One weekend, Sniper crowbarred Spy into driving out into the desert for a camp-out.
Well, Sniper called it a camp-out. Spy called it an excursion into the countryside. She only agreed to come under the condition that she could make it as luxurious as she wanted.
Sniper had seemed a little puzzled by this. "But we'll have the camper - that's real luxurious already. There's the air con and the coffeemaker and everything! What else could you want?"
Spy had patted her cheek with a pitying hand. "You have absolutely no idea what luxury is, ma petite chacal."
So it was with considerable pleasure - the same sort of simmering, expectant pleasure, she reflected, that she had last experienced upon arranging the dominos in such a way that both a politician's clandestine affair and his unsavory ties to a fascist paramilitary organizations would be revealed unexpectedly on national television - that she had started setting up for Saturday's luncheon.
When Spy started whipping out her enormous assemblage of dainties and hors d'oeuvres, Sniper's eyes had gone wide behind her glasses and she'd abruptly stopped complaining about how much Spy had packed. Spy had smiled like the cat that had gotten the cream, and then pulled out the actual cream - and the lemon curd, and the berry preserves, and the fresh butter - for them to smear on the scones she'd brought.
Sniper had looked at the delicacies, arranged on real china on a real linen tablecloth, with real silverware and crisp white napkins. She folded her hands in her lap as though she was going to make things dirty by touching them. "Think I'm beginning to understand what you meant by 'luxury.' "
Spy had blinked coyly up at her. "Oh, this little thing? In the middle of nowhere, it is rather difficult to have any semblance of civilization, but one makes do." Truly, even finding flour without mites had been a trial. Someday, she promised herself, she would treat Sniper to a real meal.
"Right," said Sniper, staring at the lights Spy had hung around the campsite and the mint-rosemary cocktail next to her plate with a garnish of curled lemon peel. She didn't move to eat anything.
"Oh dear, I brought far too much for only myself," Spy cried in dismay, as if only now noticing quite how much she'd packed. "Whatever was I thinking. How dreadful. This will go stale by the time we return to base; only Soldier will eat it at that point. I think Medic surgically removed the poor woman's tastebuds, in all honesty."
"Well, if the alternative is letting it go to waste…" Sniper hesitantly took a bite of scone-with-lemon-curd, and the expression on her face had made all the frantic preparations, all the favors Spy had called in to get good quality food in time, and even the waking at an ungodly hour this morning to bake (and conceal the baking from the rest of the team) the damn scones…worth it. And when Sniper licked an errant drop of cream off her lip, Spy had awarded herself a lascivious thought. And another petit four.
After food, they'd gone off into the desert and tried to make absurd trick shots until Spy was snorting and cackling and Sniper's shoulders were quivering with laughter so bad she couldn't shoot straight.
Now it was sunset, and the moon was peeking over the horizon.
Sniper had dragged out their usual camp chairs, and was currently watching their tiny campfire grow with proprietary pride. Spy had tossed her feet in the bushwoman's lap, and Sniper absently drew little circles around Spy's anklebone as she watched the flames.
"I do not trust this fire," said Spy, eyeing it as though it might jump from the hard-packed earth to grab her.
"Don't you BLUs have a Friday night campfire? Feel like I've seen the light before from our fire."
"Yes, but we have a firepit. It is uncivilized, but not actively dangerous." She tilted her head and allowed, "Unless we let Pyro get in and start hugging it, or let Demo's various alcohols tip into it, or Scout get drunk enough to try fire-walking on active flames, or…you get the idea."
"All right, then I know you've mentioned having a fireplace in your swanky suite over there."
"That one is even more contained and corralled. Regimented. Organized. Whereas this is just out in the open, where it could reach out and kidnap innocent passerby."
"Innocents? Here?" Sniper teased then added, more seriously, "Look mate, there's nothing flammable anywhere nearby. You saw me kick away everything earlier."
"I suppose," Spy said, darkly.
"Hell, we even used your lighter to start the thing!"
"That lighter is a friend. It would not betray me, do not even imply it," said Spy, affronted.
Sniper said something in response, then, something she could not at all remember later, because as she said it she turned to flash that sweet, sly, lopsided smile at Spy, just for her, and the gold of the setting sun hit her profile just so and -
Oh.
Spy swallowed, hard, and felt her stomach roil.
Those weren't lascivious thoughts, were they. Or, at least, not only lascivious thoughts.
What had she done.
Mon Dieu, what had she done.
Thank god Sniper was turned away in that moment, or it would've been plain on her face, all the horror and joy, all the consternation and adoration and -
"You're awful tense all of a sudden," said Sniper, conversationally. The ankle-circles had paused.
