![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY
My last three "birthday" tagged posts have this exact same subject line. (Four now.)
OKAY WELL. It's that time again! I'm a few days late, but in my defense, I am also struggling (and I do mean s t r u g g l i n g ) to finish the KU project up! True to form, I have a list of edits I must do (short) and a list of edits I'd like to do (long), but I'm trying to let go of the part of myself that needs this to be absolutely perfect because I won't learn if I can actually make this work by being overly precious. (Besides, that kind of energy is already being devoted to TEF, and I'm loathe to put that kind of energy elsewhere anyway.)
BUT that's not what we're here for today. Today we celebrate a birthday! (3 days late, but uhhhh hey beats that time I took an extra 3 damn months to finish the thing, heh.) Better yet, we celebrate with a project I've been meaning to get back to for a long, long time. Years, you might say. Which I suppose is par for the course for me.
In any case, here she be :)
Title: Best Beware the Sting
Chapter: 2
Characters/Pairing: Bubbles/Princess, Ppg/RrB (one-sided?)
Rating: R/M for violence, language, and uhhh sexy situations I guess?
Disclaimer: Not my characters, please don’t sue me (or tell CMcC I exist).
Summary: Two teams of three try to 1) at best, beat each other up; 2) at worst, kill each other; 3) at least, work together. Spy/Assassin!AU.
Notes: Again, completely and wholly inspired by racketballs’ (IG) PpG as spies/RrB as assassins AU and is completely and wholly for racketballs. I forgive you for requesting this for your birthday and immediately forcing me to write a bunch of action scenes. (Happy Birthday!) Un-beta'd.
Best Beware the Sting
Chapter 2
-sbj
When Blossom was on the verge of death, it wasn’t her life that flashed before her eyes anymore. Her brain knew better at this point. It was a waste of processing power to reflect on the quieter moments that had led her here: her childhood of ballet recitals, of sleepovers with girlfriends, of the friendships that had fallen by the wayside and the others that had stayed true, of the unmemorable romantic relationships that had never held a candle to her own dreams or career. In fact, the first time she had faced her own mortality, it had been the scattered psychological testing throughout her life culminating in this dream job that had flown to the front of her mind first. A moment that had made her question, for the first time ever as she stared death in the face, if all of it was worth it. If it only came to this.
But that had only been the first time, and Blossom had gotten used to it. Her life flashing before her eyes? Please. She’d outgrown that ages ago.
No, what had risen to take its place now was far more beneficial. And blunt.
Don’t die.
Blossom jerked back just as her target-turned-attacker stomped the heel of his foot where her left boot had been, knocking into the people behind her.
“Watch it!” they yelped, throwing her off balance. She hit the ground and immediately whipped the knife out of her pocket and threw it as he took aim and fired. The knife glanced off the barrel, just enough to upset its aim and the bullet exploded into the carpet next to her ear.
She jumped up and took off sprinting into the now-screaming crowd, one hand over her ringing, deafened ear, the other going to the knives holstered under her opposite shoulder.
Red cap—Brick, she remembered from his dossier—fired three warning shots into the air as she pulled two more knives into her hand. The casino floor exploded into screams around Blossom, the floor’s occupants split between dropping to the ground and stampeding for the exits. She leaped onto the nearest table, upsetting towers of chips that cascaded across the surface as she twisted to face him and took aim.
That’s better. She saw his mouth forming the words, recognizing the shape of the sounds amidst the cacophony of screams. He aimed directly at her and fired.
***
Buttercup jerked back as Butch’s lips brushed her ear, her hand flying for his throat. He snatched her by the wrist and slammed it into the bar, but her other was already coming for his head and grabbed him by the hair to smash his face down into her knee.
Except her goddamn other arm was in the way so he just kinda smacked into her forearm. Thank the alcohol for confusing body geography.
Is that really geography? she thought, just as his foot hooked around the leg of her stool and jerked it out from under her.
She jumped off as the stool went flying, but his hand still had an iron grip on her arm. She took a page out of his book and kicked the stool out from under him, upsetting his balance just enough for him to release her.
“I’ve been waiting to do this all night,” she snarled, and punched him in the face.
He popped up almost instantly and returned the favor, boxing her on the ear, and cooed, “‘All night?’ Oh, E, baby, sorry I made you wait so long.”
Buttercup gritted her teeth against the ringing in her temple and went all in on the jabs, keeping them tight and contained so she could alternate between that and blocking, but fuck if it didn’t seem like enough of her hits were landing. She only managed to connect a couple of times at the expense of her own defense. For his part, he was defending annoyingly well for someone who’d imbibed enough alcohol to fell an elephant.
Fine. Props it is.
Buttercup snatched a bottle from the bar and swung it at Butch’s head.
He caught the body of the bottle with the heel of his palm and rolled it along his hand, grabbing it and twisting it out of her grasp. Before she knew it the bottlecapped neck was coming at her eye, and she dropped just enough for it to smack into her brow instead.
“Shit!” she hissed as she stumbled back, bumping another table in the process. The bar’s meager patrons had already fled at the sound of gunfire and somebody had left a bag behind, the contents of which now scattered across the table at Buttercup’s upsetting it. A jar of Vaseline rolling around caught her eye.
Butch laughed and twisted the bottlecap off for a victory swig. A second later he immediately spit it out.
“Oh, ew, gross, that’s awful, what the fuck is this?” he said, gagging, just as Buttercup caught him in the chest with a spinning back kick.
He Oofed but managed to hurl the bottle at her head. She caught it and attempted to smash it over his head, but her hands, still slick with Vaseline, couldn’t grip it tight enough, and it instead sailed out of her hand and across the room, shattering against a line of slot machines instead of Butch’s skull.
“Oh, God damn it!” she yelled, just as Butch popped her in the face. His knuckles slid along her slick cheek, and while it still smarted, at least it took the edge off the impact.
“Hey, fuck you,” he said. “Vaseline is cheating.”
She dropped and jabbed her elbow into his chest, sending him colliding against a table behind him. He grabbed a chair and flipped it into his hands, legs out, and thrust it at her. She twisted to avoid a leg in the diaphragm and face simultaneously, snatching one of them and smashing the heel of her hand at the joint to break it off just as he pulled away. She twisted back up and flung it at him, hoping it would hit him splinter end first.
He raised the chair to block it and she broke another leg of it off in the process, using this one to club him in the shin and causing him to take a knee. The Vaseline was still hell on her grip, so the hit wasn’t clean, and she swore as she shot back upright, ripping a swathe of fabric from her dress to wrap around her hand and secure her grip on her makeshift club.
“Alright, this thing isn’t as cool as I thought it was going to be,” he said, and simply brought it overhead to smash down on her. She blocked and it splintered into flecks of wood around her.
“On second thought,” Butch chirped, and grabbed another chair, smashing this one into her left and giving her just barely enough time to react and block before he grabbed another and smashed it into her right. This one connected and a sharp pain shot through her side, knocking the wind out of her. She stumbled over the bits of chair littering the ground, saw him turning to grab the much larger table behind him, and raised her forearms up to brace for impact.
Nothing. She looked up and saw—
“Oh, fuck me!” Butch said, yanking one more time for good measure before looking at her. “This thing is bolted—”
She yelled and whacked the club into his temple, sending him to the floor.
“Ow! Come on! This is really killing my buzz and I put a lot of work into getting drunk tonight!” he pleaded, then kicked her legs out from under her. She fell forward and landed on top of him.
“Oh but this helps,” he quipped, smirking, and she snarled and headbutted him. “Ow! That doesn’t!”
***
Bubbles heard the gunfire ringing out behind her, but she didn’t dare turn her back on Boomer, who had his own gun pointed at her, and while she would’ve preferred not to be staring it in the face the fact that he had a firearm at all was encouraging the terrified crowd to avoid their area entirely as they fled to the exits via the main casino floor. Hers was holstered under her arm but she hadn’t had time to reach for it and only had the baton in her hand at the ready. If she needed to she could try to block the shot, but that tended to work a lot better in the movies than in real life and she didn’t feel like testing it today.
Boomer made a wincing sort of face at her. “Kinda nutty, huh?”
“A little,” she allowed.
“Look, I’m a gentleman.”
“Uh huh.” Sure. How many times had she heard that before?
“I’m not interested in fighting you. I’ll put my weapon down. We can just chill till they’re—” Here he waved vaguely in either direction behind her. Somewhere to her right, Buttercup and his partner were duking it out in what sounded like a quickly escalating bar brawl, while off in the distance behind her left, Blossom seemed to be dodging gunshots. “You know. Done doing their thing.” He yawned. “I was up pretty late at that club last night and I’m not really feeling this right now.”
If the gun’s still firing that means she isn’t dead yet. Bubbles forced her attention away from her concern for her sister-in-arms and put all of her energy into squinting at him, recalling the details from his file and his social feed. “Are you serious?”
He flipped his gun around to hand it to her. “Seriously. My therapist tells me I should be drawing better boundaries and honestly I don’t have the spoons for this right now. I’d really rather just veg and talk.” Here his eyes sparkled a moment. “Maybe get to know you a bit?” He waggled the gun at her, beckoning for her to take it.
Her gaze flicked between his face and the proffered gun. This has to be a trap.
“I promise this isn’t a trap.”
In an instant the end of her baton was at his Adam’s apple, a hair away from striking. He had not flinched.
She called him out on it. “You didn’t flinch.”
He cracked a grin. “I knew you wouldn’t hit me.”
“Or your reflexes are bad.”
“They’re not,” he chirped. He was probably right. Their intel had confirmed otherwise. “Are you going to take the gun or not?”
She took the gun and stepped back, wondering if it was about to explode. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
She flipped it and aimed it at him. “Now what did you want to talk about?”
He beamed. “Wanna go out?”
She fired a warning shot at his feet. Again, he had not flinched.
Boomer gave the bullet hole at his feet a woeful look. “I figured it would be worth a shot.”
“Could be worth two if you keep playing that hand,” Bubbles said, cocking it again.
***
Blossom switched her comm back on as she ran from table to table, shots trailing in her wake. Some came close enough to tear through her longcoat and she heard them hitting the metal that lined its inner surface. Of course she’d get the sharpshooter.
