Title: Shooting Blanks
Disclaimer: Pretty boys who aren't mine. *Sigh*.
Warning: A hard PG-13/soft R, depending on who's President of the Motion Picture Advisory Committee at present.
Summary: Irresponsible boys with their irresistible toys.
***
Tan-Sun Moon was angry, and when Tan-Sun Moon was angry the entire encampment felt it.
The colonel had been overly irritable lately--he'd beaten five lieutenant colonels so far today instead of his usual three--and sullen and moody to boot, and although nobody knew exactly what was amiss with Tan-Sun Moon they knew that to stay clear of him was the wisest course of action.
Solid rumor had it (and indeed, what was a military encampment but a sprawling engine for the propagation of rumors?) that the colonel had had a particularly colorful exchange with his father the day previous, a conversation that culminated in ill-veiled threats issued by both father and son. Again, the details were anybody's to guess, but the sharp decrease in funding from Pyongyang and the heightened security around the colonel's private quarters lead many to wonder what sort of reckoning would unfold come the dawn.
***
They didn't talk about his father. Such intimacy had never been the hallmark of their fraternity, and if Tan-Sun had ever entertained broaching the subject with Zao, the knowledge that the other man would react with awkwardness and distress quickly struck such thoughts from his mind. Besides, Zao had been there, had been privy to the sight of Tan-Sun thinning his lips and enunciating his words with care, and when Tan-Sun hurled his phone across the room at the conclusion of his conversation with his father Zao had nodded and called for handguns to be brought to his quarters immediately.
The guns came in a silver briefcase. Guns were always enough, for them.
Now, they were walking through the dying forestry surrounding the base, heading towards their private firing range. Zao was chattering amiably about the new exercise regimen he had the troops on, and the projected increases in combat efficiency, and then he was talking about the plummeting oil market and what that meant in terms of spending on U.S. intelligence, and Tan-Sun found his temper subsiding in the other man's company. The cadence of Zao's speech, the way his lips wrapped around his words. Light was failing all around them, caught as they were in the halfway time between day and night; obfuscation of sight, Zao liked to say, harder to aim in the failing dark, harder to train your eyes on the kill, though Tan-Sun suspected that it was more the man's deeply perverse sense of romanticism leading them out into the forest at sunset.
Zao gestured sharply over his shoulders. The sound of leaves rustling indicated Tan-Sun's honor guard melting away. Tan-Sun had given them all instructions, that he was to be afforded privacy with Lieutenant Colonel Zao and safety be damned. Besides, Zao was eminently more capable of protecting him than the clutch of obsequious toadies who jockeyed for the privilege of guarding him.
Tan-Sun wondered how many of them were in his father's employ.
Silently, Zao unlatched the suitcase and assembled Tan-Sun's weapon. The gun was a modified Walther PPK, metal cool to the touch, the value of a man's life running along the inside of one seamless ballistics discharge chamber. The make was standard issue for field agents working for most nearly every intelligence and infiltration organization across the world, Mossad to CIA to MI6 and everything else inclusive.
Know thy enemy, Tan-Sun always said. But more importantly, know the effective range of his weapon.
Running along the side of the barrel were a pair of intertwined dragons, picked out in gold along the steely grey of the gunshaft. The dragons' sinuous bodies were etched down to the scale, down to the talon, down to the whiskers streaming behind them in a fierce wind. The dragons connected in a few places along the gun, crossed over one another with their wiry coils. Zao called them dragons in flight; Tan-Sun called them dragons in heat.
After assembling Tan-Sun's gun, Zao took a clip from the suitcase and slipped it into his own. He took aim and, not waiting for Tan-Sun to offer first shot or not, pulled off several rounds.
Tan-Sun waited for the thunderclaps of Zao's weapon to subside before taking sight. Caught up as he was in the ritual of loading the clip, balancing the heft of the gun and taking aim--for marksmen like Tan-Sun, an almost holy thing--he didn't notice Zao slip behind him till he had hooked an arm around Tan-Sun's waist and drawn his back against him.
"Zao, what are--"
But Zao did not respond, as he never did respond when the mood stole over him.
Pressed up against the other man like this, Tan-Sun's head fit neatly in the hollow of Zao's neck. He felt more than saw Zao's hand slip down towards his fly, and shuddered when Zao pulled the zipperhead down tooth by tooth.
