The Road Less Traveled

by thedevilchicken

Summary:

Recently divorced, Cooper is forced into retirement by injury. Frank provides an alternative to his dull new job.

It started in Colorado.

It was the middle of winter and the yard was feet deep in snow right up to the tree line out back, right up into the winding suburban street out front, to the mailbox in danger of going under and never being seen again. When he found the wooden box on the kitchen counter on his way out to shovel snow from the driveway like he even had anywhere he was planning to go until he was due to start work the following week, he had to wonder how the hell Frank Moses had gotten into the house, let alone into the house without leaving puddles on the floor or at least some kind of trail in the snow. It was impressive, really, not that he liked to admit it.

There was a gun in the box when he opened it, a SIG-Sauer P220 with a sports compressor that made Cooper shake his head as he closed it up again with an audible snap. He’d sold his old SIG before he’d left the east coast. He hadn’t felt much like holding a gun in two years even if he could have done, since the injury, since the divorce.

He moved on two months later, posting complete. The company – not the Company because he’d been retired since a few long months after he’d been injured but the company he now worked for – provided houses or apartments or some kind of comfortable living arrangement wherever he went, for however long each new job lasted. They had offices and satellite branches dotted around the country, a few overseas, and they’d taken him on as a kind of twisted security consultant, something ludicrous about systems testing and exposing of vulnerabilities that he did pretty efficiently, or sometimes the incredibly dull work of corporate counter-espionage. He even had a small team assigned on-site in addition to access to staff back at the Chicago HQ, two guys with different backgrounds, one ex-military and the other a tech specialist of dubious provenance who’d turned out to be a very good worker in spite of his many, varied quirks. It used at least a proportion of his skill. He’d told himself he’d be satisfied; sometimes he actually convinced himself he was.

It was Dallas next, where the tech guy started wearing a ten-gallon hat and the ex-Ranger spent most of his time ignoring him while he cleaned guns in the back of the van and got them all half-high on cleaning fluid in the unpleasantly confined space and frankly that made the tech guy at least ten times more palatable. Then Cooper went home one night, after going through the security logs for the day with a pounding solvent headache as the tech guy started singing along with George Strait except he knew approximately 10% or less of the lyrics, and there was a box on the kitchen counter. A box with a SIG inside it, which he knew without looking though obviously he looked. He put it in the closet with the first box and when he checked the camera footage for his kitchen because obviously he had eyes on the house, all over the house, there was the slightest of glitches then a ten-second freeze-frame right where Frank Moses should’ve been. He didn’t need to run the box for prints though he still had contacts back east or in any number of other places he probably shouldn’t mention who’d do it for him in a heartbeat. He knew it was Frank. There was no one else it could be.

Cooper’s wife had left before the injury; that was probably why he’d allowed himself to get injured in the first place because he’d known as soon as the bullet hit his wrist that it should never have happened, it was a routine case like he’d had so many of before he’d ever heard of Frank Moses. After that, with no way for him to stay out in the field, the Company said it was leave or ride a desk for the rest of his career; he’d jumped ship though he could’ve gone higher, he guessed, in spite of everything, if he’d pulled himself together. He had the contacts, after all, but when his wife and kids had moved away, moved somewhere safe, moved up to Illinois to be near her parents and he didn’t even try to stop them because suddenly after Frank Moses had called him from inside his house he’d truly understood how any of fifty, a hundred guys who wanted him dead could get to him through them, he’d known his ambition had gone ahead and bottomed out. He’d taken the job that paid the best and sent them money on the first of every month through untraceable accounts just like the CIA had taught him. It didn’t bring back his motivation but he liked to think it helped.

Seattle next. A corporate office and one of those dull assignments he and the boys all hated so much but he was, as usual, the professional one, the one with the crisp suit and the colourful tie, the firm handshake and the smile no one but him knew was false. He slipped into the role of a new business analyst like he’d never done anything else in his life, though he’d done so many things in so many different places. It didn’t take more than a couple of weeks to get a really good idea of who was responsible for the building’s impressive leak. Two days before the team found the evidence they needed to get out of the Pacific Northwest and his tech guy was slowly filling the back of the van with empty coffee cups no one had the motivation to get rid of for him, though both he and the ex-Ranger were eyeing the stacks like they’d collapse at any moment and who knew if they were all empty, he went home and there was a box on his kitchen counter. There was a SIG inside, the P220 with the compressor attached, and he put it in the closet with the other two; Frank wouldn’t be on the tape but he checked anyway. As expected, he wasn’t there, but he didn’t need to see him to know it was him.

Phoenix, Salt Lake City, three months in Memphis in the summer where his tech guy played nothing but Elvis in the searing heat and almost drove his munitions guy to gory murder-suicide. They spent a month in London after that and even there he found a box on the kitchen counter in his company apartment overlooking the Thames one afternoon, a box that he smuggled back to the States with one well-placed phone call and added to the growing collection once they arrived at the next job in Cincinnati. By the time they got to Chicago, he had twelve matching guns in twelve matching boxes all stacked neatly on the top shelf of his bedroom closet in the otherwise impersonal apartment, artistically dotted with the kind of cheaply purchased crap that made the place look lived in to a cursory glance just the way his handlers had all taught him. It was winter again by then, winter of the third year.

His ex-wife and her new husband and his kids were just an hour away from his company apartment there in the city centre. He watched them one night from behind the tinted windows of his company car and then he left, went back to the place he’d been given for the duration of his stay, let himself in and there was the goddamn box on the kitchen counter. He wondered briefly when he’d last checked the tapes, when he’d stopped checking if Frank Moses had left any trace as he’d broken in yet again. He could’ve smashed the hell out of that box if he’d let himself but instead he took a seat.

