It was one of those ungodly hours of the morning where nothing quite felt real, where time itself seemed to stretch and contract. The moon had set, and there was nothing but a drifting greyness to the air; there was only uncertain footing at the tenuous, tenebrous line between day and night.

The air was cool and damp, and her hands were shaking. Spy glared at them until they stopped.

Sniper was worth it. If she could just have their platonic touch back, if she could just have their friendship, Spy could entomb her unprofessional, impossible dreams, bundle them and bury them deep in her psyche. If she could just hold her again, it would be enough, because Spy would make it be enough.

It was still a long moment before she lifted her hand and knocked twice on the camper door.

There was a long, devastating silence.

Then footsteps, and the door opened, and Sniper stood there.

It was the small things that immediately arrested Spy's attention - she couldn't quite see all of her, somehow, as though she was too much to encompass with mere human eyes with a mere human glance. So Spy fixed upon the minor puzzle as to why Sniper's hands and forearms were wet; it was the spot of soap-bubble on the inside of her elbow that made it click. She'd been washing out her mugs. She always did it herself, because the communal sinks had a suspicious habit of leaving nicks in her mugs - and Sniper was far too stingy to throw out a perfectly good mug that just happened to have a nick, so all her mugs were at this point mostly nick. It was such a familiar sight that it almost hurt. Sniper was an inveterate chore-doer when she was - ah. When she was worried or ill or in a foul temper.

She had missed this, the casual domesticity. Spy wondered, distantly, if Sniper had managed to fix the little hot-plate stove after all, or if she had indeed taken it to the RED Engineer ('And end up with an extra mode that gives the poor bugger off-road tires and a nuclear fusion mode? Not a chance, mate').

They stared at each other in stiff silence. Sniper was unreadable again behind her glasses, but there was tension in every line of her frame. One of those hands twitched toward Spy - perhaps to throttle her - before Sniper balled it into a fist. Ah, right. Time was still proceeding as normal, and any moment now Sniper would slam the door again.

"I apologize," Spy blurted out, and completely forgot the rest of her carefully prepared speech.

Sniper nodded, and at that slight sign of forgiveness the damp air tasted like wine.

"Did you mean it?" Sniper rasped, enunciating every word with apparent care. "That kiss?"

"It was an accident." Spy inhaled, and raised her chin proudly. "But on reflection, yes." If anything, Sniper looked tenser, and she ached to see it.

She fought her lying tongue and managed to say, without a drop of sarcasm, "However, this arrangement of ours - this friendship - is mutually beneficial and I do not wish to disrupt or destroy it. So, on my honor, on my life, on- on-" she cast about for something actually worthy "- on my knife, on anything and everything - it shall not happen again."

Wordlessly, Sniper opened her arms, and Spy, relieved beyond words, walked into them. Her own arms snaked around Sniper's back into their homes, and she let out a breath she felt like she'd been holding for weeks. She buried her face in the crook of Sniper's neck and breathed in the scent of her, the leather and the peppermint and the coffee and, today, the soap.

She would take what she could get. This was worth it.

They stayed like that for a long minute, and Spy gradually realized Sniper's heartbeat wasn't slowing - it beat a rapid tattoo. An almost feverish speed, that, comparable only to that which she'd felt back during the Crossbow Incident.

Concern tugging at her, she looked up and tried to see if Sniper's pupils were mismatched again.

Sniper was looking back down at her, expression still unreadable but for the slightest tug of a fond, lopsided little smile on her lips. Her pupils matched, though they were rather larger than normal, and Spy only had a moment to wonder about some new medical machination by RED's Medic before -

"Now that would be a damned pity," Sniper said with surprising intensity, and kissed her.

Spy's mind reeled in flat disbelief, in bewilderment and joy and the distant observation that Sniper did indeed taste like coffee; her body, though, had no such confusion.

She kissed back, fierce and desperate, as though if she stopped to breathe Sniper might change her mind, or Spy might wake up from this well-worn dream to the awful loneliness of her cold life.

