There was no getting out of it this time: she was fucked three ways to Sunday, and no amount of pleading from her father was going to help.  Not that he was willing to do so.  Not this time around.  He was tired of her, she could tell.  Burnt out by her outright delinquencies and blatant disregard for the warnings of her equals and commanding officers alike.  Now he was going to let her sink in the mess that she had created.

She chanced a sideways glance at him. He was making a point of not looking at his daughter, instead choosing to focus on a spot a few feet in front of the chair in which he sat.  She felt bad, she truly did.  She hadn’t intended to disgrace her family in such a manner.  But she never had been one to think of the consequences of her actions; she preferred to live in the moment, and craved excitement and adventure.  And she had always prided herself in that fact.  ‘No barriers, no regrets’ had always been her personal motto.

And yet she did feel bad for what she was doing to her father.  In the past few years, ever since she had graduated from flight school and had started to claw her way up from the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, he had grown… well, old.  Not old in the sense that we all wake up older than the day before: it was more drastic than that.  Four years ago she would have said that he looked his age, roughly in his late thirties.  Now she supposed that someone might mistake him for being in his early fifties.  His face had thinned out, along with the rest of his body.  His hair had gone from a light brown to a salt-and-pepper kind of color, and he moved with a shuffle now that had not been present in his earlier years.

She was afraid that she was killing him.

“Commander Kipling, is it? Commander Henrietta Winsor Kipling?”

She turned her attention back to the man seated behind the desk in front of her.  She met the Air Chief Marshal’s gaze with unwavering determination and nodded.  He frowned at her lack of a spoken response, which was considered extremely rude, but chose not to comment.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Miss Kipling, over the past few years.  But I don’t think we’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting face to face.”

“No, sir.  I don’t believe we have,” she replied flatly.  

“I wish it were under better circumstances then that which we are meeting for now,” he said, looking down at a stack of papers on his desk.  He flipped through them as he spoke; she supposed they were her records, which were by now a veritable book of grievances and write-ups.

“And how long have you been serving in Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force, Henrietta?”

“Four years, sir, ever since I graduated from flight school.  I’ve only just made Wing Commander recently.”

The Air Chief gave no response, but continued to shuffle through her papers.  She waited, hoping that this wouldn’t take very long.  If they were going to discharge her from the force, she wanted it to be over with quickly.  Then she could head down to the pub and crawl into a giant mug of ale.  If there was one thing Henrietta loved more than adventuring, it was ale.  That and making miniature flying aircrafts.  Preferably both at once.

“I’m going to skip straight to the point, Henrietta,” her superior said, standing up and coming around the desk to stand in front of her.  “As evidenced by your history of disrespect and disobedience, and in light of your recent… misconduct concerning Air Commodore Granville, it will be simply impossible for us to keep you in service.”  Her father sighed heavily and dropped his head into his hands.  She felt another pang of sadness at her father’s plight.

“Air Marshal Kipling, you may go if you wish.  I know that this must be hard for you.  I just have some paperwork for your daughter to fill out, and then I’ll send her along.”  She felt like she was back in grade school, the way he was talking about her.  She half expected that he would give her a candy and tell her to behave herself from now on.

Her father stood up slowly, gave a half-hearted salute to the Air Chief, and shuffled out the door.  The look of shame on his face was clear enough.

The Air Chief now grabbed a small stack of paper off of his desk, separate from the papers of her report, and a quill.  Then he took the seat that had just recently been occupied by her father.

“These are your discharge papers, Henrietta.  I’m going to need you to sign them.”  He handed her the quill, but as she reached for the papers, he pulled them back, just out of her reach.  “You know, Henrietta… you are quite an exquisite beauty.”

Is he coming on to me? She wondered.  Yes… yes, she supposed he was.  A strange look had come over him, one that a jackal might have as it has a hare in its sight.

“I’m not sure that this topic is appropriate.  And it has nothing to do with my being discharged, regardless.  Sir,” she added, almost sarcastically this time, and reached for the quill again.  He grabbed her wrist this time.

“Perhaps we can help each other,” he growled, grabbing her knee with his other hand.

--------------------------------------------------------

Henrietta left the room several minutes later, her report in hand, having decided to keep it as a souvenir.  She debated on whether to go back to her quarters and grab a few items, but figured that there was really nothing that she owned that could not be replaced.  As a general rule, she kept all of her important items on her person at all times.  It would not be good for her to linger, anyway.  Knocking your superior officer out cold is not something you generally wanted to hang around for after having done it.  Not for the first time, she was glad for all of the flight school training she had had to endure.