The sound of gunfire stopped. Reloading; this was her chance. She cast a quick glance to confirm his location in the screaming crowd and spotted his red capped head in the flow of people heading towards the door for escape.
“Got you,” she muttered, and jumped down, sprinting towards his back and gaining ground as she flipped a knife into her hand. “Bellum! Do you have the Mayor?”
“The Mayor’s fine, but he’s obviously not who they were after! We’re sending a team in to retrieve you—”
“No,” Blossom interrupted. “You saw their files. We need to bring them in!”
“Blossom, there is a crowd of civilians—”
“All evacuating!” she shouted, now having met the thick of the crowd, and holding the knife close against her leather wrapped wrist to guard against any unintentional strikes of the blade. “Their case history is miles long; there’s no telling how many names they could give us. Besides, with all these people, it’ll be too hard for you to get backup in here. Just establish a perimeter. The girls and I got this.”
“I don’t—”
“Just do it!” she shouted, and shut off her comm. She was within feet of him now, weaving through the mass of people, and, with one final shove, slammed her outstretched arm down, her hand connecting with his shoulder and holding him fast.
“Got you,” she snarled, and whirled him around, knife raised to strike.
***
Bubbles pursed her lips, watching in muted disdain as Boomer ripped open a bag of kettle corn from the candy store she’d been standing in front of when he’d first approached her. With most of their side of the floor having been evacuated, they had opted to retreat to the relative safety of the store’s display window, which housed a set of armchairs that they were both now seated in. Between her sitting companion and the setting it felt like they were on ironic display, part of the décor. Surreal to be here while the rest of their compatriots were duking it out just outside their window. Though, well. She was pointing his own gun at him.
“Kettle corn?” he offered, holding the bag out to her.
“No, thank you.”
“Come here often?”
She considered the question, then indicated the store. “Here, specifically? Or Vegas?”
“Vegas.”
“Not often. But I’ve been to this casino before.” She nodded at the casino floor outside their window. “The chandelier is new.”
He tossed a handful of popcorn into his mouth, catching every kernel, and looked over. “Mmm. Think that’s real crystal?”
“Place like this? Probably.”
“You can put that down,” he said, waving at his gun in her hands.
“I know,” she said, not making any moves to comply. “Is this your only weapon?”
“Oh, there’s a knife on my calf.”
“Please hand it over, then. I can’t be too careful.”
Boomer pulled up the leg of his pants and undid the strap securing the sheathed weapon to his calf, then handed it over. “Be my guest. I hate wearing that thing.”
She watched him for a minute and considered asking him if he realized just how bad the situation was that he was in right now, then decided against it. She wasn’t about to complain about him making this easier for her. Besides, based on the file, the real brains behind the operation was the one shooting on the other side of the glass.
As evidenced by Boomer’s insistence on making small talk. “So where you from?”
“That’s classified,” she said simply.
“Oh, right. You like what you do?”
She half-shrugged, half-nodded. “Keeps me busy.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “So you don’t like it?”
“That’s not true. I like it. It just isn’t my entire life.”
He nodded sagely, seriously. “That’s healthy. See, that’s the place I want to get to. I think I’m having like a late coming-of-age moment, or a quarter-life crisis or something.”
“You don’t like being an assassin?”
“Eh.” His turn for a noncommittal shrug. “I like it enough. Lot more money in this than what I was doing before.”
“The stunt stuff?”
He lit up. “You know about that?”
“I mean. We do have a whole file on you guys.”
“Ohhhh. Yeah, that makes sense.”
Okay, well, the likelihood of this being a trap was looking less statistically possible the longer she spoke to him. Unless he was just very, very good at lying. Which was also still a real possibility. Not that she could do the math. Statistics had never been her forte.
From what she remembered, unlike his coworkers, this one had transitioned out of stuntwork into pyrotechnics before falling into this current gig of killing people for hire. Based on how their chat was going, she was guessing the move into assassination work hadn’t been his idea.
“Yeah, nobody does practical anymore. It’s all CG and VFX now.”
“I feel like I’ve seen some,” she protested lightly, racking her brain for movies she’d seen in the past year that possibly fit the bill.
“I mean, they do, but it was already shrinking when we got out of it a few years ago.”
“Is that what motivated the job change?”
“Part of it,” he said, a little cryptically.
“Do I need to worry about you blowing anything up?” she asked quietly, thinking of all the nooks and crannies in the casino where one could hide a bomb.
The smile on his face went from innocent to sinister in a flash, but within a blink the edge had disappeared from it.
“Usually,” he said, his voice bright. “But not tonight.”
Bubbles stared at him and considered again whether he was lying or telling the truth. As established, though, statistics had never been her forte.
“You should’ve been an actor,” she told him.
Boomer laughed. “Funny. I get that a lot.”
***
The Vaseline was starting to get annoying. While it had taken the edge off of any hits, the amount of hair and God-knew-what-else from the filthy casino carpet that was getting stuck to Buttercup’s petroleum jelly-slicked face was really impeding her reaction time.
Although some of that might be the alcohol, she allowed. Which was also this fucker’s fault.
They rolled over one another on the floor, each wrestling to be on top. Every time she managed to right herself, she was only able to get in a couple of blows, mostly on his torso. He kept blocking his head, which was fucking annoying. It was making him a lot harder to knock out.
“Stop making this so fucking difficult!” she shouted, practically punctuating each word with a fist that merely connected with his raised forearms instead of his skull.
Suddenly Butch’s knuckles whacked into her solar plexus, sending her flying backwards off of him, and as her back hit the carpet and she wheezed to catch her breath, he grabbed her by the shoulders and righted her, onto her feet. “And ruin my fun?” he sneered, voice low and buzzing in her ear. “No, thanks.”
He flung her up and over the bar, where she crashed into the wooden shelves against the wall, lined with bottles of liquor. The sound of glass shattering exploded around her, near deafening. She sensed herself hitting the floor and immediately assumed the fetal position, covering her face and neck with her arms to minimize the damage.
I’m going to kill Bubbles for convincing me to wear a fucking dress.
Miraculously, most of the bottles that landed on her hit her in one piece, while the ones that shattered had mostly hit the floor. She had escaped with only minor cuts along her left arm and back, possibly a few on her legs. The adrenaline was pumping too hard for her to do a thorough assessment, but in the interest of time she assumed it was all well and good enough since she was able to stand and didn’t feel any immediate pains of protest from her body. That or her body had just given up on sending the signal since it knew better than to distract her at this point.
Butch leaned over the bar, and, finding her still conscious, stretched his hand out for a bottle of simple syrup just out of his reach under her side of the bar counter. Luckily for her, the bar counter housed a bunch of bar top video poker consoles that got in his way, impeding his attempt, and before he could grab anything to throw she staggered to her feet and blindly grasped behind her, snatching a bottle of who-the-fuck-cared and throwing it right at his head. He backed away to avoid it hitting him, but it caught his hand as he jerked back.
“E!” he yelled, hissing in pain and flapping his hand. “Too rough, too rough!”
She grabbed at the clean pint glasses resting upside down next to the sink behind the bar and started flinging them at him, one after the other. Butch went on the defensive, blocking the first few, but Buttercup threw faster, mentally tallying each hit like it was a victory point—one for his shoulder, two at the ribs, another at his knee, and on and on. Even if most of them shattered against the floor or the columns while he dodged, every connection counted—especially the one that hit him base first near his eye, causing him to stumble back and take a knee.
Damn. Wish that one had shattered.
She jumped up on the bar but he had already recovered, half-squinting and now brandishing one of the chair legs that had broken off in their scuffle earlier, and swiped it towards her legs, intending to upset her balance. She spun out of the way, cursing at having to navigate the bar’s uneven surface in heels, and heard the telltale sound of little glass cracks splintering across the poker screens under her weight. Butch whipped the club towards her so fast and with such power she could hear the wind whistling in the wake of it as she whirled away from him across the bar top, but his rhythm was fairly even, predictable. Halfway through another twirl she changed course and slammed her foot down on the club as it came towards her, halting Butch mid-blow.
He followed the line of her leg up her body, all the way up to her face, and whistled in reverence. “Thank God you don’t skip leg day.”
She snarled and kicked him in the head with her other foot, sending him flying back across the floor, and wrenched the makeshift club out of the bar as she jumped down and stalked towards him with murderous intent. Then she remembered Blossom’s directive to bring them in alive and adjusted it to merely semi-murderous intent.
So what if she put a little more shoulder into this next hit? Clearly he could take it. He’d been taking it all night.
Buttercup reared back, ready for this next hit to be the one to knock him out, but as she started to drop he grabbed at a broken bottle next to him and stabbed it towards her face.
She yelped and caught herself with her core, tensing every last one of her ab and back muscles to keep herself from falling forward, flailing her club-wielding arm backwards comically as she struggled to right herself and keep from eating a faceful of broken glass.
Butch sat up, getting a better angle, and then the bottle was coming for her face again. But just a hair too late. She regained her balance and smashed the club into his hand, knocking the bottle away.
She expected to hear a snap or several, was waiting to hear the sound of metacarpals breaking from the strength of her hit. However, his now-empty hand instead turned, grabbing back at the club, and yanked her towards him, and then his other hand was immediately closing around her throat and squeezing, hard.
Brace! her head screamed at her, and she tensed her neck muscles as much as possible, but she wasn’t quite quick enough, and her lungs were suddenly fighting for oxygen. She grabbed at the vicelike grip of Butch’s hand on her throat as she smacked the club against his back with the other, once, twice, another and another, and was gratified to see the grimace of pain on his face as she connected, but his grip didn’t loosen, and then the bar was at her back as his free hand closed around the hand wielding the weapon. He smashed her hand back against the surface of the bar and she winced at the pain, but refused to let go.
Her vision was tunneling. Her body could take a hell of a beating, but oxygen? No, it liked oxygen. And if she didn’t get some soon, she’d—
She kicked but only found air and realized Butch was holding her off the ground. She couldn’t get any leverage. Her teeth felt like they were going to crack from how hard she was gritting them as she struggled to breathe. Everything was starting to blur. Even his face, coming close. No smirk or smile on him now. If she wasn’t about to pass out from being choked to death, she’d almost believe he wasn’t enjoying this.
