1 . Name: Req @ 2013-04-04 19:20

So I have like 4 stories in the works and what do I do? Write this thing, that's what. Sniper/Spy, only moderately nsfw, critique encouraged.

You might need to give Nancy Sinatra's recording of "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" a listen, to parse parts of this. OH YES, it's one of THOSE.

I hope the italics code works.
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The only radio station the Sniper could pick up in his camper, parked a piece away from their latest base, seemed to be some rinky-dink pop station, and he'd swear he'd heard "Spooky" three times in the last hour. Still and all, it wasn't often he was in the mood to listen to the radio at all, and dammit he was gonna bleedin' well do so if he pleased. And he did please, especially when it came to the rare occasion he decided to tidy up his living quarters.  

He was wiping down the scant few feet of formica counterspace his slide-in allowed, scrubbing with a ratty old towel at constellations of coffee stains, when the distinctive strains of a tremelo guitar vibrated through his staticky radio connection. They'd played  the other recording of this song not a half hour ago, he thought. That one was more upbeat and had quite a lot of tambourine in it. This one was almost lonely in its sparseness. He could just picture little miss Nancy Sinatra, blonde hair all done up in a bouffant and sailing through the air in golden waves, when her baby shot her down. 

Of course, even though she claimed in the song to wear white, he could only picture her in the little black getup he'd seen her wearing on a video jukebox in Miami Beach, doing her song "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'". Even though that footage was colour, and he knew it was, he remembered it in black and white, and his mind's eye filled in just the red of blood running down her bare thigh after bang bang! two shots, and her baby shot her down. It was a vivid image. One bullet entered just to the left of her sternum, the other just above her right breast, and her made-up lips, full despite the fashionable skin-toned lip colour, parted on a gasp of shock and maybe tinged by blood, before her booted feet stumbled and her bare knees buckled and bang bang, she hit the ground, with her curls all splayed around her and soaking up blood as it seeped from the exit wounds in her back. 

He had to shake himself from the thoughts. He was getting distracted. 

Oh, she knew she was getting into trouble, getting involved with that bloke. He figured you always knew when you were getting yourself into trouble. The problem, of course, is doing anything to stop it. He hadn't quite mastered the art of leaving well enough alone, himself. 

After all, he'd coughed blood into the dust more times than he'd care to count, not even having to look behind him to know who'd got him. He'd try to make it up later, and then some, paying that rotten Spook back in headshots, with interest. Bang bang. But still, if the sneaky blighter got into his nest and slipped a gloved hand in under his arm, against his ribs just so, he'd be lost. The Spy didn't even need to have his knife on him, and the Sniper could crumple. 

That, or a similarly faint brush, against the back of his neck with a fingertip, along a forearm with the backs of his fingers, would be the only touch he'd get. Just the one little fleeting slip of sensation, and the man would be gone again, his promise, such as one is with a spy, already made.

It didn't matter what the Sniper did after the battle, if the Spy had visited and given him one of those meaningful little touches. He could jump in his camper and drive all night, probably, and the enemy Spy would find him. He'd never tested it to that extreme but he had to assume because the Spy always seemed to track him down. His baby tracked him down.

Keeping his van a mess had been one act of defiance. He could admit that to himself. The Spy never said anything about it, but the Sniper could only imagine how the state of the place offended the Spy's delicate senses. Regardless the man would still find him there and the Sniper realized in tripping over a discarded shirt that it had been somewhat petty to lash out like that. Petty, and passive-aggressive, and in the end, utterly pointless. 

Hadn't he been the one to ask for it in the first place? 

He couldn't tell how mutual the feeling was, really, even though it was the Spy who orchestrated their meetings entirely, now. He got the distinct impression that the Spy was only doing it for the Sniper's, well, not benefit, exactly, but as an indulgence. It was all a power game, and the Sniper knew that. He had no idea if knowing it would help him defend himself but he somehow doubted it. 

He'd known it was trouble, watching the Spy for any reason other than lining up a shot. Wanting him any other way but dead. But his unflinching stance in firing a .667 calibre handgun, that grin and the way he'd roll his cigarette to the corner of his mouth before squeezing the trigger... the Sniper couldn't get it out of his head. Other men he'd known to smile like that as they ended someone else's life, they were visibly wrecked inside, and burning from the centre out. They'd lost control of themselves, and all of them died young. Most by their own hands. The Spy seemed in control of himself. In fact, he seemed in control of everything he touched. The Sniper was looking for the in, the weakness, looking to aim right for it, when it all went pear-shaped. 

