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.

Comments

[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.