She felt the club dropping out of her hand and then his other hand was joining the first around her neck, and she scrabbled uselessly at his arm, trying to punch it, or tear at his skin, anything, but she couldn’t even manage the strength for a scratch.
God damn it. She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of watching her eyes roll back in her head as she lost consciousness.
Through the miasma of slow unconsciousness threatening to overtake her, she heard him sigh. It almost sounded sad.
“This is such a fucking shame,” she heard him murmur as her head started to go all floaty. “This is the best fight I’ve had in a long time.”
There was a wistfulness to his tone that she attributed to the fog that had now penetrated her entire being, warping the world around her. Something unwelcome churned inside her stomach. Or lower. Or wherever. Her head couldn’t seem to remember where the rest of her body was right now.
Before everything could go completely black, she cracked her eyes open and forced herself to look. Butch’s brilliant green gaze—looking a little less brilliant than before—filled her vision; he was that close.
Something inside her sighed.
Fine.
Buttercup dropped her hands and let her head fall forward, finally relenting.
She wasn’t sure if her lips actually connected with his—she wasn’t quite feeling much of anything in her face anymore when it happened—but she remembered a soft, quiet sound of desperation ghosting past her lips, and feeling it echo back at her, off of someone else’s skin.
Then something changed.
Pressure lifted away from her neck and her lungs responded instantly, her body going into autopilot and fighting to live even though her brain couldn’t quite manage to pull itself upright yet. She took in a desperate gulp of air as the pressure that had previously been wrapped around her neck moved and locked at her hips instead, and she gasped again as Butch slammed his torso against hers, chest to chest, hips to hips, hoisting her legs around his waist. Her next gasping inhale was cut off by his mouth meeting hers and once again her body responded of its own accord, pulling just enough away from his lips to pant for air, desperate little moaning gasps filling the meager space between their faces as she struggled to fill her lungs with more oxygen.
“Oh, fuck,” she heard him whisper, and then felt his fingers crawling up her bare thighs, sparking like electricity on her skin. Those fingers, those hands moved inward, and she rolled her hips forward, pushing her face back against his. The feeling was back now and she could tell. Her mouth was definitely on his mouth. Her tongue was definitely on his tongue.
She pushed against him and down and he let her, falling back against the carpet glittering with glass. No fight, no resistance. He yielded. She ground down. He moaned.
Buttercup pulled back with a breathless sigh, sitting upright and staring down at Butch with a smile.
“Man,” she said, a smirk playing at her mouth as she rolled her hips against his. “Wish I’d done that sooner.”
He grinned up at her, the sneer gone from his face. “Me t—”
He cut off abruptly, spotting the club back in her hand. Raised high.
“Oh, shi—”
Buttercup shut him up in one hit. Shut him up good.
She held tense for a second, just in case. But then his body went slack underneath her and she relaxed, her shoulders slumping, weary with sudden, immense relief. She checked to make sure he was still breathing. Yes, which was good for their mission. Though she wouldn’t have minded terribly if he wasn’t.
Her hair was in her face. This God damned Vaseline. She scrubbed as much of it off her face as she could, her hands stinging sore and numb from all the hits and nicks of glass, and glared down at the body prone beneath her. After a moment, she spat.
“Fuck you for making me do that,” she said at Butch’s unconscious body as she dragged herself to her feet.
Gunfire was still going. She took a few steps towards Blossom’s fight, then winced and held a hand to her throbbing head, swiping at her bruised lip with the other and then examining the blood left behind on her palm.
If he’s still firing, that means Blossom’s still alive.
Buttercup turned and limped back to the bar, fumbled for a bottle of beer on the other side, then collapsed into a seat.
I earned this, she thought, staring at Butch’s prone body as she whacked the bottlecap off with the edge of the bar. She scowled and swiped at her lips again. Boy, did I earn it.
She kept an ear out on Blossom’s fight as she tipped the bottle to her swollen lips. One beer, she promised herself. Then I’ll go help.
Assuming Blossom even needed it.
***
The hat was a ruse. Blossom stared in the face of this terrified stranger wearing the assassin’s baseball cap and couldn’t believe she’d fallen for it.
“Shoot,” she whispered, and dropped, dragging the hapless decoy down with her as a gun fired and they flattened on the ground. She sent a momentary prayer up that he hadn’t hit anything vital and hustled the other guy back up to his feet before he could get trampled.
“Hey sweetheart!” A voice from around her seven o’clock rang out over the screaming crowd as she wedged herself against a craps table, out of the last vestiges of the stampeding crowd. “If you’re worried about these people, you better stand up and make this easier. Save your colleagues the extra paperwork. Unintentional civilian death is, what, an additional five forms per person? I know you government types like to put a lot of red tape on this kinda shit.”
Judging from his movement, he was approaching her eight. Blossom examined the lining of his cap perfunctorily as he spoke, but it yielded no secrets. She tossed it aside and quickly assessed her knife collection—all still present and accounted for, miraculously. She took a deep breath.
Steady heart, steady voice.
“And here I thought you were real silly for calling attention to yourself wearing red,” she called back. The crowds had had enough time to thin out, leaving the casino floor completely empty, and she inched around the end of the table, staying low as she palmed as many of her lightest knives as she could fit into her palm. If one of them managed to hit, it wouldn’t cut deep, but it could buy her enough time to charge him.
“I figured one of us should dress up for the occasion.”
She needed to get within enough range to make a difference. She could almost always beat a man with a gun at about twenty-five feet, but that was before it was drawn, and for a professional murderer she figured she’d need to cut that in half and then some. Ten to twelve feet did not give her a wide margin of error.
Her attention shifted to the craps table she was crouched behind. Twelve feet long, give or take? About three tables away she could see his slow, steady step, the toes of his shoes pointed in her direction. He was moving sideways, along the edge of another table. Table was probably around a hundred pounds, which meant she could flip it if need be, but these were likely bolted to the ground and she didn’t want to risk giving away her specific position by making a stupid assumption.
Where is he aiming? If she could get close enough and come at him from an angle that required him to re-aim, she could do more damage. Anything to buy her enough time to avoid getting shot by a guy with really, really good aim who was also trying to kill her.
“You’re the guy who wore a baseball cap and you don’t think I dressed up?” she said, then immediately snuck towards the far end of her table, eyes on his legs all the while. His shoes were still pointed at the other end, and she crept a table row closer as he rounded the corner of his own. There were now two rows separating them, and soon there would only be the empty lane between his and hers and twelve feet of craps table, assuming he kept up his approach.
Twelve feet. I can do this in twelve feet.
Can, nothing. She had to.
“The cap was a diversion.” He scoffed. “Pretty stupid of you to fall for it.”
He was too close for her to risk speaking now. She went still and kept as silent as possible.
A long pause passed and the sound of his footsteps quietly padding across the carpet took the place of their dialogue. Blossom could hear another fight going on. It sounded like Buttercup. No idea where Bubbles had gone.
Don’t worry about them. Worry about yourself.
The footsteps she was watching so intently—now in the aisle next to hers, at the opposite end of the craps table, stopped. “Gotten shy?”
Her gaze trailed up to the tower of chips on the table next to her.
He started to say something else and without standing she threw a knife over the top of her table, followed by a splash of chips in the opposite direction before she dashed around the table and got inside his reach, within arm’s length—
While he was preoccupied with stopping the knife flying to his throat with his free hand, she caught and smashed the arm with the gun against the table, attempting a break. He braced in the nick of time and let go of his weapon, sacrificing the gun so he could grab her by the hair.
As she watched the knife he’d caught—her knife—flip in his hand, aimed towards her, she stamped the heel of her boot to extend the blade in its sole and kicked at him. He let go of her hair as he jumped back to dodge the slash, throwing the stolen knife back at her; it was too late for her to duck but she managed to shield herself with her coat. It made a sharp pinging sound as it glanced off of its brethren, a neat row of knives sheathed in the lining, and she took advantage of the brief cover to grab at the gun he’d left behind on the table.
No, she corrected. He’s going to reach for another gun.
She left the gun behind and charged at him instead, taking another knife in hand just as he reached inside his jacket for the other pistol, and she slashed at the leather holster it sat in so it fell, arcing away, out of his reach. A brief surge of triumph shot through her as he gritted his teeth and cursed.
Don’t celebrate yet. He was fast, he’d stopped her knife, he was a professional killer. She had to narrow his options. Blossom whirled around with her bladed boot, careful with her footfalls to avoid injury to herself, and whipped her leg high, aiming a roundhouse kick at his chest. As he jumped back she heard him snatch the other gun, followed by a telltale click, and she instantly changed course, using the momentum from her 180 to duck and charge into him, slamming his back into a craps table.
The angle wasn’t ideal for her, but it knocked the wind out of him, which was enough. And it helped that the craps tables were, indeed, bolted to the floor.
He started to re-aim while she snatched another knife and jabbed it at the meat of his thumb in the hand grasping the gun, but once again he sacrificed the shot, jerking his arm back so hard she was shocked he hadn’t dislocated his shoulder.
He isn’t stupid. Not that his dossier had given her any inclination to believe otherwise. But he was exceptionally aware of where she was moving and working hard to avoid having her hit vital tendons. Quite simply, he didn’t want to get cut.
That doesn’t mean I can’t still do damage.
He kneed her in the torso and she gritted her teeth against the pain. Even though she was wearing a vest it hurt like crazy, but she muscled through, jamming her elbow into the flesh of his inner thigh while stabbing once again at the hand holding the gun.
Once again it twisted away, leaving her knife to merely nick the back of his hand as he tossed the gun to his other side. He caught it with his free hand perfectly—a practiced move that inexplicably annoyed her to no end, even as she grabbed at his original arm and used it as leverage to roll her body horizontally up along his. She threw the weight of her back against his torso, trying to slam his back against the table while kicking at his opposite hand that now held the gun, with no degree of success at either.
Why won’t he let go?! And what is with his stupid BACKBEND?!