Tan-Sun hissed, a tight inhalation of breath between his clenched teeth. Zao's weight was throwing him off; he could no more aim like this than he could while blindfolded and hung upside down. He moved to holster his gun, but Zao's left hand swiftly caught him before he could do anything.
"No," Zao murmurred, dipping low and brushing the side of his face against Tan-Sun's. His lips scraped along the lines of Tan-Sun's jaw. "Keep firing."
Tan-Sun nodded and tried to aim.
Zao's hand sped up.
Tan-Sun squinted. He bit his lower lip.
He was flabbergasted, unmoored. Years of practice with a gun had suddenly fled under Zao's assault. He thought that the gun's hilt was too heavy, too much weight in his hands. The recoil from his next shot, a shot he should have been able to brace himself against, sent him slamming against Zao.
"Concentrate," Zao said, pushing Tan-Sun away from him a sliver's width.
Zao's free hand roamed across Tan-Sun's body. Inquisitive fingers slipped their way through the folds of his clothing and brushed up against his chest, his stomach, the dip where hip met torso met crotch. Then Zao's other hand found something to occupy itself with, and Zao had two hands wrapped around him, and Tan-Sun bucked helplessly, thrust helplessly, into the hollow of the other man's hands.
Tan-Sun moved to set the safety on his weapon, but Zao squeezed around him, painfully. "Concentrate," Zao repeated. "Aim. Fire."
Gritting his teeth, Tan-Sun took aim again. He resisted pulling the trigger till he had taken notice of Zao's rhythym upon him, and when he thought he had it down he fired.
He should not have been surprised that Zao took that precise moment of imagined understanding on his part to lick the lobe of one ear, a quick flicking out of the tongue that startled him more than aroused. Tan-Sun's next shot went wide, setting a flock of birds to take flight. He didn't care. He would shoot them all, if Zao would just hurry up. Tan-Sun's weakness in their coupling was only made tolerable by Zao's silence, the token of equitability offered by him. He took aim again and squeezed off another shot, two, four in rapid succession. He was a marksman, a damn fine one, but all his skill and all his pride was spent on controlling himself under Zao's attention.
Zao pushed himself further against him. He was swollen against Tan-Sun, pressed up against the curvature where the small of his back gave way to the cleft between his legs.
Another shot, and Tan-Sun wasn't even bothering to make the pretense of aiming anymore, merely keeping the gun level and squeezing off round after round in time with Zao's breath on the back of his neck.
Another shot popped off, another, another, Zao whispering a chain of heat into his ear, the build-up of tension in his body. Tan-Sun cried out wordlessly. His teeth flashed white against the dying sun.
Spent, Tan-Sun turned to face Zao, but the other man bent his head and buried his face in the back of Tan-Sun's neck. Zao slowed, his hands releasing Tan-Sun. Tan-Sun felt the muscles come loose in his legs, but he resisted the urge to sink to his knees.
Zao withdrew a kerchief from his pocket, wiping Tan-Sun's mess from his hands. He crossed the shooting range and retrieved the targets from their suspension and, laying them flat on the ground, called Tan-Sun over to examine them.
The spread of Zao's shots was neat, tight, two clusters of holes divided between the heart and the head. Precision had ere been the sign of Zao with a gun. Tan-Sun's own target was riddled with just as many holes, but their placement was more erratic--here a few in the right shoulder, there a spray in the stomach, far too many nowhere even near the outline and the gradiated scores.
Zao grinned without grinning, letting the lift of his cheeks and the brightness of his eyes do what a simple twist of the lips should have done. "Chapter 4, precept 4," he said, and before Tan-Sun could process that, he nodded crisply and was out of the clearing, leaving Tan-Sun crouched over a pair of shot-up targets with his pants half undone.
***
Later, back in his quarters, after he had regained the balance in his legs and composure in his form, the thought occurred to him to look up what Zao had said. A citation without title like that could only have meant one thing. He flipped to chapter 4 of _The Art of War_, skimmed with his finger over the lines till he hit the fourth precept.
"One may know how to conquer without being able to do it," he read aloud, into his empty room.
The peeling sound of Tan-Sun's laughter sounded throughout his wing for a goodly while thereafter, leading his honor guard to wonder whether the colonel was all right and if the esteemed colonel would care for them to fetch anything for him. He grinned and merely asked them to send for Lieutenant Colonel Zao.
The two of them had much to discuss in the way of strategy, after all.