But Sniper just seemed pleased by this response, and tightened her arms around Spy as though she'd been the one afraid and desperate, and that hurt to think about -

So instead, Spy cheekly nipped at the other woman's lip, and Sniper gave her a growl and riposte that sent heat pooling and pouring through her, twining around the longing and arousal and love, and she could feel her heartbeat fluttering in her fingertips to match Sniper's, every inch of contact searing and alive between them, too hot and not hot enough and -

She felt fragile enough to shatter with a touch. She felt stronger than she had in years. She felt like she was dying, and like she was living more than she had in the rest of her life put together.

They kissed, and breathed the same breath, and halfway to delirious Spy wondered at the astonishing diamond-sharp clarity of this new facet of their exchange, at Sniper in her arms so familiar, so safe, yet so new and unknown and precious and hers - there was some distant, quibbling part of her that wanted to sit down and dissect all these peculiar contradictions, but she cast it aside without a thought. This was right, and this was good, and Sniper's lips on hers were sweet and hot, her tongue bold and teasable, her body so warm and strong and close that Spy would've melted into her entirely if she wasn't so hungry -

One of them made a needy little noise, and Spy shoved Sniper back against the cabinets to further -

Or, she would have, but after a brief, puzzling struggle she found herself suddenly empty-armed and with her back against the wall.

A flushed, thoroughly-kissed-looking Sniper (and wasn't that an appetizing sight) blinked at her in similar confusion from her new position against the cabinets on the other side, and Spy belatedly realized what had happened the same time she did.

"We…both just tried to shove each other against a wall, didn't we," said Sniper, her expression warring between frustrated lust, affection, and growing mirth.

"Yes," said Spy, and cracked up laughing.

It wasn't even that funny, but she was giddy with relief and joy, so she laughed until her cheeks and stomach muscles ached, honking and hooting and snorting and wheezing until she was bent over with her hands on her knees.

Sniper had collapsed into a crouch, one hand smacking the floor as she was convulsed by her own half-silent laughter. This was fine, because Spy made enough noise for the both of them.

"Fuck off and come here, boofhead," Sniper said. She grabbed Spy's hand and reeled her down into a hug. Kneeling, they clung to each other as much for balance as for anything else.

"Not -" gasped Sniper, "Not exactly how I imagined being on my knees with you, but -"

And that set them off again.

In between shameless snorts, Spy managed to get out "I rather thought we were doing pretty well until, well -"

She could feel the laugh quiver its way up through Sniper's body, and that set the snorty giggles boiling out of her. Sniper's face was red under her tan, and Spy could feel her own bright flush.

Utterly beyond caring, Spy pulled off her balaclava and used it to dab off Sniper's tears, then her own. Sniper's expression at the sight of her bare face assuaged the few niggling anxieties she had left.

"Nice blob ya got there," said Sniper, finally. Spy could feel her stomach muscles quiver with the effort of not laughing.

Spy lightly smacked her with the balaclava. "I will murder you, you barbarian."

Sniper cupped Spy's cheek and ran a calloused thumb along her cheekbone, expression almost painfully tender. "All right, so maybe we fumbled the kissing a bit."

Spy reached up and tucked a stray strand of hair behind Sniper's ear, then curled her hand behind her neck. She tugged her hips closer with a finger through a belt loop. "On the contrary, I think the kissing was perfectly delightful. But I am very much looking forward to practicing both with you further."

"Fair warning," Sniper said with a challenging glint in her eyes. "Other walls may happen to you. I don't go quietly."

"No, I expect you to come very loudly indeed."

They were grinning hugely into each other's faces, and then they were kissing again, and Sniper seemed to be doing her very best to make sure Spy didn't have the breath or mental capacity to fire off any more terrible puns.

It was a very distracting best, but Spy eventually had to come up for air. "Bushwoman, I have a proposition."

"Hm?" Sniper sounded rather dreamy. Spy's hands had somehow gotten themselves out of their gloves and under Sniper's shirt; they were currently rejoicing at the lack of bra they'd found there.

"It occurs to one," she continued loftily, "that the benefits of platonic human touch might be amplified under -" the effect was rather ruined when Sniper moved from nuzzling the hollow of her throat to licking down her decolletage and into her cleavage and Spy made an unprintable noise, "- under conditions of nudity -"

"Dacker," said Sniper, hoarse, and was interrupted into her own undignified noise by one of Spy's hands sneaking down her spine and underneath her waistband. "Long as it's, ah, strictly platonic, o'course."