Before she could further curse his flexibility he picked her up and flipped her over, off of him, throwing her against another table. Chips went flying around her as her ears rang from the impact; the only saving grace of all this physical work was the fact that it was keeping him from truly being able to take aim and fire, and the least she could do was keep it that way.
Thank God throwing the knives was instinctual; second nature for her at this point. She sent another one flying at his hand, where it glanced off the pistol, upsetting his aim just enough.
“Damn it!” he snapped, which was satisfying. At least she was pissing him off as much as he was her.
She sent another one after him, aiming for his torso, but he dropped over the edge and the next instant she realized he was diving for his other gun.
No you don’t.
Blossom jumped up and sprinted across the tables to kick him in the back of the head, but to her consternation he dodged it and changed course, twisting to reach for one of her knives inside the lining of her coat.
She gasped and slammed the heel of her boot between his shoulders before he could get there, knocking him down to the ground and finally, finally, he lost his grip and the gun dropped out of his hand, to the floor. An opportunity.
Both guns in sight, out of his hands. She jumped down and dashed over, drawing her foot back and intending to kick both guns out of the way—
Until her knife boot caught on the carpet and stopped her cold, stuck.
Her turn to snap. “Damn it!”
She managed to retract the blade just as an unfamiliar touch slid along her torso from underneath her—his hand, his arm, skating across her body as he wrapped his fingers around one of her most prized possessions. Around one of her many knives, custom-made for her touch, for her hands.
Rage surged inside her at the knowledge of him touching even just one of her things, even moreso than the body contact, and within moments she had snatched another and stabbed at him—and this piece of human garbage had the audacity to block her with her own knife.
His face, which up to this point had remained stony and cold, seemed now to have the slightest hint of a smirk. Which was offensive beyond all reason.
In an instant she twisted and stabbed at him from another direction but this, too, was blocked. But her movement had been intentional; she had wedged her hip between his legs and now she slammed herself forward, pinning him against the craps table and hoping her hip was sharp enough to hurt him where it counted.
Judging from the way he hissed and knocked into her as he doubled over, it didn’t tickle. So she twisted forward and kneed him in the nuts for good measure.
“You fucking—”
She cut him off by slamming the butt end of her knife into his forehead, knocking him back so hard his back hit the table, and then she pinned his open blazer to the table with both knives before flipping another into her hand and jumping up, readying a punch to knock him out.
To her dismay he recovered far too quickly. He dropped, slipping out of his coat just as her knuckles met the unforgiving surface of the table, then rammed up into her torso, flipping her so she sailed over him and onto her back, crashing down on the felted wood.
Suddenly she was staring dazedly up at the casino ceiling, with its ridiculous, excessively opulent glass chandeliers hanging from a mirrored ceiling, a myriad of lights reflected a million times over that only amplified her disorientation. The sound of tearing fabric yanked her back into reality, the clear sound of him tearing one of the knives (One of my knives, she thought torpidly) out of the felted table surface, and her body acted on instinct, rolling to the side as those million lights glinted along the metal of the blade that came slamming down where she had been only a moment ago—she heard it connect with the table briefly then separate, and she automatically rolled to the other side as it came down again, barely catching her sleeve. She threw her leg up and her knee connected with his head, hard, and she couldn’t tell if the cracking sound came from him or her. Based on how her knee felt, odds were good her.
Or maybe it was him after all. The knife he’d been stabbing at her with was still stuck in the table. He had backed away, and as she was finally able to twist up, she saw he had backed into the other table, hand to his forehead.
Before he could recover fully, she was on him, the point of her knife fixed on his Adam’s apple. She’d thrown her jacket aside, the rest of her collection far from his wandering hands. The shoulder holster he was wearing was empty of its cargo, dangling uselessly off of him.
She watched as his chin tilted up and his hand fell away from his face, his gaze fixed on the hand holding the thing he couldn’t see but could definitely feel. She watched for a swallow, hoped for it, even, but disappointingly, he didn’t react that way.
Blossom was not generally one to gloat, but in this case, she found she couldn’t much help herself.
“Can’t do much without your guns, can you?” she muttered, trying to steady her rough breathing.
The arrogant prick laughed through some heavy breathing of his own. “I learned something about knife fights early.”
“You’re awful talkative for someone who just lost.”
“I learned,” he went on, his voice low and measured, “that in a knife fight, no matter what you do, you’re bound to get cut.”
A safety clicked, followed by the pressure of cold metal against her side.
Damn it.
His eyes bored into her and the laugh had gone from his expression. “So you better just have a gun.”
A long moment of silence passed between them, underscored by the gradual slowing of their respective breaths and the incessant melody of slot machines trumpeting false victory all around them.
Finally, he spoke. “Did you really think I only had two guns on me?”
“You could have as many guns as I have knives and I’d still beat you.”
“I daresay you won’t like getting gutshot.”
“Oh, but you like getting stabbed in the throat?” she returned archly.
A sneer tugged at the corner of his mouth, though his eyes remained stoic. “I know you don’t want to kill me. I’m too valuable alive. You, on the other hand?” His voice dropped low again and his gaze darkened. “You’re worth more to me dead.”
“I’d like to see how well you collect a paycheck with a slit throat.”
“You won’t—”
Blossom responded with pressure of her own, cutting him off. For all his toughness, skin was still only skin, and with a blade this sharp it took only a breath to summon a trickle of red that ran down his neck. A lazy, unhurried drop that was barely even a drop. But it shut him up. And he didn’t pull the trigger.
“I learned something about knife fights, too,” she murmured, ignoring the screams in her head to back away from the gun in her side, the pleas for self-preservation, the urge to save her own skin, her own neck. All familiar, all correct. And yet. All paled in comparison to one inner voice that held dominion over the rest.
I do not lose.
“You’re bound to get cut,” she went on, her death grip tightening on her weapon as her eyes narrowed, meeting every ounce of hatred in his glare with a pound of her own. “So quit your whining and just get used to it.”
Her statement was underscored by a tinkling sound above them, then metal connecting with something hard, and both of them shifted their eyes to the side and upward. Something was lodged in the wall of the casino, high up. A knife. Blossom and Brick squinted, almost in unison.
“What the—”
A single gunshot interrupted them, and the two of them jerked away from each other, Blossom’s hand immediately going to her stomach to staunch whatever insane amount of blood was sure to surge out of her as she jumped back. She’d really been hoping to avoid this—
She paused when the pain didn’t immediately surface and patted her stomach again. Dry. No blood. It wasn’t—
Her thoughts were interrupted by the cacophonous crash of crystal in front of her, tiny prisms of light scattering like dust around the room. Her opponent, she realized, wasn’t so lucky. The chandelier landed on him, and he had been backed against the table.
She dashed up and shifted the chandelier aside, a million little crystals singing while concern in her gut was coiling like a spring. If he’s dead—
Not dead, thankfully. But definitely unconscious. Even with that thick red hair covering his scalp, a significant bump was already visible on the crown of his head. It seemed the stainless steel plate of the chandelier from which all the crystal tassels dangled had finally managed what she couldn’t.
“Told you I could do it. Pay up.”
Bubbles. Blossom looked over to the stairs and found both Bubbles and—
She stared, dumbfounded, as their blonde target cursed and pulled some bills out of his wallet. “Damn,” he said. “Nice shot.”
“With your gun, too,” Bubbles chirped as she pocketed her winnings, then spotted Blossom and waved from her vantage point on the upper landing. “Hey! Is that all of them?”
A knife appeared in the banister next to Boomer. He cast Blossom the barest of glances and held one hand up lazily. “Don’t worry. I surrendered, like, first thing.”
The words Come quietly died on Blossom’s tongue as she watched Bubbles wave him towards the stairs heading down, now pointing what was supposedly his own gun back at him. He obediently complied.
“Here.” Buttercup, looking worse for the wear, appeared at Blossom’s side, heaving her equally bruised and bloodied target on top of Brick’s body.
“Oh my God, Buttercup, you look wrecked. You okay?”
“Ask me after I’ve had like a bucket of morphine,” Buttercup grumbled.
Blossom sniffed and wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think you should be mixing that with alcohol. How much did you drink?”
“Not enough,” she responded, wincing and collapsing to the ground, legs stretched out in front of her. “I can still feel things.”
Bubbles and her charge joined them, and Boomer, arms raised while Bubbles had his own gun at his back, issued a low whistle. “Wow. You fucked Butch up good. He takes hits like an elephant.”
“You guys were going at it awhile,” Bubbles said to the woman on the floor. “How’d you finally do it?”
Buttercup groaned. “I don’t wanna talk about it,” she said, her tone carrying an undercurrent of finality to it. Blossom flicked on her comm.
“Good to go,” she told Bellum. “Send in retrieval.”
“Can I go to the bathroom first?” Boomer asked, raising his hand. “And can I also get my knife back?”
Blossom stared blankly, then gave Bubbles a look. “Why is he still conscious?”
He covered his head and pulled away from Blossom a bit. “I don’t want to deal with a head injury. Just put a bag over my head or something.”
“A plastic one,” Buttercup supplied dryly.
He looked down at her, frowning, then took in the unconscious Butch and extended his hand. “Hi. I’m Boomer.”
“Do I look like I fucking care?”
“Please tell me retrieval will be here soon,” Blossom whispered into her comm.
“Heading in now,” Bellum’s voice assured her. “Nice work tonight, Blossom.”
“Hold your applause.” Blossom took in the unarmed, still conscious assassin, flanked on either side by Bubbles and Buttercup, chatting as if this were a casual hang and not a thwarted attempt on their lives. Her gaze then trailed down to the unconscious pair of men at her feet, lingering on the redheaded troublemaker that had given her so much grief this evening. She was already mentally readying herself for the interrogation that was to follow once they got back to HQ and couldn’t help but grimace. “The night isn’t over yet.”