The Spy had been moving a little slower that day. It took him an extra beat or two to cloak, the Engineer batted away more sappers on average, he was generally seen, around the tracks.  'There it is,' the Sniper thought. 'Bloody Spook's finally run himself ragged.' He lined up a shot, and the Spy wavered where he stood, and the Sniper realized as he pressed his cheekbone to the scope that he, himself, was smiling. The Spy turned, and looked as if right at him, and rolled his cigarette to the corner of his smirking mouth, and disappeared. 

The next time they saw eachother it was in the Sniper's nest while the battle raged below them. The Sniper didn't raise his kukri or his SMG. He felt worn out, wrung out, totally played. 

"Are you giving up, bushman?" the Spy taunted. The Sniper only shook his head. That teasing smile with the cigarette for punctuation loomed closer as the Spy leaned in to run the flat of his blade under the Sniper's jaw. The Sniper jolted forward, then hesitated, but it was too late by then. The Spy had seen it, the look the Sniper must have had on his face. Under the balaclava, his brow twitched slightly. 

"So that's it then, hm?" the Spy responded. He checked the time, and the Sniper's guts quailed. He steeled them to grimace at his enemy. 

"Dunno what you expected. Bloke like me." 

"What indeed. Well, what would you have me do?" he paused, then added, "If you are about to say something trite I urge you to reconsider."

"I... dunno. What can I possibly say?" The Spy looked unimpressed. 

"You will have to take some responsibility," he said, adjusting a glove.  

"Yeah, right, I know that." He met the Spy's gaze. "I know that," he repeated. 

"And?"

"And I'm still, y'know." It pained him to only make half-allusions, not to speak of telling the Spy the whole truth. He was sick with the knowledge-- well, what little he'd discovered for himself at the time. It would only get worse. 

He'd never told the Spy the whole truth. He'd never said that he wanted to fuck every shred of composure out of him, wanted to hurt him and dominate him and tie him down so he couldn't slip away so easy, wanted to dig fingers in and go looking for something real inside of him; or told him how it felt when the Spy held him down by the throat and forced his way into the Sniper's ass, or when the sting of a gloved backhand blossomed across his cheek, a surprise, splitting his lip and cutting the inside of his mouth against his teeth, or the seemingly careless sudden press of a finished cigarette into the exposed flesh of his shoulder. He'd stubbed it out, there, in the dip between deltoid and pectoral, and had to know that's where the Sniper's rifle would kick all day. Reminding him.

If the Spy felt any of the same way about it, he didn't let on. Maybe the Sniper was the only one growing to need it. Maybe he was the only one who thought he'd go mad if deprived of that contact for too long, felt like maybe he was finding something real in himself, something tangible, after so many years of transience. Maybe so. 

But, the Sniper never said anything about any of it. Just as he knew he was getting into trouble, the Spy had to know, too, what he was getting himself into. 

The ruddy bastard didn't even have the decency to shoot him down.

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The 1937 Zenith radio was the Engineer's pet project, something to tinker on when he wasn't busy with sentries and respawn and the temperamental A/C unit. It picked up stations in patches, as the Engineer worked, overly loud because of his tinnitus, and subjected everyone in or around the kitchen to its fuzzy warblings. 

The Spy wanted to grab a little something to eat, quickly, in the hour before dinnertime when the whole of the team would come down on the kitchen like a plague. Of course, the kitchen wasn't always as vacant as he'd prefer, when he slipped in to perhaps heat up some soup, or spread jam on toast. At least, when the Engineer used the kitchen table for whatever project, the Spy could count on decent coffee to be in the machine. Not the best beans, but fresh-ground, and not the gritty swill their Sniper would buy and the Demoman would drink. He helped himself to a cup with a nod to the Engineer. 

The man shifted a wire, and the radio crackled to life again with a whoop of approval from the Engineer himself. 

The Spy recognized the song, though he couldn't name the singer. Lyrics filtered in through the static, and while the Spy upended a soup can into a small sauce pan, he couldn't help but try to sort the words. 

He wondered why the singer let her young friend win their play-fights, but then, he didn't wonder at all. 

It was a minor compulsion, being with the enemy Sniper, and he could control it. After all, he was the one that arranged each rendezvous. It was all his call, and the Sniper had never refused. He'd been coy once or twice, going to hide in his base for a time, making the Spy wait, but that was about the extent of it and in the end the Sniper had gone looking for him. The second time, he'd even apologized for being late.

It was the best possible arrangement, really. It was clean, well-defined, concise... The Spy would have no concerns that this mutually beneficial agreement would snowball into something else, unwieldy and unsavoury, because not only was such a thing explicitly barred in their contracts, but the Sniper's self-professed professionalism wouldn't allow it. Personal pride had little to do with it, he surmised; if it had, the man wouldn't have laid himself bare that day that it all came out into the open. The Sniper liked to see himself as mechanical, the Spy thought. Whatever his thoughts on their meetings were (the Spy had decided he didn't want to know) the Sniper seemed to hold that part of himself separate from the Self he was on the battlefield.