Disclaimer: Pretty boys who aren't mine. *Sigh*.
Warning: A hard PG-13/soft R, depending on who's President of the Motion Picture Advisory Committee at present.
Summary: Irresponsible boys with their irresistible toys.
***
Tan-Sun Moon was angry, and when Tan-Sun Moon was angry the entire encampment felt it.
The colonel had been overly irritable lately--he'd beaten five lieutenant colonels so far today instead of his usual three--and sullen and moody to boot, and although nobody knew exactly what was amiss with Tan-Sun Moon they knew that to stay clear of him was the wisest course of action.
Solid rumor had it (and indeed, what was a military encampment but a sprawling engine for the propagation of rumors?) that the colonel had had a particularly colorful exchange with his father the day previous, a conversation that culminated in ill-veiled threats issued by both father and son. Again, the details were anybody's to guess, but the sharp decrease in funding from Pyongyang and the heightened security around the colonel's private quarters lead many to wonder what sort of reckoning would unfold come the dawn.
***
They didn't talk about his father. Such intimacy had never been the hallmark of their fraternity, and if Tan-Sun had ever entertained broaching the subject with Zao, the knowledge that the other man would react with awkwardness and distress quickly struck such thoughts from his mind. Besides, Zao had been there, had been privy to the sight of Tan-Sun thinning his lips and enunciating his words with care, and when Tan-Sun hurled his phone across the room at the conclusion of his conversation with his father Zao had nodded and called for handguns to be brought to his quarters immediately.
The guns came in a silver briefcase. Guns were always enough, for them.
Now, they were walking through the dying forestry surrounding the base, heading towards their private firing range. Zao was chattering amiably about the new exercise regimen he had the troops on, and the projected increases in combat efficiency, and then he was talking about the plummeting oil market and what that meant in terms of spending on U.S. intelligence, and Tan-Sun found his temper subsiding in the other man's company. The cadence of Zao's speech, the way his lips wrapped around his words. Light was failing all around them, caught as they were in the halfway time between day and night; obfuscation of sight, Zao liked to say, harder to aim in the failing dark, harder to train your eyes on the kill, though Tan-Sun suspected that it was more the man's deeply perverse sense of romanticism leading them out into the forest at sunset.
Zao gestured sharply over his shoulders. The sound of leaves rustling indicated Tan-Sun's honor guard melting away. Tan-Sun had given them all instructions, that he was to be afforded privacy with Lieutenant Colonel Zao and safety be damned. Besides, Zao was eminently more capable of protecting him than the clutch of obsequious toadies who jockeyed for the privilege of guarding him.
Tan-Sun wondered how many of them were in his father's employ.
Silently, Zao unlatched the suitcase and assembled Tan-Sun's weapon. The gun was a modified Walther PPK, metal cool to the touch, the value of a man's life running along the inside of one seamless ballistics discharge chamber. The make was standard issue for field agents working for most nearly every intelligence and infiltration organization across the world, Mossad to CIA to MI6 and everything else inclusive.
Know thy enemy, Tan-Sun always said. But more importantly, know the effective range of his weapon.
Running along the side of the barrel were a pair of intertwined dragons, picked out in gold along the steely grey of the gunshaft. The dragons' sinuous bodies were etched down to the scale, down to the talon, down to the whiskers streaming behind them in a fierce wind. The dragons connected in a few places along the gun, crossed over one another with their wiry coils. Zao called them dragons in flight; Tan-Sun called them dragons in heat.
After assembling Tan-Sun's gun, Zao took a clip from the suitcase and slipped it into his own. He took aim and, not waiting for Tan-Sun to offer first shot or not, pulled off several rounds.
Tan-Sun waited for the thunderclaps of Zao's weapon to subside before taking sight. Caught up as he was in the ritual of loading the clip, balancing the heft of the gun and taking aim--for marksmen like Tan-Sun, an almost holy thing--he didn't notice Zao slip behind him till he had hooked an arm around Tan-Sun's waist and drawn his back against him.
"Zao, what are--"
But Zao did not respond, as he never did respond when the mood stole over him.
Pressed up against the other man like this, Tan-Sun's head fit neatly in the hollow of Zao's neck. He felt more than saw Zao's hand slip down towards his fly, and shuddered when Zao pulled the zipperhead down tooth by tooth.