-end ch2-
I might need a new tag for this one. So fun to work on this, honestly! Would love to hear what y'all think 💗
AO3 | FFNet | AskFM | Ko-Fi
OKAY WELL. It's that time again! I'm a few days late, but in my defense, I am also struggling (and I do mean s t r u g g l i n g ) to finish the KU project up! True to form, I have a list of edits I must do (short) and a list of edits I'd like to do (long), but I'm trying to let go of the part of myself that needs this to be absolutely perfect because I won't learn if I can actually make this work by being overly precious. (Besides, that kind of energy is already being devoted to TEF, and I'm loathe to put that kind of energy elsewhere anyway.)
BUT that's not what we're here for today. Today we celebrate a birthday! (3 days late, but uhhhh hey beats that time I took an extra 3 damn months to finish the thing, heh.) Better yet, we celebrate with a project I've been meaning to get back to for a long, long time. Years, you might say. Which I suppose is par for the course for me.
In any case, here she be :)
Title: Best Beware the Sting
Chapter: 2
Characters/Pairing: Bubbles/Princess, Ppg/RrB (one-sided?)
Rating: R/M for violence, language, and uhhh sexy situations I guess?
Disclaimer: Not my characters, please don’t sue me (or tell CMcC I exist).
Summary: Two teams of three try to 1) at best, beat each other up; 2) at worst, kill each other; 3) at least, work together. Spy/Assassin!AU.
Notes: Again, completely and wholly inspired by racketballs’ (IG) PpG as spies/RrB as assassins AU and is completely and wholly for racketballs. I forgive you for requesting this for your birthday and immediately forcing me to write a bunch of action scenes. (Happy Birthday!) Un-beta'd.
Best Beware the Sting
Chapter 2
-sbj
When Blossom was on the verge of death, it wasn’t her life that flashed before her eyes anymore. Her brain knew better at this point. It was a waste of processing power to reflect on the quieter moments that had led her here: her childhood of ballet recitals, of sleepovers with girlfriends, of the friendships that had fallen by the wayside and the others that had stayed true, of the unmemorable romantic relationships that had never held a candle to her own dreams or career. In fact, the first time she had faced her own mortality, it had been the scattered psychological testing throughout her life culminating in this dream job that had flown to the front of her mind first. A moment that had made her question, for the first time ever as she stared death in the face, if all of it was worth it. If it only came to this.
But that had only been the first time, and Blossom had gotten used to it. Her life flashing before her eyes? Please. She’d outgrown that ages ago.
No, what had risen to take its place now was far more beneficial. And blunt.
Don’t die.
Blossom jerked back just as her target-turned-attacker stomped the heel of his foot where her left boot had been, knocking into the people behind her.
“Watch it!” they yelped, throwing her off balance. She hit the ground and immediately whipped the knife out of her pocket and threw it as he took aim and fired. The knife glanced off the barrel, just enough to upset its aim and the bullet exploded into the carpet next to her ear.
She jumped up and took off sprinting into the now-screaming crowd, one hand over her ringing, deafened ear, the other going to the knives holstered under her opposite shoulder.
Red cap—Brick, she remembered from his dossier—fired three warning shots into the air as she pulled two more knives into her hand. The casino floor exploded into screams around Blossom, the floor’s occupants split between dropping to the ground and stampeding for the exits. She leaped onto the nearest table, upsetting towers of chips that cascaded across the surface as she twisted to face him and took aim.
That’s better. She saw his mouth forming the words, recognizing the shape of the sounds amidst the cacophony of screams. He aimed directly at her and fired.
***
Buttercup jerked back as Butch’s lips brushed her ear, her hand flying for his throat. He snatched her by the wrist and slammed it into the bar, but her other was already coming for his head and grabbed him by the hair to smash his face down into her knee.
Except her goddamn other arm was in the way so he just kinda smacked into her forearm. Thank the alcohol for confusing body geography.
Is that really geography? she thought, just as his foot hooked around the leg of her stool and jerked it out from under her.
She jumped off as the stool went flying, but his hand still had an iron grip on her arm. She took a page out of his book and kicked the stool out from under him, upsetting his balance just enough for him to release her.
“I’ve been waiting to do this all night,” she snarled, and punched him in the face.
He popped up almost instantly and returned the favor, boxing her on the ear, and cooed, “‘All night?’ Oh, E, baby, sorry I made you wait so long.”
Buttercup gritted her teeth against the ringing in her temple and went all in on the jabs, keeping them tight and contained so she could alternate between that and blocking, but fuck if it didn’t seem like enough of her hits were landing. She only managed to connect a couple of times at the expense of her own defense. For his part, he was defending annoyingly well for someone who’d imbibed enough alcohol to fell an elephant.
Fine. Props it is.
Buttercup snatched a bottle from the bar and swung it at Butch’s head.
He caught the body of the bottle with the heel of his palm and rolled it along his hand, grabbing it and twisting it out of her grasp. Before she knew it the bottlecapped neck was coming at her eye, and she dropped just enough for it to smack into her brow instead.
“Shit!” she hissed as she stumbled back, bumping another table in the process. The bar’s meager patrons had already fled at the sound of gunfire and somebody had left a bag behind, the contents of which now scattered across the table at Buttercup’s upsetting it. A jar of Vaseline rolling around caught her eye.
Butch laughed and twisted the bottlecap off for a victory swig. A second later he immediately spit it out.
“Oh, ew, gross, that’s awful, what the fuck is this?” he said, gagging, just as Buttercup caught him in the chest with a spinning back kick.
He Oofed but managed to hurl the bottle at her head. She caught it and attempted to smash it over his head, but her hands, still slick with Vaseline, couldn’t grip it tight enough, and it instead sailed out of her hand and across the room, shattering against a line of slot machines instead of Butch’s skull.
“Oh, God damn it!” she yelled, just as Butch popped her in the face. His knuckles slid along her slick cheek, and while it still smarted, at least it took the edge off the impact.
“Hey, fuck you,” he said. “Vaseline is cheating.”
She dropped and jabbed her elbow into his chest, sending him colliding against a table behind him. He grabbed a chair and flipped it into his hands, legs out, and thrust it at her. She twisted to avoid a leg in the diaphragm and face simultaneously, snatching one of them and smashing the heel of her hand at the joint to break it off just as he pulled away. She twisted back up and flung it at him, hoping it would hit him splinter end first.
He raised the chair to block it and she broke another leg of it off in the process, using this one to club him in the shin and causing him to take a knee. The Vaseline was still hell on her grip, so the hit wasn’t clean, and she swore as she shot back upright, ripping a swathe of fabric from her dress to wrap around her hand and secure her grip on her makeshift club.
“Alright, this thing isn’t as cool as I thought it was going to be,” he said, and simply brought it overhead to smash down on her. She blocked and it splintered into flecks of wood around her.
“On second thought,” Butch chirped, and grabbed another chair, smashing this one into her left and giving her just barely enough time to react and block before he grabbed another and smashed it into her right. This one connected and a sharp pain shot through her side, knocking the wind out of her. She stumbled over the bits of chair littering the ground, saw him turning to grab the much larger table behind him, and raised her forearms up to brace for impact.
Nothing. She looked up and saw—
“Oh, fuck me!” Butch said, yanking one more time for good measure before looking at her. “This thing is bolted—”
She yelled and whacked the club into his temple, sending him to the floor.
“Ow! Come on! This is really killing my buzz and I put a lot of work into getting drunk tonight!” he pleaded, then kicked her legs out from under her. She fell forward and landed on top of him.
“Oh but this helps,” he quipped, smirking, and she snarled and headbutted him. “Ow! That doesn’t!”
***
Bubbles heard the gunfire ringing out behind her, but she didn’t dare turn her back on Boomer, who had his own gun pointed at her, and while she would’ve preferred not to be staring it in the face the fact that he had a firearm at all was encouraging the terrified crowd to avoid their area entirely as they fled to the exits via the main casino floor. Hers was holstered under her arm but she hadn’t had time to reach for it and only had the baton in her hand at the ready. If she needed to she could try to block the shot, but that tended to work a lot better in the movies than in real life and she didn’t feel like testing it today.
Boomer made a wincing sort of face at her. “Kinda nutty, huh?”
“A little,” she allowed.
“Look, I’m a gentleman.”
“Uh huh.” Sure. How many times had she heard that before?
“I’m not interested in fighting you. I’ll put my weapon down. We can just chill till they’re—” Here he waved vaguely in either direction behind her. Somewhere to her right, Buttercup and his partner were duking it out in what sounded like a quickly escalating bar brawl, while off in the distance behind her left, Blossom seemed to be dodging gunshots. “You know. Done doing their thing.” He yawned. “I was up pretty late at that club last night and I’m not really feeling this right now.”
If the gun’s still firing that means she isn’t dead yet. Bubbles forced her attention away from her concern for her sister-in-arms and put all of her energy into squinting at him, recalling the details from his file and his social feed. “Are you serious?”
He flipped his gun around to hand it to her. “Seriously. My therapist tells me I should be drawing better boundaries and honestly I don’t have the spoons for this right now. I’d really rather just veg and talk.” Here his eyes sparkled a moment. “Maybe get to know you a bit?” He waggled the gun at her, beckoning for her to take it.
Her gaze flicked between his face and the proffered gun. This has to be a trap.
“I promise this isn’t a trap.”
In an instant the end of her baton was at his Adam’s apple, a hair away from striking. He had not flinched.
She called him out on it. “You didn’t flinch.”
He cracked a grin. “I knew you wouldn’t hit me.”
“Or your reflexes are bad.”
“They’re not,” he chirped. He was probably right. Their intel had confirmed otherwise. “Are you going to take the gun or not?”
She took the gun and stepped back, wondering if it was about to explode. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
She flipped it and aimed it at him. “Now what did you want to talk about?”
He beamed. “Wanna go out?”
She fired a warning shot at his feet. Again, he had not flinched.
Boomer gave the bullet hole at his feet a woeful look. “I figured it would be worth a shot.”
“Could be worth two if you keep playing that hand,” Bubbles said, cocking it again.
***
Blossom switched her comm back on as she ran from table to table, shots trailing in her wake. Some came close enough to tear through her longcoat and she heard them hitting the metal that lined its inner surface. Of course she’d get the sharpshooter.
The sound of gunfire stopped. Reloading; this was her chance. She cast a quick glance to confirm his location in the screaming crowd and spotted his red capped head in the flow of people heading towards the door for escape.