-—-

Sometime later, Spy snickered. "Bushwoman," she said, muffled.

"Instantly dry as a desert," Sniper said. It was a lie of such enormity that if she'd been wearing pants they would've caught fire. "Dessicated. If you say a single bloody word about being a cunning linguist, I swear I'll - hnk - "

Spy, feeling very pleased with herself indeed - especially since she hadn't, after all, remembered to clean out her jacket pockets - did that trick with her tongue again.

She always did enjoy getting the last word.

-—-

Much later, Sniper sat bolt upright.

"Wait a tick. Those weren't dates? Well what d'ya call 'em, then?!"

Spy - who had shamelessly wrapped herself, octopus-like, around the other woman - was hauled up with her. She blinked out of her doze. "I beg your…what?"

"Until you up and disappeared on me I thought we were just taking things slow because you had weird Spy intimacy issues to get over!"

"Weird Spy intimacy issues?"

Spy stared at her.

Sniper stared back. She looked nervous all of a sudden, and Sniper never looked nervous. She was unflappability personified.

"Are you saying," said Spy, carefully, "That you believe we have been in a romantic relationship for…some time now?

"Well yeah," she said, as if it were obvious. "You think I go around callin' just anybody 'possum'?"

"I - I have no idea what a possum is, in all honesty, but -"

Sniper started counting off her fingers. "And you're always flirting and calling me that little pet name, and we touch each other all the bloody time, and you keep sleepin' in my bed, and you look at me sometimes like you want to tear all my clothes off and eat me out right there on the floor -"

"I- I do?" Spy cleared her suddenly dry throat. "Well aside from the last one, the rest is all perfectly normal female behavior, I thought."

"Look mate, I had to sit down and think about it for a while but there is no way what we were doing was straight, even if you are European."

Spy just continued staring, mind working frantically to square this newest revelation with Sniper's behavior of the last few weeks - even months? How long -

A thread of panic entered Sniper's voice, and her hand knotted in the sheets. "Don't fucking tell me that was just a friendly root between friendly friends back there? Because I'm not gonna be able to just do that, not with you - "

"No, no! I return your - affections - entirely," Spy said, choking on the obvious like a fool. She grabbed Sniper's hand and wrapped her own around it, pulling it to herself as if to prevent the other woman from up and rushing out of her own home half-naked.

"Thank bleedin' Christ," Sniper said, and blew out her breath. "You really didn't think we were going steady, there?"

"I really - no." Spy seemed unable to string a full sentence together. "But how did you come to…? Why?"

"It made sense to me, you're so…er…forward in general that I reckoned you just weren't ready to move forward yet." Sniper looked at her hand, still caught in Spy's, and flexed it. "And I'm a patient woman, I like a good long hunt. I don't mind waiting for you to sort yourself out and all, lord knows how that career of yours has made you twitchy around trusting people, and that's me sayin' it. Justifiably so, if half the stories you've told me are true." She looked away, voice growing thoughtful. "You know, befriending you is like befriending a wild thing? A wild thing that likes to pretend it isn't. Slippery as all hell."

Under different circumstances Spy would have decided to be insulted by this, but she was so utterly flummoxed by this revelation that she hardly spared a thought to being peeved.

Sniper continued, "Anyway, I figured you'd just up and start something physical when you were good and ready. I admit, I'm a coward for not bringing it up outright, but you're so you when it comes to talking about serious things and I'm so damn bad at talking in general -"

Spy hid her face against Sniper's hand in hers, knuckles against her forehead. "Sniper, I was still trying to determine if you were straight or not."

Sniper looked confused. "You mean…you can't just see it? With your fancy spy skills?"

"You said you weren't gay!" Spy wailed.

"What?! When?"

"That first day, when you offered your original proposition." She slipped her voice into her best Sniper imitation and quoted the words that had been grinding a hole in her head for weeks now: " 'Don't, er, take any liberties, all right? M'not a dyke.' "

"I did? Hell, I hardly remember anything from that whole conversation, I was so nervous."

"You did not show it."

"Yeah, well, always had a good poker face. But damn, I probably just opened my mouth, shoved my foot in, and said the first dumb, defensive thing that I could think of. Women can get weird about touching you if they know you're gay."

