Clash
Another delightful prompt from vorpalbladedwitch on Tumblr that I think I decided was framed into a vaguely Cold War AU. This was not what I was going to write. Not at all. I kind of love it when that happens.
"Is that a gun? Or are you just happy to see me?"
It would be something to laugh at were this not in deadly earnest, though that's the better part of why she says it – lets the words drip, heavy with sardonic undertones, from crimson-painted lips into the winter air, each puff of breath clouding the pistol he has pressed against her jaw before fading in the face of the bitter chill. The metal is cold against skin left exposed by her scarf but she hardly feels it for the burn of his knuckles through the fine wool, of his cheek against her head and his other hand tight enough to bruise around one wrist, and she knows this is real, knows this is where it ends (whatever it is, and that's a question she's asked herself almost from the start, time and again, in these endless rounds of give and take and cloak and dagger) and that they would end up here someday but she hadn't thought it would be so soon, still doesn't know what she'd have wanted from him if things were different, and so she pulls her mouth into a smile she knows he can hear even if he cannot see and keeps the tension from her limbs and waits for what he'll do.
And what he'll do is spin her into the worn bricks behind them so he can look into her face, pin her there between the solid heat of his body and the cool wall, and she tips her head back, bares her throat in challenge rather than surrender, watches him from beneath half-lidded eyes as he swallows and wets his lips, but whatever misgivings he may have the barrel remains steady.
"Give me one good reason why I shouldn't kill you right this moment," he growls, low-voiced warning, and with those few words throws her off-balance, because she knows how serious this all is but she all too clearly has misjudged him – because the man she thought she knew would have either hauled her in by now or simply shot her, and nowhere in her estimations did him posing a question enter into it; she's having to reevaluate, reconsider, and for the first time in all this there's a spark of something she should quash but doesn't, can't, not when he's looking at her like that.
"You know what I did," she says, letting go of that knife-edged smirk because she can't laugh in the face of these unexpected possibilities; "now ask me why."