“Got you,” she muttered, and jumped down, sprinting towards his back and gaining ground as she flipped a knife into her hand. “Bellum! Do you have the Mayor?”
“The Mayor’s fine, but he’s obviously not who they were after! We’re sending a team in to retrieve you—”
“No,” Blossom interrupted. “You saw their files. We need to bring them in!”
“Blossom, there is a crowd of civilians—”
“All evacuating!” she shouted, now having met the thick of the crowd, and holding the knife close against her leather wrapped wrist to guard against any unintentional strikes of the blade. “Their case history is miles long; there’s no telling how many names they could give us. Besides, with all these people, it’ll be too hard for you to get backup in here. Just establish a perimeter. The girls and I got this.”
“I don’t—”
“Just do it!” she shouted, and shut off her comm. She was within feet of him now, weaving through the mass of people, and, with one final shove, slammed her outstretched arm down, her hand connecting with his shoulder and holding him fast.
“Got you,” she snarled, and whirled him around, knife raised to strike.
***
Bubbles pursed her lips, watching in muted disdain as Boomer ripped open a bag of kettle corn from the candy store she’d been standing in front of when he’d first approached her. With most of their side of the floor having been evacuated, they had opted to retreat to the relative safety of the store’s display window, which housed a set of armchairs that they were both now seated in. Between her sitting companion and the setting it felt like they were on ironic display, part of the décor. Surreal to be here while the rest of their compatriots were duking it out just outside their window. Though, well. She was pointing his own gun at him.
“Kettle corn?” he offered, holding the bag out to her.
“No, thank you.”
“Come here often?”
She considered the question, then indicated the store. “Here, specifically? Or Vegas?”
“Vegas.”
“Not often. But I’ve been to this casino before.” She nodded at the casino floor outside their window. “The chandelier is new.”
He tossed a handful of popcorn into his mouth, catching every kernel, and looked over. “Mmm. Think that’s real crystal?”
“Place like this? Probably.”
“You can put that down,” he said, waving at his gun in her hands.
“I know,” she said, not making any moves to comply. “Is this your only weapon?”
“Oh, there’s a knife on my calf.”
“Please hand it over, then. I can’t be too careful.”
Boomer pulled up the leg of his pants and undid the strap securing the sheathed weapon to his calf, then handed it over. “Be my guest. I hate wearing that thing.”
She watched him for a minute and considered asking him if he realized just how bad the situation was that he was in right now, then decided against it. She wasn’t about to complain about him making this easier for her. Besides, based on the file, the real brains behind the operation was the one shooting on the other side of the glass.
As evidenced by Boomer’s insistence on making small talk. “So where you from?”
“That’s classified,” she said simply.
“Oh, right. You like what you do?”
She half-shrugged, half-nodded. “Keeps me busy.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “So you don’t like it?”
“That’s not true. I like it. It just isn’t my entire life.”
He nodded sagely, seriously. “That’s healthy. See, that’s the place I want to get to. I think I’m having like a late coming-of-age moment, or a quarter-life crisis or something.”
“You don’t like being an assassin?”
“Eh.” His turn for a noncommittal shrug. “I like it enough. Lot more money in this than what I was doing before.”
“The stunt stuff?”
He lit up. “You know about that?”
“I mean. We do have a whole file on you guys.”
“Ohhhh. Yeah, that makes sense.”
Okay, well, the likelihood of this being a trap was looking less statistically possible the longer she spoke to him. Unless he was just very, very good at lying. Which was also still a real possibility. Not that she could do the math. Statistics had never been her forte.
From what she remembered, unlike his coworkers, this one had transitioned out of stuntwork into pyrotechnics before falling into this current gig of killing people for hire. Based on how their chat was going, she was guessing the move into assassination work hadn’t been his idea.
“Yeah, nobody does practical anymore. It’s all CG and VFX now.”
“I feel like I’ve seen some,” she protested lightly, racking her brain for movies she’d seen in the past year that possibly fit the bill.
“I mean, they do, but it was already shrinking when we got out of it a few years ago.”
“Is that what motivated the job change?”
“Part of it,” he said, a little cryptically.
“Do I need to worry about you blowing anything up?” she asked quietly, thinking of all the nooks and crannies in the casino where one could hide a bomb.
The smile on his face went from innocent to sinister in a flash, but within a blink the edge had disappeared from it.
“Usually,” he said, his voice bright. “But not tonight.”
Bubbles stared at him and considered again whether he was lying or telling the truth. As established, though, statistics had never been her forte.
“You should’ve been an actor,” she told him.
Boomer laughed. “Funny. I get that a lot.”
***
The Vaseline was starting to get annoying. While it had taken the edge off of any hits, the amount of hair and God-knew-what-else from the filthy casino carpet that was getting stuck to Buttercup’s petroleum jelly-slicked face was really impeding her reaction time.
Although some of that might be the alcohol, she allowed. Which was also this fucker’s fault.
They rolled over one another on the floor, each wrestling to be on top. Every time she managed to right herself, she was only able to get in a couple of blows, mostly on his torso. He kept blocking his head, which was fucking annoying. It was making him a lot harder to knock out.
“Stop making this so fucking difficult!” she shouted, practically punctuating each word with a fist that merely connected with his raised forearms instead of his skull.
Suddenly Butch’s knuckles whacked into her solar plexus, sending her flying backwards off of him, and as her back hit the carpet and she wheezed to catch her breath, he grabbed her by the shoulders and righted her, onto her feet. “And ruin my fun?” he sneered, voice low and buzzing in her ear. “No, thanks.”
He flung her up and over the bar, where she crashed into the wooden shelves against the wall, lined with bottles of liquor. The sound of glass shattering exploded around her, near deafening. She sensed herself hitting the floor and immediately assumed the fetal position, covering her face and neck with her arms to minimize the damage.
I’m going to kill Bubbles for convincing me to wear a fucking dress.
Miraculously, most of the bottles that landed on her hit her in one piece, while the ones that shattered had mostly hit the floor. She had escaped with only minor cuts along her left arm and back, possibly a few on her legs. The adrenaline was pumping too hard for her to do a thorough assessment, but in the interest of time she assumed it was all well and good enough since she was able to stand and didn’t feel any immediate pains of protest from her body. That or her body had just given up on sending the signal since it knew better than to distract her at this point.
Butch leaned over the bar, and, finding her still conscious, stretched his hand out for a bottle of simple syrup just out of his reach under her side of the bar counter. Luckily for her, the bar counter housed a bunch of bar top video poker consoles that got in his way, impeding his attempt, and before he could grab anything to throw she staggered to her feet and blindly grasped behind her, snatching a bottle of who-the-fuck-cared and throwing it right at his head. He backed away to avoid it hitting him, but it caught his hand as he jerked back.
“E!” he yelled, hissing in pain and flapping his hand. “Too rough, too rough!”
She grabbed at the clean pint glasses resting upside down next to the sink behind the bar and started flinging them at him, one after the other. Butch went on the defensive, blocking the first few, but Buttercup threw faster, mentally tallying each hit like it was a victory point—one for his shoulder, two at the ribs, another at his knee, and on and on. Even if most of them shattered against the floor or the columns while he dodged, every connection counted—especially the one that hit him base first near his eye, causing him to stumble back and take a knee.
Damn. Wish that one had shattered.
She jumped up on the bar but he had already recovered, half-squinting and now brandishing one of the chair legs that had broken off in their scuffle earlier, and swiped it towards her legs, intending to upset her balance. She spun out of the way, cursing at having to navigate the bar’s uneven surface in heels, and heard the telltale sound of little glass cracks splintering across the poker screens under her weight. Butch whipped the club towards her so fast and with such power she could hear the wind whistling in the wake of it as she whirled away from him across the bar top, but his rhythm was fairly even, predictable. Halfway through another twirl she changed course and slammed her foot down on the club as it came towards her, halting Butch mid-blow.
He followed the line of her leg up her body, all the way up to her face, and whistled in reverence. “Thank God you don’t skip leg day.”
She snarled and kicked him in the head with her other foot, sending him flying back across the floor, and wrenched the makeshift club out of the bar as she jumped down and stalked towards him with murderous intent. Then she remembered Blossom’s directive to bring them in alive and adjusted it to merely semi-murderous intent.
So what if she put a little more shoulder into this next hit? Clearly he could take it. He’d been taking it all night.
Buttercup reared back, ready for this next hit to be the one to knock him out, but as she started to drop he grabbed at a broken bottle next to him and stabbed it towards her face.
She yelped and caught herself with her core, tensing every last one of her ab and back muscles to keep herself from falling forward, flailing her club-wielding arm backwards comically as she struggled to right herself and keep from eating a faceful of broken glass.
Butch sat up, getting a better angle, and then the bottle was coming for her face again. But just a hair too late. She regained her balance and smashed the club into his hand, knocking the bottle away.
She expected to hear a snap or several, was waiting to hear the sound of metacarpals breaking from the strength of her hit. However, his now-empty hand instead turned, grabbing back at the club, and yanked her towards him, and then his other hand was immediately closing around her throat and squeezing, hard.
Brace! her head screamed at her, and she tensed her neck muscles as much as possible, but she wasn’t quite quick enough, and her lungs were suddenly fighting for oxygen. She grabbed at the vicelike grip of Butch’s hand on her throat as she smacked the club against his back with the other, once, twice, another and another, and was gratified to see the grimace of pain on his face as she connected, but his grip didn’t loosen, and then the bar was at her back as his free hand closed around the hand wielding the weapon. He smashed her hand back against the surface of the bar and she winced at the pain, but refused to let go.
Her vision was tunneling. Her body could take a hell of a beating, but oxygen? No, it liked oxygen. And if she didn’t get some soon, she’d—
She kicked but only found air and realized Butch was holding her off the ground. She couldn’t get any leverage. Her teeth felt like they were going to crack from how hard she was gritting them as she struggled to breathe. Everything was starting to blur. Even his face, coming close. No smirk or smile on him now. If she wasn’t about to pass out from being choked to death, she’d almost believe he wasn’t enjoying this.