The Spy prefered it that way. If the Sniper had spared him more than just that once, he would have felt... patronized, to start, and probably anxious, that someone else would notice, or that their dynamic would change. 

It was for the best if the Sniper shot him down.

Such an odd song, the Spy thought absently, stirring his Campbell's Chicken and Vegetable. He'd had to wash the wooden spoon again; people seemed to be in the habit of putting things away still crusted with food, and he hoped that what he'd chipped off of the spoon wasn't mashed potatoes because that would mean nobody had washed it in six days. At the very least, the enemy Sniper washed his coffee cup. 

The signal faded into static for a moment, and returned, and the singer recounted her playmate-cum-lover's teasing about their violent games. It should have been a tip-off, she seemed to say. He could see where it was going.

He didn't have to worry about the same set of circumstances. Surely, the Sniper would never love him, and would never pretend to. Even if he knew that those wordless invitations were getting more and more frequent, and that the Sniper might start to get ideas about that fact, he could simply rely on refusing to let things change. 

Even if he sought the man more frequently than was strictly prudent, he was no stranger to addiction. He knew how to handle that, at the very least. And, if he concentrated enough on that 'awful sound', the crack of his enemy's rifle and its ricochet, bang! (bang), he could almost find comfort in that one constant. He didn't step on the cracks in BLU concrete, and aligned his shoes with the slats of RED floorboards. He policed his feet. It helped him to stay silent, to know where he was stepping. It was second-nature. But, the enemy Sniper was introducing an element of unpredictability into his life, and when he was at least a little honest with himself (he was rarely fully honest), he hoped that instability wouldn't bring him down. 

He hoped it hadn't already. 

That one day that started it all, well, it wasn't properly the beginning, was it? No, the Sniper's sight, that pinpoint of light that flitted across his lapels and alighted on his forehead, had lingered on him too long too many times in the preceding weeks to call that the absolute beginning. By the time he saw the dot, if he saw it, he was supposed to be already good as dead. But there were long moments in which he sought to veer or vanish, lifetimes spread out between the Spy's realization and the Sniper's commitment to the kill, that he remained conspicuously alive.

What was the man waiting for? What was he looking for? The Spy's first thought was that the Sniper was getting off on the anticipation, and so he did what any gambling man would do. He ran a gambit. He would wait until he next saw that dot, follow its trajectory, and let the dirty bushman know that his filthy secret had been found out. He guessed from the man's reclusive character and forced candor that he'd be humiliated and would hide for the rest of the day, at least. When he went to the Sniper's roost to collect on the wager, the payout was at once better and worse than he had expected. By utterly giving up the fight, in a way, the Sniper let him down. 

The Spy scraped the pot, spooning the last of the broth into the least chipped bowl. He could call it taking advantage of a weakness, this thing they had, but, he thought cruelly, in whom? It had already gone on too long to be a mere joke, and as seasons came and changed the time, he realized somebody was going to have to take responsibility for it all. 

Perhaps some bread to go with his soup, he thought, listening for the next strained notes from the flayed machine. 

"Now he's gone, I don't know why," the young woman sang. The Spy casually watched the chromed toaster, allowed lyrics to filter through him, and observed his distorted reflection. Ah, there it was: the inevitable desertion. She should have seen it coming. Anyone should. These things couldn't be expected to change, after all. They couldn't.

He courted death, with the Sniper. Not the kind of meaningless, ephemeral death he suffered at the man's hands, but real death, true death, the kind he hadn't needed to delineate, before taking this job. Anything more substantial than these games they played, only a few degrees of realism above pop-guns and wooden swords, and he was sure his employers would shut him down. 

It was the closest to real and true he'd gotten in some time. 

Even if he didn't survive, he'd left his mark on the other man, a sentimental legacy in a cigarette burn. The knife scars didn't matter; they were inflicted in the midst of this surreal war, this unreal place where death and dismemberment were only just fleeting, and besides, the kind of man the Sniper was could be expected to have a scar or two from any range of close scrapes. Any other who saw those thin, pale lines could conjure their own explanations. But the cigarette burn-- its severity and placement could never be construed as accidental. He wasn't sure what prompted him to do it, but it stood out against the Sniper's flesh, where the Spy could brush his thumb over it and remember what it was like to live with consequences to his actions. 

He tried to hold onto that feeling, in those shuddering moments after recognizing the laser-sight shining in his eye. He tried to feel the way his heart would clench, if his baby shot him down.   

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