"Loki, what's wrong?" His brother asks, but Loki barely hears him. The picture in his hands begins to tremble for the quickest of moments before he pulls himself together. He's just gotten the newest target from the base and . . . well, what the hell was he supposed to think?
"New assignment," he murmurs, looking up into the confused blue eyes of his brother. Thor brushes a strand of hair out of his face, the rogue blond lock having escaped from the small bun his long hair was pulled into, and he extends his hand a moment later to take the picture. Loki lets him, watches his features as they contort in surprise.
"This is-."
"I know."
"But how-how did we not-?
"Beats me."
"What're you going to-?"
"Do I have a choice?" He sighs.
Silence. "Not unless you're gonna go rogue."
No, he isn't about to do that. He looks down at the ring on his left hand and sighs, twists it around once more twice to see the engraving on the underside of it. He doesn't usually wear it unless he's not on a mission but for this one he has to. He shakes his head and drops his hand down to his side. "No. I'm gonna talk to her."
Thor's hand on his brother's shoulder is all that they need, and he squeezes it before walking away. "Do what you must, Loki. We all understand, and we're here for you."
Loki nods and shoots the tall blond a small smile. He appreciates it, and gets back to his work, thinking over what's going to happen that night. He can't imagine how he'd gotten to this point, how he could have overseen such a huge factor like this. More than that, though, how the hell was he going to fix it? He lets out an exasperated sigh and buries his head in his hands. Might as well get all his emotion out now before it genuinely compromised him for what he had to do next.
The house is dark by the time he gets home, the only light coming from the kitchen where assumes Natasha has started to make dinner, but the house is empty of any sound or smells of such a thing. He swallows hard, hand clutching tightly onto the gun he carries on him every time he worked, as he walks slowly through the door, avoiding the step just to his left that creaks every time.
"Honey, I'm home." He tries not to laugh at the sentiment. How ridiculous it sounds now that he knows the truth. He steps further inside, confused when she doesn't reply back. What the heck is she-.
He goes down onto his knees when she kicks him and rolls into the movement, landing on his good knee with the other bent, squating and pointing the gun at her. She's already in position, a gun in her own hand, not bothering to whip the strands of red hair falling in her face away. He had hoped he might have had the element of surprise, that perhaps her own company wouldn't have told her about him. He guessed wrong.
"You found out?" She asks, voice quiet and blue eyes trained on his. He stiffens, nods, and she curses. "Why didn't you tell me?" She sounds more furious than the time that he bought her a new car, despite her telling him that her company would provide her another since her old one had been crashed. He wonders, in the back of his mind, just how that happened.
"What? That I was a spy, or that I got the order to kill you?" He asks, and, throwing caution to the wind, he lunges at her, catching her around the knees. It's so unlike him, and probably goes against everything her file explained about his technique, that she nearly drops the gun, so he takes it from her hands instead and chucks it down the hall. The safety was still on.
Well that was nice of her.
She lets out a growl of frustration and flips him onto his back, landing a hard punch to his face that connects, but all she hits is soft tissue. Her hands are around his throat next but he manages to buck his hips to throw her off, then flip her over onto her front as he climbs atop her to grab her arms.
"Why didn't you tell me your secret?" He demands, turning the tables on her. Or so he hopes. She manages to roll them over, however, so he's beneath her, and she smashes her head back onto his to disorient them both. In the short time he takes to recover she's scrambling towards the gun and shoots the floor just between his legs. He curses.
"Because I'm allowed to keep some things to myself!" She says and he can hear the fury rising in her voice. Shit. "God! That's just like you-You're allowed to keep secrets but I can't?" She's standing now and he's scrambling behind the wall. The bullet bites through the drywall from the close range, and he looks around for some projectile to throw. His eyes land on her favorite vase, a horrendous red and grey monstrosity he'd begged her not to buy, and throws the decorative flowers from it.
"So you're telling me that your pottery class-."
"I had to pick up another mission that night. Your guy's night?"
"Went to do some paperwork after a long day in the field." He takes a split second to check around the corner before throwing the vase at her. She manages to catch it and drops the gun in the process. He dives for it, grabbing it just as she sets the pot down, and the next bullet misses her but hits the pottery.
Whoops.
"Bastard!" She snarls as she kicks him in the hands, the gun skittering out of his grasp. "That was my favorite!"
"It was so ugly," he counters, scrambling to his feet to try and kick at her abdomen. She ducks down just in time, flattening herself to the floor before she kicks out his leg from under him, then kicks him again in the chest when he's down.
In no time they reduce the house to a hole-riddled mess, the pair of them pulling guns and weapons from their own secret stashes to try and kill the other, but there was no intent there. He notices as she's throwing daggers that she's still wearing her ring, and though the last one very nearly catches him in the crotch-"HEY! Unfair! You like that as much as I do!"-it's nice to see he isn't the only one who's holding onto the idea, the sentiment of what they have.
It seems to take all night for them to tire out, and sure enough the sun is making its way over the peaks of the trees when they collapse beside the other.
"How long have you been doing it?" Loki asks, looking over at his wife, who's nursing a bleeding bottom lip while Loki puts pressure on a gash in his arm, his left eye swelling from her fist having collided with it before.
"Twenty years. You?"
"Nineteen. You ever think you would get married?"
"No. You?"
He shakes his head, and in another moment she's on top of him, pressing her body hard against his as she kisses him, blood mingling with their saliva. He groans and wraps his arms around her waist, ignoring the blood he's striping her shirt with in favor of holding her as close to him as he can. They don't resurface for air for some time, doing battle with their lips and tongues and teeth instead of their fists and weapons, each trying to claim dominance over the other. Eventually, Loki lets her win, submitting for the first time in his life for the woman he loves.
"I don't want to kill you," he breathes as she pulls away. She echoes the sentiment and they stay there for some time.
"Want to kill the bastards that put us up to this instead?" She asks, corners of her lips twisting into smiles.
"You have no idea."
They retire shortly after that, leaving behind a smoldering wreckage of two careers, taking what money was owed to them for years of service and going off the radar. They end up in the south of France some two years later, holding hands as they recount the various missions they've gone on, the different situations they've survived and how the other would have handled it.
Every so often their phones ring with freelance work just in case they ever get bored, and even more rarely do they take the case, though this time it's as a team.
A/N:
Filling the prompt for idamnloveorange, who wanted Nat and Loki in a Mr. and Mrs. Smith setting where they both find out they're spies and have to kill one another! Yay! I hope you like, and hope that the action sequences aren't as awkward as I felt while writing them. Whoops.
Enjoy!
If you have any prompts that you'd like to see of Blackfrost feel free to message me at my tumblr or on here! Thanks!