"Do they now," said Spy, as dry and flat as the endless desert.

Sniper added hastily, "But it was the most pointless lie, I'm sure I'm very obviously a lezzo."

"I try not to assume based on appearances," said Spy, stiffly.

"…you mean it really isn't obvious? Look at me, I stand out like a shag on a rock."

Spy threw up her hands. "What am I supposed to do, smell the lesbianism on you? Look for tattoos of naked women?"

"I dunno, how do you usually do it? You're the ladykiller here!"

Spy crossed her arms. "I look into their files and history or break into their homes - entirely unsuccessful in your case, might I add - or drop increasingly obvious hints until the target understands what my intentions are."

"You went through my…why am I not surprised." Sniper smiled and shook her head as if breaking and entering was an amusing quirk of Spy's rather than an imprisonable crime and betrayal of trust. "Why didn't you just go for it, then? You know I'm not so good at the subtle-hinting and all."

Spy broke eye contact, her gaze skittering away. It was entirely ridiculous how this was the part she was embarrassed by. "I was afraid to be…forward, as you say, with a likely straight woman. On a target, I might take a chance, but by the time I knew I was interested I -" the words caught in her throat, and she cleared it "- I valued our friendship too much to risk it."

The other woman was quiet, and her gaze was drawn back to her as if magnetized.

Unfortunately, Sniper was giving her one of those annoyingly perceptive looks. "You overdramatic, gallant lil shit, you thought you were sparing your innocent straight friend from your horrible lezziness or some shite, weren't you. Is that- is that why you were so upset about what the RED Spy was nattering on about?"

"No!" Spy lied, liefully.

"Holey dooley, is that why you were being so squirrely about meeting for a while there? Were you pining?"

"Not at all!" she lied, even more poorly, and attempted to defend herself. "You are incredibly difficult to read sometimes, Sniper! It was far too risky -" Abruptly, several small mysteries shifted, and clicked into clarity. "Wait, that thing you do where your face goes stiff and blank, that isn't just your resting poker face, is it."

Sniper looked bewildered by the change in subject. "I don't know, is it? Usually around you I'm a bit too distracted by thinking about what I want to do with you to think about what my face is doing!"

Spy had an excellent memory, and it started replaying all the times when Sniper had gone unreadable at odd moments. Moments, she was starting to realize, that they could have spent much more productively kissing. Mon Dieu, how long exactly had this been going on?

"But why the bloody hell didn't you say anything about all this?!" Sniper exclaimed.

"Why did you not say anything?!"

They looked at each other for a long moment, somewhere between aghast and rueful.

Sniper began again, slowly, "So when you bussed my cheek the other day…"

"An unprofessional slip of my cover. I thought I had ruined everything." The honesty burned coming out, but Spy couldn't have stopped if she'd tried. "I thought you would despise me for seemingly only befriending you for sexual purposes."

"I thought you'd regretted us, regretted moving forward at last. Thought I'd messed up somehow, thought you decided you were done with me." Sniper's voice dropped, low and anguished; Spy's hand made its way back into hers, and tightened in mute comfort. "I did a lot of talking out loud to myself for a while there in the hopes you were lurking. Because you're damn hard to pin down when you don't want to be. And I'll admit it, I was afraid to try."

Something huge and serrated squeezed Spy's insides at the thought of Sniper blaming herself for Spy's idiot blunders. At the thought of her spending her days worrying at her scope and watching for Spy, afraid to act for fear of driving her farther away.

"Tragically, for perhaps the first time in my life I was not, in fact, eavesdropping." She fought her automatic light tone, and forced out, "I could not…bear to see what I had done, what I thought it'd lost with my slip. There was no way you could have played that 'right', because the error - and my ensuing panic - was entirely mine. What with the things the RED Spy told you, before, I thought you would see my behavior as confirmation of her insinuations."

Sniper screwed up her face, and looked like she wanted to spit. "God, what a slimy piece of work she is. An A-grade flog! The way she talked about you - I swear I saw red, and not in a ha-ha RED way, either. 'Prurient,' 'lecherous,' she said, as if that was all we had! As if it was just about sex and nothing more! Would've clocked her for that if it wouldn't have totally blown our cover."