She felt the club dropping out of her hand and then his other hand was joining the first around her neck, and she scrabbled uselessly at his arm, trying to punch it, or tear at his skin, anything, but she couldn’t even manage the strength for a scratch.
God damn it. She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of watching her eyes roll back in her head as she lost consciousness.
Through the miasma of slow unconsciousness threatening to overtake her, she heard him sigh. It almost sounded sad.
“This is such a fucking shame,” she heard him murmur as her head started to go all floaty. “This is the best fight I’ve had in a long time.”
There was a wistfulness to his tone that she attributed to the fog that had now penetrated her entire being, warping the world around her. Something unwelcome churned inside her stomach. Or lower. Or wherever. Her head couldn’t seem to remember where the rest of her body was right now.
Before everything could go completely black, she cracked her eyes open and forced herself to look. Butch’s brilliant green gaze—looking a little less brilliant than before—filled her vision; he was that close.
Something inside her sighed.
Fine.
Buttercup dropped her hands and let her head fall forward, finally relenting.
She wasn’t sure if her lips actually connected with his—she wasn’t quite feeling much of anything in her face anymore when it happened—but she remembered a soft, quiet sound of desperation ghosting past her lips, and feeling it echo back at her, off of someone else’s skin.
Then something changed.
Pressure lifted away from her neck and her lungs responded instantly, her body going into autopilot and fighting to live even though her brain couldn’t quite manage to pull itself upright yet. She took in a desperate gulp of air as the pressure that had previously been wrapped around her neck moved and locked at her hips instead, and she gasped again as Butch slammed his torso against hers, chest to chest, hips to hips, hoisting her legs around his waist. Her next gasping inhale was cut off by his mouth meeting hers and once again her body responded of its own accord, pulling just enough away from his lips to pant for air, desperate little moaning gasps filling the meager space between their faces as she struggled to fill her lungs with more oxygen.
“Oh, fuck,” she heard him whisper, and then felt his fingers crawling up her bare thighs, sparking like electricity on her skin. Those fingers, those hands moved inward, and she rolled her hips forward, pushing her face back against his. The feeling was back now and she could tell. Her mouth was definitely on his mouth. Her tongue was definitely on his tongue.
She pushed against him and down and he let her, falling back against the carpet glittering with glass. No fight, no resistance. He yielded. She ground down. He moaned.
Buttercup pulled back with a breathless sigh, sitting upright and staring down at Butch with a smile.
“Man,” she said, a smirk playing at her mouth as she rolled her hips against his. “Wish I’d done that sooner.”
He grinned up at her, the sneer gone from his face. “Me t—”
He cut off abruptly, spotting the club back in her hand. Raised high.
“Oh, shi—”
Buttercup shut him up in one hit. Shut him up good.
She held tense for a second, just in case. But then his body went slack underneath her and she relaxed, her shoulders slumping, weary with sudden, immense relief. She checked to make sure he was still breathing. Yes, which was good for their mission. Though she wouldn’t have minded terribly if he wasn’t.
Her hair was in her face. This God damned Vaseline. She scrubbed as much of it off her face as she could, her hands stinging sore and numb from all the hits and nicks of glass, and glared down at the body prone beneath her. After a moment, she spat.
“Fuck you for making me do that,” she said at Butch’s unconscious body as she dragged herself to her feet.
Gunfire was still going. She took a few steps towards Blossom’s fight, then winced and held a hand to her throbbing head, swiping at her bruised lip with the other and then examining the blood left behind on her palm.
If he’s still firing, that means Blossom’s still alive.
Buttercup turned and limped back to the bar, fumbled for a bottle of beer on the other side, then collapsed into a seat.
I earned this, she thought, staring at Butch’s prone body as she whacked the bottlecap off with the edge of the bar. She scowled and swiped at her lips again. Boy, did I earn it.
She kept an ear out on Blossom’s fight as she tipped the bottle to her swollen lips. One beer, she promised herself. Then I’ll go help.
Assuming Blossom even needed it.
***
The hat was a ruse. Blossom stared in the face of this terrified stranger wearing the assassin’s baseball cap and couldn’t believe she’d fallen for it.
“Shoot,” she whispered, and dropped, dragging the hapless decoy down with her as a gun fired and they flattened on the ground. She sent a momentary prayer up that he hadn’t hit anything vital and hustled the other guy back up to his feet before he could get trampled.
“Hey sweetheart!” A voice from around her seven o’clock rang out over the screaming crowd as she wedged herself against a craps table, out of the last vestiges of the stampeding crowd. “If you’re worried about these people, you better stand up and make this easier. Save your colleagues the extra paperwork. Unintentional civilian death is, what, an additional five forms per person? I know you government types like to put a lot of red tape on this kinda shit.”
Judging from his movement, he was approaching her eight. Blossom examined the lining of his cap perfunctorily as he spoke, but it yielded no secrets. She tossed it aside and quickly assessed her knife collection—all still present and accounted for, miraculously. She took a deep breath.
Steady heart, steady voice.
“And here I thought you were real silly for calling attention to yourself wearing red,” she called back. The crowds had had enough time to thin out, leaving the casino floor completely empty, and she inched around the end of the table, staying low as she palmed as many of her lightest knives as she could fit into her palm. If one of them managed to hit, it wouldn’t cut deep, but it could buy her enough time to charge him.
“I figured one of us should dress up for the occasion.”
She needed to get within enough range to make a difference. She could almost always beat a man with a gun at about twenty-five feet, but that was before it was drawn, and for a professional murderer she figured she’d need to cut that in half and then some. Ten to twelve feet did not give her a wide margin of error.
Her attention shifted to the craps table she was crouched behind. Twelve feet long, give or take? About three tables away she could see his slow, steady step, the toes of his shoes pointed in her direction. He was moving sideways, along the edge of another table. Table was probably around a hundred pounds, which meant she could flip it if need be, but these were likely bolted to the ground and she didn’t want to risk giving away her specific position by making a stupid assumption.
Where is he aiming? If she could get close enough and come at him from an angle that required him to re-aim, she could do more damage. Anything to buy her enough time to avoid getting shot by a guy with really, really good aim who was also trying to kill her.
“You’re the guy who wore a baseball cap and you don’t think I dressed up?” she said, then immediately snuck towards the far end of her table, eyes on his legs all the while. His shoes were still pointed at the other end, and she crept a table row closer as he rounded the corner of his own. There were now two rows separating them, and soon there would only be the empty lane between his and hers and twelve feet of craps table, assuming he kept up his approach.
Twelve feet. I can do this in twelve feet.
Can, nothing. She had to.
“The cap was a diversion.” He scoffed. “Pretty stupid of you to fall for it.”
He was too close for her to risk speaking now. She went still and kept as silent as possible.
A long pause passed and the sound of his footsteps quietly padding across the carpet took the place of their dialogue. Blossom could hear another fight going on. It sounded like Buttercup. No idea where Bubbles had gone.
Don’t worry about them. Worry about yourself.
The footsteps she was watching so intently—now in the aisle next to hers, at the opposite end of the craps table, stopped. “Gotten shy?”
Her gaze trailed up to the tower of chips on the table next to her.
He started to say something else and without standing she threw a knife over the top of her table, followed by a splash of chips in the opposite direction before she dashed around the table and got inside his reach, within arm’s length—
While he was preoccupied with stopping the knife flying to his throat with his free hand, she caught and smashed the arm with the gun against the table, attempting a break. He braced in the nick of time and let go of his weapon, sacrificing the gun so he could grab her by the hair.
As she watched the knife he’d caught—her knife—flip in his hand, aimed towards her, she stamped the heel of her boot to extend the blade in its sole and kicked at him. He let go of her hair as he jumped back to dodge the slash, throwing the stolen knife back at her; it was too late for her to duck but she managed to shield herself with her coat. It made a sharp pinging sound as it glanced off of its brethren, a neat row of knives sheathed in the lining, and she took advantage of the brief cover to grab at the gun he’d left behind on the table.
No, she corrected. He’s going to reach for another gun.
She left the gun behind and charged at him instead, taking another knife in hand just as he reached inside his jacket for the other pistol, and she slashed at the leather holster it sat in so it fell, arcing away, out of his reach. A brief surge of triumph shot through her as he gritted his teeth and cursed.
Don’t celebrate yet. He was fast, he’d stopped her knife, he was a professional killer. She had to narrow his options. Blossom whirled around with her bladed boot, careful with her footfalls to avoid injury to herself, and whipped her leg high, aiming a roundhouse kick at his chest. As he jumped back she heard him snatch the other gun, followed by a telltale click, and she instantly changed course, using the momentum from her 180 to duck and charge into him, slamming his back into a craps table.
The angle wasn’t ideal for her, but it knocked the wind out of him, which was enough. And it helped that the craps tables were, indeed, bolted to the floor.
He started to re-aim while she snatched another knife and jabbed it at the meat of his thumb in the hand grasping the gun, but once again he sacrificed the shot, jerking his arm back so hard she was shocked he hadn’t dislocated his shoulder.
He isn’t stupid. Not that his dossier had given her any inclination to believe otherwise. But he was exceptionally aware of where she was moving and working hard to avoid having her hit vital tendons. Quite simply, he didn’t want to get cut.
That doesn’t mean I can’t still do damage.
He kneed her in the torso and she gritted her teeth against the pain. Even though she was wearing a vest it hurt like crazy, but she muscled through, jamming her elbow into the flesh of his inner thigh while stabbing once again at the hand holding the gun.
Once again it twisted away, leaving her knife to merely nick the back of his hand as he tossed the gun to his other side. He caught it with his free hand perfectly—a practiced move that inexplicably annoyed her to no end, even as she grabbed at his original arm and used it as leverage to roll her body horizontally up along his. She threw the weight of her back against his torso, trying to slam his back against the table while kicking at his opposite hand that now held the gun, with no degree of success at either.
Why won’t he let go?! And what is with his stupid BACKBEND?!
Before she could further curse his flexibility he picked her up and flipped her over, off of him, throwing her against another table. Chips went flying around her as her ears rang from the impact; the only saving grace of all this physical work was the fact that it was keeping him from truly being able to take aim and fire, and the least she could do was keep it that way.
