Let's go dancing on the backs of the bruised;

[grimvisaged]

She's good.

This had been the sum total of his report on Natalia Romanova, teenage prodigy and assassin-in-training. From anyone else it was a scant accounting, but from him, notoriously skilled and still taciturn, those two words contained volumes.

In truth, Romanova was better than he'd anticipated. She was far from the first student he'd had, but she'd been the first to come close to holding her own. When playtime had finished and he'd stopped pulling punches, she'd refused to back down. He'd given her bruises for her trouble, but she'd earned his respect—Something none of the others had managed.

Also unlike all the others, he found himself actually looking forward to their sessions together.

Today, he was waiting for her in the rafters. Cloaked in shadow and perfectly still, he kept a sharp eye on the door and his muscles poised to spring.

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[grimvisaged]

Memories of having done this before have all been stripped from him, but his body knows this business as well as the neat efficiency of killing. It carries him forward even as his mind stutters and shifts, hips finding a smooth rhythm, one broadly-splayed hand hitching her forward even as she rises breathlessly to meet him. She is so soft, so pliant, and so yet recklessly demanding, her fingers grasping hard against fabric and skin, her breath hissing hot and urgent into his ear as if he had any choice but to oblige her. He knows little of religion but thinks, wildly, that were she a temple he would worship within her everyday.

Skilled though his body may be, he recognizes quickly enough that it has been far too long since he has done this with anyone at all, much less someone so keenly attuned, so desperate and eager, and he gasps despite himself, a hard, strained sound into the tangle of her hair as he struggles to master his own control. He reaches between them again with his right hand, fingers gone graceless but finding their target easily enough, slipping hastily against slick flesh and then faltering as fingertips alight on the place where he's pushing inside of her, where they two are joined.

The sound he makes is primal, a roughly straining whimper that wrenches from his throat as he drives more deeply within her, rocking them both against the unforgiving floor. Left hand braced so that he can push up and look at her, he grasps desperately onto the final thread of his rapidly-fraying control and finds her mouth again with his own.

[regimes_fall]

Her teeth catch at his skin, her fingers curling at his back to graze him with her nails because not even then, not even when she was surrounded by more warmth and want than she’s ever known in the whole of her remembered life does she know how to be truly gentle. She wants to mark him with her teeth, wants to suck at his skin until the salt of it lingers inside her mouth, wants to feel his panted breaths and rough noises beneath her lips because they are hers to take, to love, and that seems very important.

She has been raised almost a wolf, and the little she knows of love narrows down to a wispy memory of a pretty woman with red hair that fed her warm milk and sang her songs at night and now this – this act of love, which seems to have so very little to do with the emotion itself. Love to Natalia has always been an exploitable point of weakness, a snug little underbelly in which her knife will always find its home. But now, now she understands, even if her understanding is only rudimentary at best. She is going half mad for this, for him. She will do it again and again and again if she can and will think nothing of the consequences as long as it meant she can have more of this. Death, in that moment, seems but a small price to pay.

When his fingers shifted down between them and over her, she jerks and shudders beneath him with no slow build up, no crescendo. She comes hard and takes his mouth as he covers hers, her tongue slipping along his teeth to mute her own cries as she shivers and clenches at him, her legs rising from the floor instinctively to lock around him and hold him deep inside her. When he comes, she wants to feel it inside her. That seems important, too.

[grimvisaged]

Her climax is as insistent as every other part of her; an unrelenting, chaotic wave of tightly gripped fingers and legs, commanding that he be pulled under with her. There is nothing for him to do but oblige: a supplicant falling to his knees in benediction, his muscles stiff and quaking, hips gone hopelessly erratic.

"Natalia," he says, the softest rasp against the pillow of her lips as he tumbles headlong into orgasm. It is the first time he has said her name aloud.

He collapses atop her a moment later, still held firm by the lock of her legs, aware only enough to keep himself from resting the full of his weight on her panting, shivering body.

He is still inside of her. He wants to stay there forever.

[regimes_fall]

She is caught in a net, twisting and tangling and catching fire for all that she is equally as undone. She clings to him instead of fighting for freedom or demanding space. Shudders against him when the first word she's ever heard him speak is the breathy murmur of her true name against his lips, her legs tightening around his thighs to hold that intimacy inside her, to relish the heat and wetness of the point where their bodies have fit together, even though she knows he will break from her all too soon.

She kisses his mouth far softer than any touch that's been exchanged between them up until that point, the kiss which should've been the first instead of the breathy aftermath if either of them had been the sort of people who had the heart for slow romancing. She moves her fingers to smooth his hair away from his face on both sides, wanting to drink in the features of his face, needing burn them into her brain so that she never forgets this moment and how he has made her feel.

"I don't want this to end," she says, giving him honesty when she cannot give him the intimacy of speaking his real name.

[grimvisaged]

He becomes cognizant of their surroundings in stages, the tangibility of her voice the first nudge into awareness. For a moment, however slim, he had fallen so recklessly into her that he'd failed to think of anything else. Now, the reality is creeping steadily back, bleeding into that brief, crystalline fantasy.

She knows as well as he does that this is an intolerable slip from their programming. He can hear the weight of it in her voice.

He looks at her, at the bright flush in her cheeks and the careless tangle of her hair, his own breath slowing where it pants against her lips. He looks at her and feels the new rift in himself widen, a hairline fracture pushed apart by the easy warmth of her body. Suddenly, he is at war with himself, and that alone is alarming for all that it implies.

He looks at her, and knows that they will not hesitate to kill her regardless of how good she is.

Wordless, he pulls away from her with gentle efficiency, tucking himself away and adjusting his clothing. He cannot look at her, his resolve already tenuous, and he is silent he strides to the door.