Wrenching her expression back into its usual mask of sardonic insouciance, Spy darted another glance at her. Behind those glasses, Spy could see her eyes fixed on the moon peeking over the horizon, as though she thought Spy might startle like a cat if she was directly observed.
"Oh, your mention of my rooms - I recalled I had forgotten to water my roses," Spy lied smoothly, forcing her leg muscles to relax. "But they will survive until I return. I spoil them thoroughly, the privation will improve their character."
"Didn't know you grew flowers," said Sniper, with a mild sort of curiosity. The ankle-circles resumed.
"Where on earth do you think the ones in my lapels come from?" said Spy.
Sniper looked at the ground. Sniper looked at the sky. "Dunno. Never thought of it before."
And that gave Spy a chance to tease her for her inattention, and the precious seconds to let her heartbeat calm and the flush drain from her face.
-—-
Spy flatly refused to spend the night on the roof of the camper in a sleeping bag, as Sniper planned to. The bushwoman didn't seem surprised by this, only amused. She hefted her own bag, climbed on the roof, and waved a goodnight.
Instead, Spy went inside.
She laid in the bed that smelled of Sniper, and stared up at the ceiling, and stared up at the woman on the other side of that ceiling, and did not sleep.
-—-
Spy didn't act any differently on Sunday. She was very, very careful not to. Because she was now on the undercover mission of her life, disguised as a version of herself who did not now harbor devastatingly dangerous intelligence.
So when Sniper handed her a mug of the special, high-quality coffee - after gallantly not entering the camper until she was certain Spy was wearing her balaclava - Spy did not reach up, and tuck an errant hair behind her ear, and twine her hands behind her neck, and kiss her thoroughly in thanks.
Instead, she squinted grumpily up at Sniper, sipped the coffee, muttered grudgingly that it was acceptable and that everything was dirty, and stumped off to glare at today's campfire.
When an overtipped pan burned breakfast, Spy did not say that she could think of something far better to eat, and shove Sniper against the side of the camper and drink deep of her until Sniper was crying her name.
Instead, she tsked, said something about how her Marseillais foremothers would be disappointed by the state of the culinary arts these days, and admitted that she never usually ate breakfast anyway.
And when Sniper invited her on a hike to an interesting-looking rock, Spy did not kneel before her and say, with all the fervent romanticism in her French soul, that she, Spy, would gladly walk with her to the very ends of the earth, stabbing everyone who got in their way.
Instead, she curled her lip in prissy disgust at the very idea, and waved a hand in dismissal in such a melodramatic way that Sniper laughed her quiet, rusty laugh and clapped her on the shoulder. And when Sniper left on that hike, she carefully turned away with disinterest in her progress, sat in the shade with a book, and stared without reading at the page.
She had a light lunch (only six kinds of cheese) and a glass of wine ready for Sniper when she returned, dusty and cheerful. Spy's own wine glass was mostly empty, but she hadn't drunk anything to get it to that state.
So the day went.
They drove back to the bases, a weekend seemingly well misspent, and Spy waved a casual farewell as she cloaked and made her way back to her rooms.
She spent a long time in the shower that day, but not pleasurably.
-—-
Spy snapped her fingers, and turned off the water.
This must be a situational sexuality thing. They were in the middle of nowhere, there wasn't hardly anyone sane within miles, much less attractive, and Spy hadn't gotten laid in, ugh, years. And so Spy's standards had lapsed so far as to have these sorts of intense…emotions…about disgusting, filthy, uncivilized (kind, charming, funny, handsome) barbarians.
To prove it to herself, she sought out the BLU Sniper, who turned out to be watching the sunset from a stump near the team firepit while whittling something or other. The BLU Sniper, in Spy's opinion, was always whittling something or other.
Spy approached silently from the side, wishing she could go invisible to her allies as well as her enemies, and stared at the woman. She waited for some spark of interest to flare.
After a while, BLU Sniper's own anti-Spy instincts must have kicked in, because she jerked up her head. "Were you ever gonna say something? You're heaps creepy, mate."
Spy supposed she could pick out, aesthetically, things to appreciate in the Kiwi's face and form. But it was only that, the mild sort of sexual appreciation she could get about anyone.
In fact, she found herself unfavorably comparing the BLU Sniper to her Sniper.
Wait, her Sniper?
Spy sighed in defeat. "No, I was not."
She eyed Spy. "Yeah, nah, I suggest you gap it and go creep on someone else."
"I very much fear I am going to," Spy muttered, rubbing her temples, and returned to her rooms.
-—-
Spy locked all five locks, plus the assortment of other traps and triggers she had set up over the years. She closed the curtains and, safely ensconced in dimness, allowed herself to pace and think.