Thank God throwing the knives was instinctual; second nature for her at this point. She sent another one flying at his hand, where it glanced off the pistol, upsetting his aim just enough.
“Damn it!” he snapped, which was satisfying. At least she was pissing him off as much as he was her.
She sent another one after him, aiming for his torso, but he dropped over the edge and the next instant she realized he was diving for his other gun.
No you don’t.
Blossom jumped up and sprinted across the tables to kick him in the back of the head, but to her consternation he dodged it and changed course, twisting to reach for one of her knives inside the lining of her coat.
She gasped and slammed the heel of her boot between his shoulders before he could get there, knocking him down to the ground and finally, finally, he lost his grip and the gun dropped out of his hand, to the floor. An opportunity.
Both guns in sight, out of his hands. She jumped down and dashed over, drawing her foot back and intending to kick both guns out of the way—
Until her knife boot caught on the carpet and stopped her cold, stuck.
Her turn to snap. “Damn it!”
She managed to retract the blade just as an unfamiliar touch slid along her torso from underneath her—his hand, his arm, skating across her body as he wrapped his fingers around one of her most prized possessions. Around one of her many knives, custom-made for her touch, for her hands.
Rage surged inside her at the knowledge of him touching even just one of her things, even moreso than the body contact, and within moments she had snatched another and stabbed at him—and this piece of human garbage had the audacity to block her with her own knife.
His face, which up to this point had remained stony and cold, seemed now to have the slightest hint of a smirk. Which was offensive beyond all reason.
In an instant she twisted and stabbed at him from another direction but this, too, was blocked. But her movement had been intentional; she had wedged her hip between his legs and now she slammed herself forward, pinning him against the craps table and hoping her hip was sharp enough to hurt him where it counted.
Judging from the way he hissed and knocked into her as he doubled over, it didn’t tickle. So she twisted forward and kneed him in the nuts for good measure.
“You fucking—”
She cut him off by slamming the butt end of her knife into his forehead, knocking him back so hard his back hit the table, and then she pinned his open blazer to the table with both knives before flipping another into her hand and jumping up, readying a punch to knock him out.
To her dismay he recovered far too quickly. He dropped, slipping out of his coat just as her knuckles met the unforgiving surface of the table, then rammed up into her torso, flipping her so she sailed over him and onto her back, crashing down on the felted wood.
Suddenly she was staring dazedly up at the casino ceiling, with its ridiculous, excessively opulent glass chandeliers hanging from a mirrored ceiling, a myriad of lights reflected a million times over that only amplified her disorientation. The sound of tearing fabric yanked her back into reality, the clear sound of him tearing one of the knives (One of my knives, she thought torpidly) out of the felted table surface, and her body acted on instinct, rolling to the side as those million lights glinted along the metal of the blade that came slamming down where she had been only a moment ago—she heard it connect with the table briefly then separate, and she automatically rolled to the other side as it came down again, barely catching her sleeve. She threw her leg up and her knee connected with his head, hard, and she couldn’t tell if the cracking sound came from him or her. Based on how her knee felt, odds were good her.
Or maybe it was him after all. The knife he’d been stabbing at her with was still stuck in the table. He had backed away, and as she was finally able to twist up, she saw he had backed into the other table, hand to his forehead.
Before he could recover fully, she was on him, the point of her knife fixed on his Adam’s apple. She’d thrown her jacket aside, the rest of her collection far from his wandering hands. The shoulder holster he was wearing was empty of its cargo, dangling uselessly off of him.
She watched as his chin tilted up and his hand fell away from his face, his gaze fixed on the hand holding the thing he couldn’t see but could definitely feel. She watched for a swallow, hoped for it, even, but disappointingly, he didn’t react that way.
Blossom was not generally one to gloat, but in this case, she found she couldn’t much help herself.
“Can’t do much without your guns, can you?” she muttered, trying to steady her rough breathing.
The arrogant prick laughed through some heavy breathing of his own. “I learned something about knife fights early.”
“You’re awful talkative for someone who just lost.”
“I learned,” he went on, his voice low and measured, “that in a knife fight, no matter what you do, you’re bound to get cut.”
A safety clicked, followed by the pressure of cold metal against her side.
Damn it.
His eyes bored into her and the laugh had gone from his expression. “So you better just have a gun.”
A long moment of silence passed between them, underscored by the gradual slowing of their respective breaths and the incessant melody of slot machines trumpeting false victory all around them.
Finally, he spoke. “Did you really think I only had two guns on me?”
“You could have as many guns as I have knives and I’d still beat you.”
“I daresay you won’t like getting gutshot.”
“Oh, but you like getting stabbed in the throat?” she returned archly.
A sneer tugged at the corner of his mouth, though his eyes remained stoic. “I know you don’t want to kill me. I’m too valuable alive. You, on the other hand?” His voice dropped low again and his gaze darkened. “You’re worth more to me dead.”
“I’d like to see how well you collect a paycheck with a slit throat.”
“You won’t—”
Blossom responded with pressure of her own, cutting him off. For all his toughness, skin was still only skin, and with a blade this sharp it took only a breath to summon a trickle of red that ran down his neck. A lazy, unhurried drop that was barely even a drop. But it shut him up. And he didn’t pull the trigger.
“I learned something about knife fights, too,” she murmured, ignoring the screams in her head to back away from the gun in her side, the pleas for self-preservation, the urge to save her own skin, her own neck. All familiar, all correct. And yet. All paled in comparison to one inner voice that held dominion over the rest.
I do not lose.
“You’re bound to get cut,” she went on, her death grip tightening on her weapon as her eyes narrowed, meeting every ounce of hatred in his glare with a pound of her own. “So quit your whining and just get used to it.”
Her statement was underscored by a tinkling sound above them, then metal connecting with something hard, and both of them shifted their eyes to the side and upward. Something was lodged in the wall of the casino, high up. A knife. Blossom and Brick squinted, almost in unison.
“What the—”
A single gunshot interrupted them, and the two of them jerked away from each other, Blossom’s hand immediately going to her stomach to staunch whatever insane amount of blood was sure to surge out of her as she jumped back. She’d really been hoping to avoid this—
She paused when the pain didn’t immediately surface and patted her stomach again. Dry. No blood. It wasn’t—
Her thoughts were interrupted by the cacophonous crash of crystal in front of her, tiny prisms of light scattering like dust around the room. Her opponent, she realized, wasn’t so lucky. The chandelier landed on him, and he had been backed against the table.
She dashed up and shifted the chandelier aside, a million little crystals singing while concern in her gut was coiling like a spring. If he’s dead—
Not dead, thankfully. But definitely unconscious. Even with that thick red hair covering his scalp, a significant bump was already visible on the crown of his head. It seemed the stainless steel plate of the chandelier from which all the crystal tassels dangled had finally managed what she couldn’t.
“Told you I could do it. Pay up.”
Bubbles. Blossom looked over to the stairs and found both Bubbles and—
She stared, dumbfounded, as their blonde target cursed and pulled some bills out of his wallet. “Damn,” he said. “Nice shot.”
“With your gun, too,” Bubbles chirped as she pocketed her winnings, then spotted Blossom and waved from her vantage point on the upper landing. “Hey! Is that all of them?”
A knife appeared in the banister next to Boomer. He cast Blossom the barest of glances and held one hand up lazily. “Don’t worry. I surrendered, like, first thing.”
The words Come quietly died on Blossom’s tongue as she watched Bubbles wave him towards the stairs heading down, now pointing what was supposedly his own gun back at him. He obediently complied.
“Here.” Buttercup, looking worse for the wear, appeared at Blossom’s side, heaving her equally bruised and bloodied target on top of Brick’s body.
“Oh my God, Buttercup, you look wrecked. You okay?”
“Ask me after I’ve had like a bucket of morphine,” Buttercup grumbled.
Blossom sniffed and wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think you should be mixing that with alcohol. How much did you drink?”
“Not enough,” she responded, wincing and collapsing to the ground, legs stretched out in front of her. “I can still feel things.”
Bubbles and her charge joined them, and Boomer, arms raised while Bubbles had his own gun at his back, issued a low whistle. “Wow. You fucked Butch up good. He takes hits like an elephant.”
“You guys were going at it awhile,” Bubbles said to the woman on the floor. “How’d you finally do it?”
Buttercup groaned. “I don’t wanna talk about it,” she said, her tone carrying an undercurrent of finality to it. Blossom flicked on her comm.
“Good to go,” she told Bellum. “Send in retrieval.”
“Can I go to the bathroom first?” Boomer asked, raising his hand. “And can I also get my knife back?”
Blossom stared blankly, then gave Bubbles a look. “Why is he still conscious?”
He covered his head and pulled away from Blossom a bit. “I don’t want to deal with a head injury. Just put a bag over my head or something.”
“A plastic one,” Buttercup supplied dryly.
He looked down at her, frowning, then took in the unconscious Butch and extended his hand. “Hi. I’m Boomer.”
“Do I look like I fucking care?”
“Please tell me retrieval will be here soon,” Blossom whispered into her comm.
“Heading in now,” Bellum’s voice assured her. “Nice work tonight, Blossom.”
“Hold your applause.” Blossom took in the unarmed, still conscious assassin, flanked on either side by Bubbles and Buttercup, chatting as if this were a casual hang and not a thwarted attempt on their lives. Her gaze then trailed down to the unconscious pair of men at her feet, lingering on the redheaded troublemaker that had given her so much grief this evening. She was already mentally readying herself for the interrogation that was to follow once they got back to HQ and couldn’t help but grimace. “The night isn’t over yet.”
-end ch2-
I might need a new tag for this one. So fun to work on this, honestly! Would love to hear what y'all think 💗
AO3 | FFNet | AskFM | Ko-Fi
i died
Re: i died
no subject
I’ll comment again once this makes its way to AO3, but great work as always!
OH ALSO
Boomer, as always, is freaking hilarious. The fact that he surrendered immediately and just want to talk is so in character for him.
Re: OH ALSO
(And thank you also for your lengthy ao3 comment! Super appreciate the time you took to leave it 💗)
no subject
no subject