He sat down on one of the high stools there at the counter, rubbing one hand over his face as he looked at the box; lucky thirteen, he guessed, another one to add to the armoury that was his closet. He must’ve sat right there for twenty minutes just looking at the damn box with one hand on top of it like that was going to help the situation in any way when wherever he went there was always someone watching. He was pretty sure the only reason he was still alive was the comedic double-act of Frank Moses and Marvin Boggs and maybe that should’ve bothered him. Maybe it should’ve bothered him that sometimes when he came in from work he smelled bleach on the air and there were tiny pieces of glass that his bare feet found on the carpets, dents in walls that hadn’t been there earlier in the day. It should all have bothered him and that night, for the first time in years, he found it did and when it did it was visceral. He’d looked in on his family before he could stop himself, maudlin as fuck, unbearably dumb; he didn’t want to think what might’ve happened if Frank hadn’t been watching. He didn’t want to think who he might’ve led to them.

He took the gun into the bedroom; he took the others from the closet; he took each one out of its box in turn and set them on the bedspread, thirteen SIG-Sauers all jigsawed together in a line over his wife’s side of the bed. Then he lay down fully clothed, suit and tie and shoes and all, and he went to sleep. He suspected he was going to need it.

When he woke again around 2am, the room was dark and he wasn’t alone. All of the guns were back in their boxes. His bag was packed at the foot of the bed.

“Cooper,” Moses said.

“Moses,” Cooper replied.

“You ready to go?”

He was ready to go.

***

Training with the guy who’d trained his trainer was pretty damn bizarre. Especially with a paranoid sociopath shouting commentary like it was freaking WWE.

The first day, he left the floor having had his ass handed to him wrapped up in a pretty pink bow, hurting and irritated and in desperate need of a shower. Marvin watched him shower, like that wasn’t creepy as heck, like maybe he still thought he was faking the injury and this was all part of some incredibly long con. Cooper maybe wished that were true but there were so many ways in which it just wasn’t, not that he was going to to spend time explaining that to Marvin.

The second day, he left the floor aching like a son of a bitch and iced his jaw in the locker room. Apparently Marvin had thought ahead and brought the ice pack with him that time; it wasn’t flattering that he’d been such a screw-up on day one that ice and butterfly bandages had been on his list of essentials.

The third day, Frank pissed him off. He knew it was a ploy but the guy was just so damn grating when he started talking about the time he trained Kordeski and how Cooper must’ve been bottom of that damn class that Cooper flung an elbow at his jaw and then it was all fists and knees and the heels of their hands until they were both on the floor and Frank was laughing and Marvin was laughing louder and all Cooper could do was look at them both like they’d completely lost it. Marvin probably had. The jury was still out on Frank.

“Told you he’d get there,” Frank said.

“Lucky guess,” Marvin said, and flicked a folded fifty in Frank’s direction. Cooper wasn’t sure if he should’ve been flattered or maybe just slapped Marvin in the face. It might’ve been worth it to see his reaction but he guessed as he’d already seen him pull a huge shiny revolver on a pre-teen in glasses looking for the trampoline class it might be safer for all concerned if he left Marvin the hell alone.

They were living out of a crappy disused warehouse in Queens, which wasn’t where Cooper would’ve said he saw himself in five years before he’d been ordered to X out an ex-analyst called Frank Moses. To be fair, he guessed Sarah had done a pretty good job making the offices in it about as homely as an office could be; it looked like she’d put a half hour’s effort into the one Cooper was living out of but the one she occasionally shared with Frank had lamps and comforters and shit that Cooper was pretty sure no one actually needed but Frank seemed to like, which was maybe why she’d made the effort. He’d lived in worse places, back in the Marines on tours in Afghanistan, after that in South America before he’d paid his dues in the CIA and gotten the good assignments, if you called wetwork on the eastern seaboard good. Maybe it was kind of fucked up that on a good day he did.

The fourth day, Frank drove him to the gym and they left Marvin in the warehouse with Sarah; the combination seemed like a really bad idea to both of them, judging from the way Frank looked back at the two of them with a grimace as he pulled the sliding door shut behind him, but Cooper guessed it couldn’t be the first time they’d been left alone to blow shit up or maybe just blow their collective cover. But then Frank really started to train him, really train him now he’d gotten over the idea that he couldn’t fight with a fucked up hand, and Cooper found he couldn’t’ve cared less if Marvin had blown half of New York off the map because hell if it wasn’t the first time he’d felt more than anger or aggravation or general apathy in months. Under the aching and the bruises, he felt good.

Three years ago he’d gotten himself shot in the wrist of his gun hand and no amount of surgery had been able to fully repair his median nerve. Full flexion of his trigger finger was more or less impossible; motor control of his thumb was sketchy, jerky at best; he spent the majority of time in a wrist brace taking anti-inflammatories for the fuckedupedness of the whole thing like they helped at all.

“Don’t tell me you can’t learn to do what you do left-handed,” Frank had said, the day he’d offered him a job, standing there in Cooper’s office in Langley like it wasn’t nearly the weirdest place he could’ve shown up. And Cooper, pissed at the world because he couldn’t even sign his name left-handed let alone fire a gun, had told him in no uncertain terms to go fuck himself. He’d left the CIA, he’d gotten himself a new job, he’d moved to Colorado in the middle of winter and then the SIGs had started arriving. He’d known all along what they’d meant, that there was a transmitter there in the box just waiting to go because he’d swept it for bugs and explosives before he’d even touched it at all; all he had to do was take the gun out, hold it in his hand, and Frank would know it was time. If he hadn’t been so fucking intent on misery, he might’ve agreed when the first one arrived.

The fifth day, Victoria Winslow came to town. When she looked him up and down appraisingly and nodded her apparent satisfaction with a twinkle in her eye, that was when he should’ve known he was in trouble.

“He’ll do,” she said.

All he could do was take that as a compliment.

***

“You knew she was going to leave me and you didn’t tell me?” Frank said on day twelve, looking distinctly unimpressed. Cooper knew the look; it was the same look he’d had when his wife had left him.