Sniper didn't seem to understand. Spy insisted, "Oh, no, she was completely correct. I am precisely as she described."

Sniper groaned. "Don't you start. Obviously it's more than just lasciviousness and that shite."

"No, the rest. About the manipulation, and the selfishness, and the lying, and the taking, and the lack of conscience, and…" The self-loathing curled a thread around her throat and choked her into silence.

Sniper reached over and gently tugged at her earlobe, as if to scold her. "Darlin', I can't see into your mind. All I can see is how you've acted, and you've never been less than- gentlemanly to me. Even before, when you were laughin' at me bleeding out, I was doing the same to you, and fair's fair."

Spy had an objection to this, but couldn't seem to find the words.

But Sniper seemed to see it in her face. "Maybe listen less to how you think you are and say you are and more on how you actually act. That's what I do with you, anyway, you weird little liar." But she smiled as she said it.

"I shall take that under advisement," Spy said stiffly, mind whirring as she searched for the flaw, the deception, the falseness -

"Besides," Sniper said, and sighed. She looked down at their hands, and ran a thumb over Spy's knuckles. It felt oddly real without her gloves in the way. "I'm to blame here anyway. I shoulda said something. I was a damn coward. I shouldn't have assumed you could read me and I shouldn't have just let so many things go unspoken like I did."

This couldn't be allowed to stand. So with a surge of fierce, protective love Spy cupped the other woman's face and lifted her chin until their eyes met. "You are not to blame for my obliviousness," said Spy, firmly. "Nor are you a coward for finding it difficult to talk to someone who refuses to make herself vulnerable for serious conversation."

And as this was perhaps a bit too much verity for her, even now, she rolled her eyes in amused self-deprecation and added, "And it would be terribly convenient, but no, I am no mind-reader. I have training and experience, yes, but I am tragically just as human as anyone else."

"I don't think it's tragic at all. I like your…you." Sniper slanted a shy, sly little smile over at her.

"I suppose your you is halfway acceptable too," teased Spy back.

"And I guess you're not the worst shot I've seen."

"I'm swooning," said Spy. She laid the back of a hand against her forehead, looking up at Sniper from under her lashes. "I love it when you talk dirty."

They snickered like schoolchildren.

The question still lingered in Spy's mind. "But - you say you've been under the impression that we've been in some kind of relationship for some time now. So how long, exactly…?"

"Well," said Sniper, looking with apparent fascination at the ceiling. "You've always looked very good in those waistcoats, y'know. And with those damn crow's feet."

"Quality tailoring, you might consider it sometime."

"Shut it, you smug wanker." Sniper reached over and tweaked her nose. "Didn't much matter anyway - I still didn't think you were even human until that one day."

Spy tried to imagine which day this was, and failed. "However did I mislead you to that conclusion?"

"That one time early on, when you hugged me too hard and nearly cracked a rib? And after, you had an actual expression on your face, not a smug or disgusted look. Not that I don't like your smug looks, and work hard to get the disgusted ones," she added, cheekily.

"Oh," said Spy, nonplussed. "What kind of expression did I have?"

"Er." Sniper looked away. "Despair?"

Spy paused. "Are you often attracted to…"

"No! I just - the way this job makes me feel sometimes - I really sympathized with you right in that moment. Y'know, I'd seen you die hundreds, thousands of times before that, and even so you'd never break character. You were something like a force of bloody-minded nature instead of a person with actual feelings. It surprised me, I s'pose. And I started seeing you differently." Sniper wrapped her hand around Spy's and traced one of Spy's scars there.

Spy couldn't entirely stop the embarrassed flush. She couldn't even pretend it was just from being gloveless, either. "Entirely too kind for my own good."

Sniper continued, the words leaving her in a rush. "And then I walked into my camper weeks later - that first after-hours sesh, when you broke in - and you were sitting on my bed of all things and looking almost worried about it. I couldn't imagine you've ever been nervous about a bit of breaking and entering, so it had to be something else. So later, after you fell asleep on me like it was nothing - and that was another bloody revelation, I'll tell you that - I had a think about it all and reckoned you weren't ready to announce your interest and intentions so, er, blatantly as to be out loud, and that if I brought it up you - being you - would overreact and deny it and we'd be back to square one."