This, she thought grimly, was this problem with acquiring a genuine friendship for once. It opened one up to all sorts of new hazards.
She should've known better, just like she should've known better than to agree to the exchange-of-platonic-human-touch arrangement in the first place. But it had been so very long since she'd last messed up this spectacularly (and she really hadn't, not this badly) that she'd almost believed herself immune, believed herself old and worn and cynical and cold enough to be safe.
What a fool she was. Complacency was, as ever, the sign of a spy due a painful surprise.
On the one hand, yes, Spy enjoyed the entertainment of a good romance. But - and this was the critical bit - only from the outside, when it could be safely contained in a novel or through a pair of binoculars and a wiretap. Spy was meant to be in the wings, orchestrating the show for the audience; she wasn't meant to be on the stage itself, melting under the spotlight.
Her past seductions had been for physical pleasure, carefully circumscribed, or for work, a performance. No danger either way because there was no emotion involved, nothing of the woman behind the mask.
It was too hot in here. She ripped off her suit jacket and threw it over an armchair. Her tie followed a moment later, and slipped off to pool on the floor.
In the time since the RED's Arts & Crafts Night, Spy had put in a good deal more thought into Sniper's sexuality, all with the same frustrated, pointless puzzling she'd given impenetrably encrypted messages. But now, with The Revelation hovering over her, there was a new urgency and desperation in it. These new awful emotions twisting her guts and causing her heart to pound were not patient in the least, nor were they at all amenable to reason.
(If this is was how those other spies had felt - the failures, the ones idiotic enough to be compromised by their attraction to their targets - well, Spy finally was able to summon up some fellow-feeling. She was certainly feeling wild enough to attempt something spectacularly idiotic right about now herself.)
She'd presented subtle conversational openings. She'd inquired, delicately, and then less delicately, to the point where in Spy terms she was practically shouting her Question to the skies. In response, Sniper would merely look faintly puzzled, or pass entirely over the hidden meanings in Spy's words with the ease of a naturally upfront person blithely skating over the surface of implication. And yes, normally Spy loved that about her, found it delightfully refreshing, but right about now it was driving her absolutely insane.
She'd broken into the Administrator's files again, poring over Sniper's sparse files in the hopes of finding some small mention of her sexual inclinations. Plenty on jobs worked, a long and illustrious career of carefully placing bullets where they were needed; but nothing on the Question at all. Sniper appeared to be a loner there too; it was quite possible she wasn't interested in romance or even sex with anyone at all.
It had all been entirely worthless. Nothing that would stand up even in the court of her pathetic hopes.
There wasn't even enough data to put up on a corkboard and tie together with red yarn. She had the corkboard, of course, but right in the middle was a single damning index card: Sniper's own words, that first day, when she'd eyed Spy and declared herself to not be a dyke. And in the time since, Sniper had been proven to be honest to a fault, painfully so.
She'd been over the conundrum a million times, and no amount of massaging the data would change the facts. While Spy was, of course, incredibly attractive, Sniper was precluded from appreciating that as she should due to the small hindrance of not being fucking gay.
But simple things like 'facts' and 'reality' seemed to do very little against the huge, gnawing craving, the desperate throbbing Want that tied her tongue and flushed her face and churned her stomach.
She paused to rake her nails over her head in frustration. And out of the black, sludgy depths of her mind, the ever-practical, ever-ruthless Spy's Spy slithered around to whisper in her ear.
Why not simply charm Sniper into bed? it asked. Perhaps not everything of which you now dream, but you might be satisfied enough by a taste. One must be practical, when it comes to impossible dreams. One must compromise.
'Charm' was such a mild word for what she could do, if she exerted herself. Even 'manipulate' was. Spy could get anyone she wanted, and frequently had.
You could charm anyone. You have seduced supposedly straight women in the past many times, to achieve your goals.
Spy started pacing again, slower.
While that was true - her conquests of the fairer sex were legendary in the very small, very secretive intelligence community - those had all been part of a mission.
You could make Sniper into a mission. A little mission, just for yourself.
Just for herself, for once.
You've done far worse things on behalf of worse causes; aren't you due a little selfishness for your own amoral desires? It would be such a small, simple, unimportant thing, compared to the fates of nations.
She was tempted. So tempted.
You know her vulnerabilities well, her moments of emotional weakness, her alcoholic tolerance. How kind you would be to be there, just for her. To ease that throttle into something more, just for you.
Why, it would be simplicity itself, compared to the paranoia and security of some previous targets.