Victoria shrugged, the motion disturbingly elegant in her thick fur coat that somehow didn’t look totally out of place in the warehouse. “She’s not leaving you, Francis,” she said. “She just needs some time away.”

“You mean time away from me.”

“I mean time away from all of this.” She gestured about the warehouse, which Cooper had to admit wasn’t exactly a five-star hotel.

“She’s definitely leaving you,” Marvin said, not helpfully, from his deck chair by a space heater. All three of them glared at him. “What? You want me to believe she’s gone back to the call centre in Kansas? She wants action and adventure, Frank. And a .357 Magnum and maybe dinner out so she doesn’t have to reheat Chef Boyardee over a freaking camp stove. You, my friend, made the run right past emotional safety.”

“I might have sent her to Germany to train with Han,” Victoria said then, forestalling the inevitable argument, and at least had the good grace to look sheepish as she said it. Frank glared. “What? You don’t think it’ll be good for her? Next time you take a job in Buenos Aires, maybe she won’t actually shoot you in the foot.” Cooper raised his brows and Victoria shot him a wry smile. “Yes, William; she really did shoot him in the foot.”

“He has a scar,” Marvin added. “This big.”

Frank scowled and said nothing, which Cooper guessed meant the story had some truth to it even if Marvin’s assessment of size seemed to be off by several orders of magnitude. He was fairly sure Sarah hadn’t hit Frank’s foot with an RPG since it was still present if not totally correct.

They stopped using the gym on day thirteen, once Marvin had managed to hook up enough space heaters in the warehouse to make the cold bearable though where he’d found the collection of workout mats was probably a secret best left only to Marvin. On day fifteen, Victoria watched from the sidelines, painting her toenails a particularly violent shade of red as she sat cross-legged in an old armchair. Marvin was tinkering with the oddest arrangement of telephonic devices Cooper had ever seen in his life, spilling tiny screws and screwdrivers all over the concrete floor, and Frank was distracted.

“You’re distracted, Frank,” Cooper said, in a blinding display of stating the obvious. He threw a punch with his left hand; he missed but that had been his plan. He barged him with his right shoulder and Frank went down, Cooper coming down neatly on top of him.

“What makes you say that, Coop?” Frank asked. He brought up a knee that narrowly missed Cooper’s groin and tossed him to the floor, only slightly winded. He rolled out of it, back up to his feet, and offered Frank his right hand; Frank took it and slipped back onto the floor when Cooper didn’t – couldn’t – support his weight with the use of only two fully-functional fingers. He’d done it on purpose; Frank obviously knew it and looked vaguely amused by the concept.

“You’re only handing me my ass with one hand instead of two, old man.”

Victoria gave a very ladylike chuckle as she watched them; she’d moved on to her fingernails and quite how she was managing to paint and watch them at the same time was beyond Cooper, but she seemed to be doing it very well indeed. He held out his left hand to Frank and Frank yanked him down, tossed him to the mats, followed through to bar a forearm across Cooper’s throat but Cooper had his left hand jammed up under Frank’s chin and so that was that. The first draw.

“I think he’s ready,” Victoria said.

“I think so, too,” Marvin said, though frankly no one cared what Marvin thought, particularly as he’d abandoned his cellphones and was sitting there binding three sticks of dynamite together with electrical tape stamped with Christmas trees.

Frank stood, offered him his hand, and Cooper guessed it would’ve been rude to take him down for a second time. He stood, let Frank help him up to his feet. Frank looked at him closely.

“He’s ready for the next step,” he said, glancing at Victoria over Cooper’s shoulder.

“Eagle’s Nest?”

Frank nodded, his gaze back on Cooper who wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, or that he liked the sound of it.

“Eagle’s Nest,” he confirmed.

Victoria blew on her nails. “This is going to be fun,” she said.

***

Eagle’s Nest turned out to be idyllic, perfect, the kind of place he was sure his ex would’ve loved to have lived, overlooking a small town to one side and a river to the other. Spring was coming on and Cooper guessed it might be a pleasant place to be except he wasn’t sure exactly how semi-rural Maryland fit into the equation.

“Victoria’s going to teach you how to shoot,” Frank told him, as they unpacked their bags from the SUV and started toward the front door.

“I know how to shoot,” Cooper said, slightly surly though that was probably something to do with the irritation of driving so long in the back seat with Marvin. He shouldered his bag and tried not to think of the morning he’d woken in Chicago with Frank Moses in his bedroom, his bag packed read at his feet.

“Clearly you don’t or you’d still be in your pretty little glass-walled office with your name on the door and not slumming it with us,” Marvin said, which wasn’t useful but was basically true because he’d signed up for this, whatever this was. “Besides, Victoria really knows how to shoot.”

Frank shrugged, giving him a semi-apologetic look. They were all apologetic when it came to Marvin, in their own special way.

“Not that shooting’s the only thing she knows how to do,” Marvin continued, oblivious, heading for the door. “The first time she tried to kill me, she used a knife.”

Cooper raised his brows as he followed Frank into the house. “The first time?” he said, just about under his breath. “There’s been more than one?”

“Three,” Frank mouthed.

Cooper guessed that made sense, given present company and the fact that he could’ve cheerfully slapped Marvin straight across the face. That was something he could do with his left hand, at least. Hell, he could probably still just about manage it with his right.

There were more bedrooms than Victoria could have conceivably required for herself, considering she apparently didn’t receive all that many guests; she made a polite suggestion that Cooper take the room next door to Frank’s and Marvin be as far away from any of them as humanly possible, which apparently meant a small building elsewhere on the grounds because apparently, unsurprisingly, Marvin had been much more at home in the dingy warehouse in New York than in Maryland. Perhaps Frank thought she was just keeping the pair of them away from her master bedroom but Cooper suspected that wasn’t the case. She’d got plans they just didn’t understand yet.