"That early," said Spy faintly. She really was fourteen kinds of idiot, wasn't she.

"If you didn't want to talk about it, that was fine, because I'm not exactly good at talking either. And I wasn't at all sure about actually having something with you then, o'course, because you were still the enemy Spy and all, but it turns out you're -" She hesitated, and said with all the gravity of a much larger pronouncement, "I enjoy your company. A lot. And that's not something I can say about most people."

Spy cleared her throat again. "I enjoy your company rather a lot as well. A rare and precious thing, in our profession."

"I wasn't entirely sure how this is supposed to work, this," Sniper gestured between them, "this having an ongoing relationship thing, and from those hints you'd drop about all your previous lovers it sounded like you were plenty experienced with this sort of stuff and just needed time. Which made sense, we're technically enemies and all."

Spy let her forehead land on the other woman's shoulder with a thunk. "Sniper, if this farce has taught me anything, it's that I have no idea what I'm doing. I am a naive idiot and have no conception of how to be in a relationship that is not built on lies and ulterior motives."

Sniper blinked. "Oh. Really?"

Spy added, "I fear you have me dead to rights, at least where the denying and overreaction is concerned, but you are no coward at all. You tend to be accommodating in social situations, that's all."

"Just don't like kicking up a fuss over nothing, is all," muttered Sniper, looking fixedly at their entwined fingers.

Spy raised their clasped hands and kissed Sniper's palm. "It's not nothing if it's something to you."

"I'll, er. Take that under advisement," said Sniper, and gave her another of those new, hesitant-and-hopeful smiles.

Spy arched a mock-scornful brow. "Really, if I have to be kind to myself or whatever nonsense you were spouting earlier, it's only fair if you do as well."

"Fine, fine, you harridan." Sniper ducked her head with her growing smile, and in another of those bursts of giddy adoration Spy leaned forward and kissed her on the temple. Because she wanted to, and because she could. It still felt unreal, to show herself so baldly and so earnestly - a woman could surely become drunk on such blatant affection, she thought. It couldn't be natural, but that had never stopped Spy before.

Sniper leaned into her touch, and they simply existed together for a long moment.

"So," said Sniper slowly, "If you didn't think we were going steady for bleedin' months now - and you better believe I'll razz you about that until you murder me for good - when did you fall for me?

"Ah, that," Spy said, and did not continue.

"C'mon," said Sniper, and poked her in the ribs. "I'm dead curious."

"Hmm…" said Spy, leaning back to mock-appraise her. "No. You shall have to either torture or seduce it out of me. It is far too devastatingly embarrassing."

"Oi, fair suck of the sauce bottle! I told you my embarrassing bits!"

Spy raised and arched a hand dramatically. "Honesty is one of your virtues but one of my vices, ma chacal. I've been far too debauched in that regard tonight for any spy's health."

Sniper just looked back at her in real appraisal. "You're doing the thing again, aren't you."

Spy sighed, and dropped the gesture for the act it was. "Yes, I am. Speaking honestly is…difficult for me; you may trust the RED Spy was correct on that. Truths - they twist on my tongue, and become true things said in jest or falsehoods said in perfect earnestness."

"Think I've picked that up, yeah."

"I do appreciate you prodding me on it. But perhaps for a little while longer, allow this decrepit old fatal fem to cloak herself in a shred or two of mystery." She looked away, and without the pressure of meeting Sniper's eyes was able to smuggle a bit more honestly out. "You're a terrible influence, you know. I haven't been this honest in…well. Decades, at the least."

"Sure," said Sniper, and the lines around her mouth deepened with easygoing humor. "Like I said, I enjoy a nice long hunt. And like you said, I'll just seduce it outta you." She pushed out her lips and fluttered her lashes in such a ridiculous way she must've picked it up from Spy herself. "Lemme know when the urge to disclose starts hittin' you. Aaaaany second now."

This made Spy laugh, of course, and Sniper joined her in it.

A rueful, comfortable silence grew, and Spy leaned her forehead against Sniper's. "What a mess." She edged closer and wrapped her arms around her again, because even now she yearned for her embrace. It was starting to feel like not such a bad thing, that yearning, a settled and steady joy instead of a gnawing, empty source of pain.