Simplicity, indeed. The practiced part of her mind was already calculating the angles, the opportunities; she laid out the broad strokes of the conversation, the way she'd nudge it where she wanted, her movements, the target's likely reactions; the openings for plying the target with alcohol or - if she was feeling adventures - perhaps something borrowed from a Medic's cabinet or her own collection.
A few deniable touches, careful monitoring of responses both macro and micro; a game suggested, or a massage? Or perhaps a challenge. Sniper did like challenges, their little duels and play-fights. Sniper would -
She abruptly jerked into awareness, horror flashing cold through her. She sagged onto her arm chair, feeling suddenly weak and ill.
Lonely ambassador's wives, naive heiresses, world-weary princesses, powerful men of all varieties; they were objects upon which she'd used her charm, over the years. It was a tool and it was a weapon, something she could flick on and off at will, a mask over her mask to trap and entangle the unaware.
Deep down, Spy knew she was snide and selfish, picky and petty, smug and unscrupulous and cruel, and more ad infinitum. She knew she lacked the internal guiding compass of morality that some seemed to have; she did awful things to people who probably did not deserve it and felt nothing but satisfaction for a job well done. She was a decaying hedonist stitched haphazardly together with fine tailoring; she was endless, empty artifice in poor disguise as a human being.
And around Sniper, she let herself relax into revealing that terrible person, instead of being the suave and perfect and untouchable individual a spy was supposed to be.
And it was so, so nice that Sniper didn't seem to mind any of it. In fact, she teased Spy for those qualities, as though they were amusing eccentricities instead of tumorous character flaws that she refused to acknowledge. Sniper was so firmly herself that it pulled sincerity from Spy in turn, like venom from a wound.
Using manipulative spy-skills on Sniper - open, straightforward, trusting Sniper - would be worse than wrapping her arms around her in their usual touch-exchange, reaching up, and stabbing her in the back with a poisoned blade. It would be worse, because Sniper wouldn't know she was being stabbed.
And if Sniper did fall into bed due to Spy's charm, when she wouldn't with Spy herself…it would hurt. It would hurt like a betrayal, even though Spy would be the one doing the betraying.
Spy inhaled, shakily.
She usually kept her self-loathing firmly buried underneath a few metric tons of ego, distraction, and outright self-deception. But actually allowing herself to acknowledge an emotion for once allowed it to well up through the cracks. It curled around her, hot and sick, and tightened around her neck until she choked.
Sniper was friends with her, and was friends with her, not any of her thousands of masks. She was precious. And here Spy was, even considering for a moment the option of seducing her under false pretenses, drugging her, just so Spy could fulfill some sick sexual fantasies?
God, she was despicable. A predatory lesbian, a rotting opportunist clawing greedily for more than she was due, looking at her innocent friend like a piece of meat to dissect and consume.
Spy hadn't wept in years. She didn't now. But -
Some spy she was. She couldn't even lie to herself anymore.
Spy wept.
Scones are more of a British thing, but poor Spy had to really struggle with the state of ingredient availability in 70s America, not to mention the vagaries of Mann Co. It was the best she could do under the circumstances.
New Zealand got Krypton-cum-Atlantas'd in canon, but I had semi-forgotten about that bit of lore during the writing of WaLHBE, and now I'm stuck with my own canon there with the BLU Sniper, lol. Besides, I've decided I don't even like that canon much anyway, so there :P
/-/
It occurred to me that the particular flavor of internalized homophobia Spy is experiencing in this chapter is somewhat less common than it used to be (great, good, love it). A small explanation, for younger readers: Back in the day, thanks to gross official and implicit policies like the Hays Code, if a sapphic woman did make it onscreen (or in a novel, etc) she would be almost certainly depicted as creepy and menacing toward innocent, presumably straight women, taking advantage of their trust in the "safety" of a fellow woman for their own sexual kicks. It was a pretty prevalent homophobic belief, too, and you can imagine it got internalized by a lot of sapphics of the time. A bit of it still lingers today, more's the pity (good examples here ), but at least we have some counternarratives out there in media and in real life couples these days!
So on the one hand, Spy has liberated herself from a lot of shitty social mores due to her career/life experience and her strength of will, but these kinds of beliefs are absolutely insidious, and she's got her anxiety about being a predatory lesbian wrapped up with her anxiety about being a predatory, manipulative secret agent.
(If this sounds oddly familiar, this is because this same sort of fearmongering was resurrected in the past few years against trans women and their right to use e.g. women's bathrooms. It's as though some people think it's ok to regurgitate 50s-era lesbophobia if it's against trans women...this is why the queers gotta stick together lol)
-—-—-
mon Dieu - French; my god
Sorry for the delay! Laptop died (nothing lost, thanks to backups!) and editing/posting takes a bit longer, unfortunately.