She gave them roughly thirty minutes to settle in then whisked Cooper away into the basement, which would have seemed strange except she appeared to have a small arsenal down there behind a false wall covered in hammers and chisels and various tools and he shouldn’t have been surprised but there it was: they all kept surprising him. She handed him a rifle as casual as handing him drink and he took it like this were the most natural thing in the world because in a way it was. Then she marched him outside and they set up in the treeline. It did feel unnatural to settle in with his left hand over the trigger, however, and she could tell.

“You’ll get there, William,” she told him, with a pat on the shoulder that wasn’t totally reassuring considering the fact that she could probably kill him as effectively and efficiently as anyone in the world if she chose to do so and maybe she wouldn’t even think twice about it. He didn’t think it wise to disagree. And after the first two hours, his feet going numb from the odd position he’d apparently not so wisely chosen to lie in, his elbows digging into dirt and Victoria talking at him as if talking at him would be the distraction he needed to just get on and magically learn to do everything he’d used to do with his right hand with his non-dominant hand, that was apparently it for the day. Or at least for the rifle.

“Get the SIG,” she said, as they walked into the house, and Cooper made his way upstairs to grab the first one he came to, the first of thirteen in boxes all in a neat stack in the closet. Then she showed him back down into the basement, into another room leading out of it because apparently it was warren down there, essentially a gun range in miniature complete with targets and ear defenders and and benches and more ammunition than he’d seen in one place since the Marines.

“I think Frank might be lonely,” she said once he’d loaded the gun, as he was taking his first shot. He hit the ceiling and she laughed. “Well, I didn’t think it was that controversial,” she continued, stepping up behind him. “Concentrate, William, please.”

She steadied his arm with hers and he fired again, hit the target in the shoulder. That was better but not good; the next shot, he let her aim.

“What makes you say that?” he asked, eventually, regretting it the moment the words passed his lips because she was nothing if not wiley. Of course, she was a lot of things in addition to wiley, not many of which he’d fully grasped so far. He guessed he had time, considering the progress he currently wasn’t making and her apparent patience. He just needed to remember how long it’d taken to get as good as he’d gotten the first time around, he guessed.

Victoria shrugged, which put him off and nudged the next bullet into the white space at the edge of the target, making him grimace. He’d never been so easily put off in his life, not even when he’d just been starting out, not even right back in basic training. He hated it, hated it. She could probably tell.

“He started reading romance novels before we left New York,” Victoria said, as if this was all the explanation it required. He squeezed off another shot, this time hitting the target squarely in the throat. Not exactly where he’d been aiming but definitely an improvement.

“And why are you telling me this?” he asked. She gave him a solid pat on the ass as she stepped away and for the second time he fired a shot that ricocheted off the ceiling. He guessed it was a good job the room was soundproofed, considering the way they were yelling each other over their ear protection even without factoring in his appalling shooting.

“You’ll figure it out, dear,” she said. “I’m going upstairs to bake an apple pie for dinner. Why don’t you join me when you’ve emptied three clips.” She moved for the door, removing her ear protectors on the way so he did likewise, setting the SIG down briefly, a little awkward with his semi-functional hand. “Or when you’ve managed three headshots, whichever comes first.”

She left the room. He put the ear defenders back on and he picked up the gun, looked at it there in his left hand. Victoria had a plan, and he really hoped it wasn’t what he thought it was. He had enough to deal with.

***

She had him shooting in the range in the basement for four hours every day for a week, two in the morning and two before dinner. She gave him a stress ball to squeeze in the other hand like that was going to help but apparently she wanted to make sure he didn’t lose control of his final two right hand fingers just because he couldn’t pull a trigger with the first one or even successfully flip anyone off with the second - he’d tried. Then they moved all of the furniture out of the sitting room and covered the hardwood floor in training mats and he realised he and Frank were going to be spending more time together again. In a weird way he hadn’t missed the resulting aches and pains but he had still missed the training; it was like being back with Kordeski, or like Kordeski-plus since Frank had moves Cooper’s trainer had never taught him.

He started running in the mornings; Victoria had sent away for practically a whole wardrobe for him like he was her private dress-up doll and there’d been a couple of decent tracksuits in there and a couple of pairs of running shoes that he could get outside in, dodging through the woods around dawn. He’d go out for an hour or so, his SIG chafing in his shoulder holster but Frank insisted he take it with him even if they were fairly sure no one had managed to track them down. Each day he was a little less convinced that he still couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with it if he’d needed to. Every day he emerged from the gun range under the house a little less defeated and then started helping Victoria with the baking in the afternoon. Apparently that was also part of his training, learning to manipulate a knife with his left hand under Victoria’s watchful eye.

He cut himself on the second day, not deep but deep enough and she called Frank from his room to clean it up and dress it. She oh-so-casually suggested Frank might want to join him on his morning run while he was there in the kitchen, washing blood from Cooper’s hand over the basin, and when Frank looked at him he shrugged, said maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea, they didn’t want the old guy getting out of shape. Victoria laughed. Frank frowned. Cooper had a fair idea that he was playing straight into Victoria’s hands but didn’t want to think about exactly what that meant.

On the morning of the eighth day, Frank joined him for a run. Cooper didn’t slow down, kept his usual pace and Frank kept up pretty well for the most part over the unfamiliar terrain, something about the fact that he’d had a punchbag installed in his room and kept Cooper up some nights beating the hell out of it likely had something to do with that. Then Cooper pushed it, got faster, got faster again and again and Frank matched him till it was pretty clear they were racing and if he hadn’t known better he’d’ve said they were having fun, whipping through the trees getting all scratched to hell by stray branches, hurdling ditches, falling, getting muddy, not caring at all. They got back to the house a total mess, breathless, bloodied, and Victoria was sitting on the porch with a pair of binoculars in her lap.

“You boys need to stop being so competitive and start working together,” she said. Frank rolled his eyes. Cooper shrugged. “A job came in. I think the two of you should take it, it’ll be good for you both.”