Sniper matched her, and quirked a brow in self-deprecation. "All right, fine, so maybe we're not the best at the whole communication thing, either."

"I will admit to some astonishment that our careers as lonely, paranoid assassins did not adequately prepare us for intimate, vulnerable conversation," said Spy, straight-faced.

"Well, we could practice that too. In between the kissing." Sniper leaned closer, looking so hopeful that Spy couldn't help but smile at her.

"Oh certainly, we cannot neglect that. I would say we thoroughly practiced communication, these last few minutes. Perhaps we could - "

They didn't need any more excuse than that.

-—-

Much, much later:

"What is a possum, anyway?"

"Real cute lil critter."

There was a frigid silence.

"If you are implying what I think you're implying…"

"You're being cute right n- "

And, well, Spy certainly had to cut that conversation short.

-—FIN—-

No bets on how, exactly, she cuts Sniper off. Don't mind me, just creeping along the edge of that T rating... Oh, and I know the general fan fiction expectation is to have a big sex scene end the fic, but when I find myself reading those kinds of fics I more often than not skip those scenes, weirdly enough. Even if they're well-written, they often feel oddly disconnected from the rest of the plot to me? So that's why this is something of a subversion of that - I do hope no one is disappointed! To me, it felt more narratively satisfying to arrange things this way. Like, thematically, they've spent the whole fic communicating pretty well through touch but not so well (at least about serious stuff) verbally - so having the ending be them finally getting things right both physically and verbally just felt Right. (Also because lord knows these two were too hornt up to actually talk things over before diving into physical release.)

I did promise every dumb romance trope in a trenchcoat, and there is nothing more dumbass lesbian than dating for months without realizing it. While the idea did initially strike me because I thought it would be a funny twist and also an extremely lesbian thing to do, the more I thought about it the more I wanted to include it. A certain amount of this fic is about the grey line between female friendship and female romance - for Spy, anxiety about where that line is was expressed primarily through her internalized lesbophobia ("this is a friendship and I'm making it gross and sexual and reading too much into things"); for Sniper, meanwhile, as a miscategorization of their relationship ("we do a lot of couple-y things and care a lot about each other, so we must be dating"). Compared to, say, the ingrained homophobia and very black-and-white line in many male friendships (as touched on in WaLHBE) that prevents men from getting the affection (physical and otherwise) they need. ...Not that my silly little fics are deep explorations into anything at all, lol - just some stuff that was on my mind as I wrote. It just interested me to think about how the pull and push dynamics play out so differently with just a gender swap.

Oh, and I do hope this fic rewards re-reads with that little revelation of Sniper's ;) I had a lot of fun planting her little blank-faced hints throughout the story. Spy is usually doing something stupid and sexy in those moments without realizing it, lol. Another fun bit for rereads - every scene that isn't just Spy moping/plotting alone contains some kind of touch between her and Sniper, violent or platonic or romantic or otherwise. Just a challenge for myself while writing.

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root - Aussie; sex, a fuck

lezzo (also spelled leso) - Aussie; lesbian

stand out like a shag on a rock - Aussie; incredibly obvious (a shag is a kind of seabird; imagine it standing on a bare rock in the middle of the waves)

flog - Aussie; someone who drinks their own bathwater, i.e. someone who thinks they're smart and cool and is very much not. A wanker.

fair suck of the sauce bottle - Aussie; steady on; be reasonable

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bingus1man - Gosh I love Soldier so much! She's just so purely Herself, y'know? I hope this last chapter was a satisfactory ending for ya, and thank you for all the comments c:

-Looking Ahead-

I don't want to up and promise anything, because life happens and writers get distracted or bored just like anyone else. But just as a sneak-peek into a possible future:

1) A shorter Halloween fic (yes I know, it's already November lol). Because Merasmagic is just too fun to inflict on people, especially if they are as egotistical as Spy is.

2) Another larger, full-fledged historical!AU fic, though this one'll need a LOT of research so I have no idea if it'll ever happen.

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I treasure (and am absolutely fueled by) every comment c: If you do leave one, maybe mention what your favorite scene/line/moment line was in the fic? V. curious to see what resonated with y'all.

Anyway, thank you very much for reading! Cya around :D