey sniffs, composes herself. “That sounds great.”
“And you’ll have to show us your badge,” Denise adds.
“Hell yeah,” Audrey loops her arms through both of theirs, dragging them closer, making sure she’s firmly between the two of them. Back to being excited now, she tells them, “It’s so shiny and new. Albert, we’ll have to compare, I want to see how it’ll change with time, because now it’s almost too clean, and did you hear that part in the speech when A.D. Skinner was talking about the importance of trusting your partner? Do we think he meant partner? Is A.D. Skinner one of us? And what about -“
As she drags them towards the parking lot, still rambling on, Albert and Denise share a fond look over the top of her head. Denise knows that neither of them thought they'd end up here years ago, when Denise received that that letter, when they met up for drinks with Audrey for the first time and had to carry her home.
She thinks that all things considered, they did pretty well. She can’t wait to find out what happens next.