They should’ve been suspicious and maybe they were but they agreed to it anyway; it was more or less inevitable, Cooper thought, because he’d been finding it difficult to say no to anything Victoria suggested from target practice to oven-baked Camembert. They went into the house once they’d taken off their muddy running shoes and they showered and they changed and then spent ten quick minutes in the kitchen wiping each other’s visible scratches down with disinfectant while Victoria told them the plan over a frying pan full of onions that was making everyone’s eyes water. It sounded like total lunacy.

“Sounds like fun,” Marvin said. “Sarah would’ve loved it. Can I come along?”

Victoria cuffed him round the back of the head as Frank didn’t even try not to look like some kind of forlorn puppy, which was a sincerely odd expression on a guy like him.

“We’ll do it,” Cooper said.

“We will?” Frank asked.

“We will,” Cooper confirmed. And that was that.

***

The job was lunacy, as it turned out, but that wasn’t something with which the team was unacquainted, as it also turned out.

They were down in Ecuador for a week, because South and/or Central America had always been such great locations for off-the-books shenanigans judging by Frank and Marvin’s time in Guatemala and the resulting fiasco. Victoria had booked them both into the same room in a crappy hotel and while that wasn’t necessarily a problem it went some way to confirming Cooper’s suspicions about Victoria’s nefarious intent. They spent a depressing amount of time sweating into starchy sheets with no AC, drinking bottled water like it was going out of style, and Frank was reading a romance novel stretched out in his undershirt on his rickety twin bed like reading romance novels as a hardass ex-operative of the CIA was a sensible state of affairs. However, Cooper was catching on quick that there was pretty much nothing sensible about anyone or anything involved with Frank Moses, least of all the guy himself.

“Sarah likes them,” he said when Cooper broke down and asked what the deal was with the novels, once he’d given up on cleaning his gun for the fourth time and decided Ecuadorian TV with rusty Spanish where his brain was hearing Marvin dubbing in nonsense in a terrible Mexican accent wasn’t getting him anywhere but frustrated and a little alarmed.

“You really need to forget about her,” Cooper told him, squeezing the damn stress ball that was shaped like Porky Pig while he tried not to wish he’d brought a book of his own, even if it’d turned out to be a trashy romance novel with pages thin enough his fingers would stick to them with sweat. “I hesitate to say this but Marvin’s actually right on this one.”

That seemed to give Frank a moment’s pause at the very least; agreeing with Marvin didn’t happen often. They’d all been together nearly three months by that point and Cooper couldn’t think of a time he’d actually heard much else in the way of sense pass Marvin’s lips, but he guessed he wasn’t surprised given his interesting history.

The job wasn’t hitchless but it went through pretty well in any case. When Cooper shot he actually hit the target so maybe Victoria was right about his preparedness at least up to a point. Frank muttered something about how at least Marvin wasn’t there wearing fruit on his head and Cooper wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to understand that particular statement. Six bad guys and a drug cartel takedown later, an explosion that left Cooper’s ears ringing just a fraction and the worst plan he’d ever heard of as they abseiled from a hot air balloon after dusk armed to the teeth like a two-man SEAL team, they returned to the crappy hotel and they took turns in the shower that basically had two settings: vague, scalding drizzle and off. Cooper somehow managed to take his time in there, wondering how the hell the plan had ever worked and he came to the conclusion that it was just enough like working with Kordeski that they’d got the same kind of weird in-op shorthand, the same looks, gestures, a level of familiarity that they had at pretty much no other time.

And then, with some kind of Spanish-dubbed American sitcom playing on the TV that Cooper scowled at while he had more success lip-reading with the audio on mute, Frank called in for their ride home.

“I’ll have Marvin there with a plane in the morning,” Victoria said. “I’m sure you can amuse yourselves for one night. Have a drink, boys. See the sights.”

It seemed like a bad idea in light of the fact that they were now wanted by the remains of a particularly sketchy Ecuadorian drug cartel but they went out anyway, perhaps just to prove a point. And they sat in a bar drinking terrible tequila with the bottle on the table between them as Frank started telling him yet more stories about the time he’d trained Kordeski, something about a broken pelvis and an office fan in Tehran and how the scar Kordeski had on his palm was where he’d jabbed him with a fountain pen and it’d gotten infected, then he started in on his time with the Company and then everything that had come after. Turned out the guy was a pretty garrulous drunk for an ex-agent, or he’d just decided he could trust him. Cooper guessed he shouldn’t have been surprised given the fact that Frank had been following him around the country in a kind of lunatic recruitment drive for the best part of two and a half years.

“How did you fix the thing with the VP, anyway?” Frank asked, once they were well on their way to well past drunk.

Cooper shrugged as he poured another shot. “I told the truth,” he said.

“Bullshit.”

“No, really,” he said. “I went into the director’s office and I told him what happened. And he swept it under the rug, called it a sad act of domestic terrorism like you saw on TV and here we are.” He smiled tightly. “Henry helped.”

Frank nodded sagely, like the assistance of Henry the Records Keeper made all the difference. Cooper guessed it did.

“Thanks for looking out for my family,” Cooper said, the words coming out before he’d realised he meant to say them and he was pretty sure he’d actually meant to keep that particular sentiment firmly in his head. Frank looked at him over his empty tequila glass as Cooper decided to keep busy and pour out two more.

“I’m pretty sure you earned it,” Frank said, and downed his shot. Cooper didn’t have to ask to know Frank had a team on them even then, watching his ex and the kids and her new husband, keeping them safe. It helped to know they’d be fine without him, helped to know they’d never know what he’d done for a living, what he did now though even he wasn’t sure what he’d call what he did now. He’d’ve liked to’ve sent them cards at Christmas, birthdays, let them know he still cared, that he was actually still alive, but he guessed the way he could really show he cared was by leaving them all the hell alone.