Tan-Sun hissed, a tight inhalation of breath between his clenched teeth. Zao's weight was throwing him off; he could no more aim like this than he could while blindfolded and hung upside down. He moved to holster his gun, but Zao's left hand swiftly caught him before he could do anything.
"No," Zao murmurred, dipping low and brushing the side of his face against Tan-Sun's. His lips scraped along the lines of Tan-Sun's jaw. "Keep firing."
Tan-Sun nodded and tried to aim.
Zao's hand sped up.
Tan-Sun squinted. He bit his lower lip.
He was flabbergasted, unmoored. Years of practice with a gun had suddenly fled under Zao's assault. He thought that the gun's hilt was too heavy, too much weight in his hands. The recoil from his next shot, a shot he should have been able to brace himself against, sent him slamming against Zao.
"Concentrate," Zao said, pushing Tan-Sun away from him a sliver's width.
Zao's free hand roamed across Tan-Sun's body. Inquisitive fingers slipped their way through the folds of his clothing and brushed up against his chest, his stomach, the dip where hip met torso met crotch. Then Zao's other hand found something to occupy itself with, and Zao had two hands wrapped around him, and Tan-Sun bucked helplessly, thrust helplessly, into the hollow of the other man's hands.
Tan-Sun moved to set the safety on his weapon, but Zao squeezed around him, painfully. "Concentrate," Zao repeated. "Aim. Fire."
Gritting his teeth, Tan-Sun took aim again. He resisted pulling the trigger till he had taken notice of Zao's rhythym upon him, and when he thought he had it down he fired.
He should not have been surprised that Zao took that precise moment of imagined understanding on his part to lick the lobe of one ear, a quick flicking out of the tongue that startled him more than aroused. Tan-Sun's next shot went wide, setting a flock of birds to take flight. He didn't care. He would shoot them all, if Zao would just hurry up. Tan-Sun's weakness in their coupling was only made tolerable by Zao's silence, the token of equitability offered by him. He took aim again and squeezed off another shot, two, four in rapid succession. He was a marksman, a damn fine one, but all his skill and all his pride was spent on controlling himself under Zao's attention.
Zao pushed himself further against him. He was swollen against Tan-Sun, pressed up against the curvature where the small of his back gave way to the cleft between his legs.
Another shot, and Tan-Sun wasn't even bothering to make the pretense of aiming anymore, merely keeping the gun level and squeezing off round after round in time with Zao's breath on the back of his neck.
Another shot popped off, another, another, Zao whispering a chain of heat into his ear, the build-up of tension in his body. Tan-Sun cried out wordlessly. His teeth flashed white against the dying sun.
Spent, Tan-Sun turned to face Zao, but the other man bent his head and buried his face in the back of Tan-Sun's neck. Zao slowed, his hands releasing Tan-Sun. Tan-Sun felt the muscles come loose in his legs, but he resisted the urge to sink to his knees.
Zao withdrew a kerchief from his pocket, wiping Tan-Sun's mess from his hands. He crossed the shooting range and retrieved the targets from their suspension and, laying them flat on the ground, called Tan-Sun over to examine them.
The spread of Zao's shots was neat, tight, two clusters of holes divided between the heart and the head. Precision had ere been the sign of Zao with a gun. Tan-Sun's own target was riddled with just as many holes, but their placement was more erratic--here a few in the right shoulder, there a spray in the stomach, far too many nowhere even near the outline and the gradiated scores.
Zao grinned without grinning, letting the lift of his cheeks and the brightness of his eyes do what a simple twist of the lips should have done. "Chapter 4, precept 4," he said, and before Tan-Sun could process that, he nodded crisply and was out of the clearing, leaving Tan-Sun crouched over a pair of shot-up targets with his pants half undone.
***
Later, back in his quarters, after he had regained the balance in his legs and composure in his form, the thought occurred to him to look up what Zao had said. A citation without title like that could only have meant one thing. He flipped to chapter 4 of _The Art of War_, skimmed with his finger over the lines till he hit the fourth precept.
"One may know how to conquer without being able to do it," he read aloud, into his empty room.
The peeling sound of Tan-Sun's laughter sounded throughout his wing for a goodly while thereafter, leading his honor guard to wonder whether the colonel was all right and if the esteemed colonel would care for them to fetch anything for him. He grinned and merely asked them to send for Lieutenant Colonel Zao.
The two of them had much to discuss in the way of strategy, after all.