Scheherazade
Reno had a thousand different smiles, Rude thought, and he figured he had seen all of them--the glitteringly bright-eyed smile of watching a building blow up, the slow, lazy half-smile as he wrapped his hand around the controls of a helicopter and settled in for a long flight, the knife-like smile as he interrogated someone, the unfocused smile of a few shots of tequila, the up to no good smile as he planned something that was sure to get him yelled at if he were caught. Rude had seen all of those smiles and more; the thousand different smiles that flickered across his partner's face in the span of a day, of an hour, of an instant.
This smile now was something almost predatory but not; there was focus of the kind that screamed of danger when coming for Reno--screamed it now, but it was the kind of danger you wanted, the allure of a bright flame to a moth, of the snow maidens calling you. One where you saw the danger and you leapt for it.
Maybe it was the glittering eyes, perhaps it was the way the smile curved so slowly across his face. Or perhaps it was the delicate tip of a tongue running over his lower lip, and how it seemed tied into the way the man stood, somehow sinuous though he was still, as if the still was a lie, a trick of a brain unable to conceptualize perpetual motion.
Or maybe it was something simpler. Like the way that smile was so very close, so close Rude's breath caught because of the bright something behind Reno's light eyes, eyes that changed color with the light and time of day, but this close were a green shot through with blue, with flecks of grey in the mix as well. How fitting, Rude thought vaguely, that a man with such chameleon-like emotions should have eyes that were the same.
"So are ya gonna keep dancin' around it, partner, or make a move?" Reno said, his voice low and casual as always, but now there was another note to it.
"Around what?" Rude said, not giving an inch and wanting to know what it was Reno would say. He watched Reno's eyebrow raise, the faint moment of uncertainty that he tried to hide and them ignored--Reno could see the moment of "Am I wrong? Did I...No, I can't be--" flash through the man, transmitted in those indistinct eyes and the quicksilver play of a thousand expressions at once on his face.
"You watch me," Reno finally said, pulling back a bare sliver, but in Reno that was a valley, a gulf. "Ain't nobody never watched me as much as you. So are ya gonna just keep watchin', or you gonna do something?"
Rude let a faint smile come to his own lips. Trust Reno to have noticed that Rude's eyes always found him; were always on the man. But then, how could Rude not watch him? Not watch something always moving; never still and ever changing, trying to figure out the man's way of moving and thinking and doing; admiring the sheer agility and quickness of Reno even when he did small things, like pull out his baton with a grace that belied the intent--Reno was a dancer in motion even when still, and every moment cried out to be watched. And so Rude had observed, unable not to, and now he found his watching was not as unobserved as he had thought.
"Why would I make a move," Rude finally said, his words slow and careful, like everything he did--they were opposites, those two, water and stone. The stone never moved, but it was the water which changed it. "When you do it for me?"
Reno had a thousand smiles, that Rude already knew. But as it turned out, Reno had a thousand and one, this smile now one obviously rare, one of almost childlike joy.
"Yeah," Reno finally said. "You're right," he said, and in a movement of burning grace, leaned in and made his move.