“Let’s get back to the room,” Cooper said in the end, to cover the awkward pause, like there were moments with Frank that weren’t awkward when he’d basically moped his way through Ecuador with a romance novel in his back pocket.

They went back to the room. And Cooper tried not to think about why on earth Frank Moses had ever given a damn what happened to him.

***

It turned out Victoria was a truly terrifying matchmaker.

She wasn’t there when they got back, hauling a couple of backpacks with Marvin in a truly horrific Hawaiian shirt that made Cooper’s retinas object quite resoundingly. They left their boots by the door and there was a note in the kitchen by the coffee maker where she must have guessed it would be found quickly. It was disconcerting how well she knew them all.

Boys,

Don’t worry, I’m just taking care of a little business in town.

Marvin, if you would be so kind as to sweep the grounds for listening devices.

Frank & William - I expect manly men such as yourselves can find a way to wash the blood from the patio. No, it’s not mine.

Yours,

Victoria

Frank stared at the note for a moment as Marvin departed the room with a vague mutter about satellites and illegal surveillance like he’d ever performed any strictly legal surveillance in his life himself. Cooper sighed. She was a terrifying matchmaker. And her methods were as outlandish as Marvin’s shirt.

They wound up in Home Depot buying a power washer, three bottles of bleach and a box of industrial strength rubber gloves, queuing behind a family of five and trying not to look like they’d just stepped out of a bad TV movie about suburban serial killers though if they’d really meant to avoid that they should’ve made sure they’d not both dressed head to toe in black. One of the kids kept staring at Frank and Cooper had to remind himself not to laugh when the kid in question started asking mommy, why has that man got no hair? They made it back into the parking lot without further incident and Frank drove, tuning the radio to something obnoxious that Cooper immediately turned off again.

They spent forty minutes trying to decide how the hell the power washer even fitted together and then another fifteen reading the manual sitting together on patio furniture in the garden. Then Frank turned it on and spattered their shoes with water and blood of dubious provenance until Cooper sighed and took the damned appliance from him; he sprayed and Frank bleached and then they burned their shoes in the back yard like some sort of ritualistic offering, standing around the fire in sports socks damp from the grass as they watched their footwear burn. Cooper was just starting to feel like an extra from the Sopranos when Victoria got back and while eyeing their socked feet but stoically saying nothing about it, she informed them that she had another job lined up.

“You’ll enjoy it,” she told them later, over yet another frying pan filled with onions, like she’d decided that was her weapon of choice and not the sniper rifle in its case resting against the patio door. Cooper was faintly aware in the back of his mind that his own home hadn’t usually been full of firearms but Victoria’s, he guessed, was a special case. “I bought you both suits you can use.”

Frank looked at Cooper. Cooper looked at Frank. He was pretty sure neither of them thought Victoria taking care of their wardrobe could bode well.

***

They came back to Eagle’s Nest injured but not exactly shot or beaten, just a fraction knifed. Marvin fussed but Victoria sent him to investigate a strange noise on the telephone line that may or may not have actually existed and set down a medical kit on the dining room table before making herself likewise scarce.

“Clean each other up, boys,” she told them as she left the room. She was a terrifying matchmaker.

They made their way upstairs, half leaning on each other all the way to the bathroom, Cooper clinging onto the medical kit with the two good fingers of his right hand as he hung onto Frank’s jacket with the other. Frank’s suit was slashed through at the shoulder so Cooper helped him out of it down to his undershirt and had him sit down on the edge of the huge cast iron tub, where he promptly fell in and smacked his head on the faucet - another cut to swab but one more hardly mattered. They wound up sitting cross-legged and half naked on the tiled bathroom floor, Frank leaning back against the tub as Cooper stitched up his shoulder with his left hand and Frank told him he had to learn to do it left-handed sometime, might as well be on him.

Forty minutes, a whole pack of gauze and more medical tape than Cooper had seen in his life, half a bottle of Victoria’s good scotch and a line of sutures that looked something like a lightning bolt later, they stumbled out of the bathroom and into Frank’s room. Frank walked into the punchbag and when he fell he took Cooper with him, landing on top of him in an awkward heap with his bad hand up against Frank’s bad shoulder and they both cursed loudly. Maybe Victoria hadn’t meant for them to get hurt but in the end Cooper guessed it hadn’t harmed her crazy primary mission.

They’d been in New York for three nights, in some ritzy hotel Victoria had booked them into like she’d slipped seamlessly into the role of their new handler or some kind of demented booking agent while they weren’t looking. She really had bought them both a suit each, exceptional quality that somehow fit perfectly though Cooper guessed he shouldn’t have been surprised by that, and they had a target’s photo in a folder along with all the info Victoria had on him. Frank’s speciality wasn’t wetwork as much as pseudo-military black ops but he was still pretty efficient in that area; Cooper knew exactly how to make it look like an accident. When it came down to it, it wasn’t that much different being paid to do it that it had been doing it for his country. After all, it took a pretty special kind of person to get into that work in the first place.

And then, of course, the target turned out to have a visitor with him at his dashing penthouse apartment, a visitor with five armed guards and a dog that could run like the wind. Victoria’s intel hadn’t foreseen that particular eventuality and though the job got done, bodged together to make it look like an art theft gone wrong more through force of will and that weird operative shorthand they still shared than through planning, they’d both had a fair beating, Frank had gotten sliced, and they’d exited chased by an Alsatian. It wasn’t one of Cooper’s more successful capers. He definitely hadn’t meant it to end in Frank Moses’ bedroom.

“We need to start getting our own intel if we’re taking Victoria’s jobs,” Cooper said, flopping onto his back on the bedroom floor like the situation and the subject were in any way aligned.

