Sniper rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling of his camper. In the dark, all he could see were the blurry shapes of his possessions and the square of warm reddish light the street lamp outside threw onto the wall.
A sharp pain shot up his back. He winced into the darkness. The respawn system was good, but not great-it couldn't erase deep scars or the aches and pains that came with getting shot and blown up all day. Or in this case, stabbed.
He hadn't heard him coming. Sniper had the RED heavy's head lined up in his sights when he felt the cold shard pierce his back. A long, lithe body pressed against his, keeping him upright against the chest high wall. A low chuckle vibrated in his ear, and the smell of cigarettes followed.
The knife withdrew. As Sniper collapsed and his vision clouded with dark spots, he watched a pair of scuffed dress shoes strut away. Spy's stupid (sexy) laugh was the last thing he heard before awakening on cold tile.
Sniper sighed and shifted his weight so his sore lower back wouldn't touch the mattress. Stupid Spy and his mask and his cigarettes and his nimble gloved hands. Sniper didn't know why he was so drawn to him. It's not like Spy was even his type. Well-that wasn't entirely true. Sniper had always liked men.
He had known ever since he was 13 and took regular excursions to his town's only cinema to watch The Wild One with Marlon Brando. Every afternoon, for as long as the film was billed, he snuck out of his Catholic boy's school and slipped into the dingy theater for the cheap matinee. He sat in musty seats and swung his feet above the sticky floor. He watched Brando swagger across the screen in those sinfully tight jeans. He watched him flash that devilish grin.
Sniper was transfixed by Brando for weeks, until the film went out of circulation. Once, he had asked his father to buy a reel of the film for him and got rebuked. It wouldn't do to have his impressionable mind sullied by such nonsense. But it was too late. Sniper was hooked.
Sniper heard footsteps outside, loud in the dead night air. He didn't stir. The gait was long and deliberate. Familiar.
An image of the first time he saw Spy flashed into his mind. His first day on the job, he watched a masked figure slink into the open, poised to strike his team's engineer from behind. Sniper brought the spy into his sights, tightened his finger on the trigger-and froze.
He watched as the RED spy buried his blade into the engineer's back, who went down without a sound. He watched the way the spy withdrew from from the dissipating body like a snake recoiling after a strike. He watched the way the tight fabric of his dress pants played across his thighs. He watched his masked face twist into a devilish grin. Then he watched him disappear.
It wouldn't be ten minutes before Sniper fell to that damnable spy for the first time. But it was too late.
The camper door open and closed. Sniper felt a lean body slither under the covers beside him. A gloved hand slipped under his shirt.
And again, just as the first time he saw him and all those years ago in the darkened theater, Sniper was hooked.