“I’ll get Marvin on it,” Frank said. And they just lay there on the hardwood floor for a couple of minutes in their damn underwear, covered in patches of stuck-on gauze and the occasional band-aid, aching and half drunk. Cooper was pretty sure he hadn’t ached so much since that day in his office when Frank Moses had walked in and broken nearly every piece of furniture he’d owned with one of his body parts or his own.

He rubbed his eyes then he turned his head and nothing else and looked at Frank, his neck straining. Frank looked at him. They had to be mad to keep on doing this, but Cooper guessed maybe they were.

Three days later, Belgium. Hong Kong a week after that. Victoria kept them busy and Frank started packing Cooper’s bag for him while Cooper packed the med kit and the small arms. Beijing for four days then back to Eagle’s Nest, aching and tired like they were on some kind of rock band world tour except the only drugs they had were aspirin and topical Voltarol. They’d been patching each other up in hotel bathrooms, getting better with each job and Marvin’s surprisingly insightful intel once they distilled it down from a half hour of chatter, till they weren’t getting beaten up anywhere near so damn much but they were still checking each other for injuries anyway.

Victoria had a lot to answer for, Cooper thought, as he pressed down on a bruise over Frank’s ribs when they got back home, for values of home that included Maryland and a house that always smelled like a bakery except the day when Marvin used Victoria’s favourite apron while playing with hydrofluoric acid. Cooper hadn’t known such colourful curse words had existed in the English language and he’d heard a few in his time.

Frank winced faintly but that didn’t mean stop. Cooper found another bruise to palpate, up by his sternum. It was ridiculous; they’d been travelling the world for two months, nearly three, not always for a hit, sometimes for other shady purposes but that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that he’d gotten used to standing around in Frank’s room in his boxer shorts feeling him up for potential internal injuries or broken bones like either of them thought anything was broken because they both knew exactly what broken felt like. He stopped and he sighed and he took a step back, hand running over his hair. His eyes went to the scar at Frank’s foot, where apparently Sarah had shot him once. There was a romance novel on Frank’s nightstand.

“You actually find something this time?” Frank asked, looking faintly amused around the edges.

“I think I was looking for my dignity so no, I didn’t find anything,” Cooper muttered, and Frank only looked more amused. Cooper looked up, met his gaze. “Let’s face it, Frank, we’re just touching each other up here.”

And that, at least, wiped the amusement straight off of Frank’s face.

***

Paris was a bad one.

Frank hadn’t been there since his run-in with Katja and the Frog, he said, like Cooper had any idea what he was talking about except then he spent the rest of the private flight telling him all about how they’d blown up a red mercury bomb over the UK - Cooper shouldn’t known that was him - and broken into the Kremlin. Anyone else, Cooper might’ve been skeptical. At least it made a change that they were speaking again.

They’d been dancing around their little revelation for just over a week. Frank had stopped joining him for his morning run, Cooper had stopped heading into Frank’s room to work out with the bag and his right hand taped into a fist like that was a particularly good idea considering his nerve damage except he guessed it couldn’t get that much worse than it already was. They looked at each other over dinner while Victoria sighed and served the peas and Marvin started talking about an op that even Frank couldn’t remember but Cooper guessed he’d been on so many that maybe, just maybe, there were a few he’d forgotten about and Marvin hadn’t just hallucinated the whole thing. And then Victoria had sent them to Paris. Paris. For her, usually so subtle, it was an alarmingly obvious move.

They had a hotel room off the Champs-Élysées with a king bed they eyed as they pointedly didn’t eye each other, then swapped rooms at reception to get twin beds instead. When they turned out the light that night they were both awake for an hour or more, lying there in the dark, not speaking. They woke with the alarm at 6am. Cooper showered first; he shaved and he dressed while Frank showered and they avoided each other by virtue of the French TV that Cooper understood while he knew Frank didn’t get much of at all and it was petty but he turned it up just so he couldn’t ignore it. They each had their areas of expertise, weapons they preferred, languages they spoke that didn’t seem to have much in the way of intersection; Victoria went out of her way to let them know they complemented each other. Cooper was kind of pissed that she was right because ordinarily they made a great team. They usually knew each other’s next move before it happened so this was so goddamn counterproductive; suddenly they couldn’t read each other worth a damn.

And then, predictably, the op went sideways. Too much security on the visiting dignitary, not enough prep, nowhere near enough communication and though they were both meant to be professionals they fucked up royally, expansively, the job only completed by blind, dumb luck as Frank grabbed the right briefcase on the way out through the door. A bad car chase around Paris with Frank behind the wheel because Cooper’s left shoulder was dislocated, a manic yarn about the time Sarah had totalled a 2CV in a too-narrow alley with Marvin in the passenger seat that Cooper couldn’t help but imagine in vivid Technicolor as he gritted his teeth, then they ditched the Benz and somehow wound their way through the side streets to the back door of the hotel. With the application of a couple of blazers over Frank’s bleeding side and Cooper’s popped shoulder they ducked their heads and made for the service elevator. Somehow, somehow they made it to the room without further incident. Cooper guessed neither one of them knew how.

“We’ve gotta stop ignoring the elephant in the room, Frank,” Cooper said, right before Frank yanked hard on his arm and popped his shoulder back in. It was just as unpleasant a feeling as he remembered.

“I’m not gay, Coop,” Frank said, and headed into the bathroom; Cooper joined him, the two of them just about working out how to get their stolen blazers off without any further injury, Frank having to unbutton both shirts because Cooper wasn’t feeling much like trying to move his left arm just yet, and they wound up back where they always did after every op, on the bathroom floor surrounded by bloodied clothes and a medkit Cooper had packed back in the bathroom in Maryland from supplies he’d bought online with Victoria’s credit card.

“I didn’t say you were gay, Frank,” Cooper continued, like they hadn’t just had a five-minute pause as he started to sponge out Frank’s bullet wound with his bad hand, a cloth dunked in disinfectant gripped between his pinkie and ring finger so maybe the stress ball hadn’t been a total waste of time after all. It was shallow, just a graze across his ribs, so between the two of them it wasn’t too bad to apply some gauze and tape and get it covered up.

“You need to get your story straight,” Frank said, slumping against the tub. “You’re not talking about what you said last week?”

“It was the week before,” Cooper said, pedantic, and the look on Frank’s face said he didn’t give a damn when it was. He shrugged and he cursed, his shoulder aching like a son of a bitch as he did so. “There’s…something.” He gestured vaguely between the two of them with his bad hand that was still covered in Frank’s blood like that wasn’t something that happened all the damn time. “Jesus, Frank. You know what I mean.”

Frank knew what he meant and that was just as well because Cooper wasn’t sure himself what he meant at that particular moment. They sat there, leaning on walls, worn out, looking at each other under the too-bright light that reflected in all the blood they’d smeared over the white-tiled floor, a couple of minutes in silence while Cooper smiled a wry, sardonic smile and Frank pressed at his side to make it look like he had a legitimate reason to wince.

But after that, when Frank scooched across the floor on his knees like a goddamn old man and chuckled under his breath, tired the fuck out, when he leaned over and pressed his bruised mouth to Cooper’s like that wasn’t crazy and he hadn’t just introduced the back of Cooper’s head to the wash basin in the process, it was okay because apparently crazy was his life now.

***

Victoria’s first reaction when they came back to the States was a beaming, triumphant smile, something linked pretty closely to the fact they were more or less leaning on each other as they made their way to the front door. The second was a frown because, Cooper knew, up close they looked like they’d just come out of a particularly unforgiving wood chipper. He knew; once upon a time he’d had to use one for a messy disposal.

“Well, you two certainly weren’t joking when you said it hadn’t gone to plan,” she said, and served them each a bowl of soup with home-baked bread at the kitchen table before they’d even been made to remove their boots in the customary manner. They must have looked bad.

Cooper looked at Frank; Frank looked at Cooper. They really hadn’t been exaggerating.

Marvin was away, she said. Personal business and Cooper didn’t feel any particular yearning to know what personal business actually meant in Marvin’s case though he’d probably ask when he got back and wind up spending an afternoon hearing about his family who all thought he was dead and about wearing pigtails in Moldova until he wished he hadn’t asked. Then Victoria apologised, told them there was plenty of food in the refrigerator and she’d be back in a couple of days, something about a weekend away with Ivan, before she vanished through the door with a wink and a smile.

“She’s been setting us up for months, hasn’t she,” Frank said.

Cooper nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m pretty sure she has.”

They did the dishes in near-silence, Frank washing, Cooper drying, because apparently Victoria had yet to join the 21st century and get a dishwasher installed in the house. They straightened up the kitchen, grabbed a couple of long-stemmed glasses and a bottle of Victoria’s good wine and when they sat in the sitting room - it looked a whole lot different now the mats had been moved back out and the furniture moved back in - it was pretty damn odd. It might’ve seemed domestic if Cooper hadn’t been wearing his SIG in a holster over his sweater and Frank hadn’t had a MAC-10 peeking out from under a newspaper on the side table. Maybe domestic was a relative term.

They didn’t watch some kind of reality TV show for a half hour while they drank, not speaking, occasionally glancing at each other. All they’d done the night before they came back was make out on the bathroom floor like a pair of idiots because Victoria wanted it so maybe it was true, but they’d been wiped out, beaten up, pissed off, pulled each other up off of the tiles as Frank bitched about his knees and helped each other into clothes then ordered more room service than they could eat somewhere around midnight because Victoria was picking up the tab. They’d finally made it to bed around 2am, once they were pretty sure neither had a concussion to be worried about and Frank had stopped bleeding through the gauze.

It wasn’t any easier that night, either, even with Victoria and Marvin out of the house, even back on home soil like that meant something these days, everything properly bandaged and dressed and not flung together on a hotel bathroom floor. Frank had started a new romance novel on the plane home and Cooper had despaired over his in-flight mini-vodka as he ignored a movie. They were hopeless: Cooper still missed his ex-wife and Frank was pining for a woman who’d left him to learn how to kill people for a living. And all of that was without thinking about the idiocy that was the notion of the two of them getting together in the first place, some kind of bizarre cross-generational CIA fiasco that seemed unlikely even if they somehow relearned how to communicate. He was pretty sure he had a better chance of getting it on with Sarah himself than this ever going anywhere with Frank. He wasn’t sure he wanted it to. Then again, he wasn’t sure he didn’t.

“We should go to bed,” Frank said, mercifully, because who knew where the hell that train of thought had been heading.

Cooper laughed, just a short huff under his breath but even that much hurt. “You know how that sounds, right Frank?”

Frank shrugged, then he hoisted himself up out of his chintzy armchair. “I know exactly how it sounds,” he said, and suddenly Cooper wasn’t even half so amused as he had been. Frank held out a hand and Cooper took it, winced as Frank helped him to his feet because damn, his shoulder was going to be out of whack for at least a couple of weeks. Frank stepped in closer and rested his hand on Cooper’s bad shoulder, not heavily enough to hurt as his thumb traced the skin just over the collar of his t-shirt. Coming from Frank, that was a hell of a gesture. “We still need to do something about that goddamn elephant in the room, Coop.”

They ended up in Frank’s room after that, one glass of wine broken on the floor in a puddle of glass shards and beaujolais and Cooper guessed they’d best not take the power washer to that even if it looked a little like blood on the wood. Frank dragged him down onto the bed like either of them had any idea what the hell they were doing there and the next thing was cursing when the hand of Cooper’s wrenched arm came to Frank’s bullet-wounded side and they knew this was a bad idea. It was a spectacularly bad idea but they persisted anyway, not to be thwarted by such trifling concerns as semi-serious injury.

They just about managed to get Frank's shirt off before there was a new gale of cursing and he was bleeding again and after that there was no way they were going to get any further so they just gave the hell up and decided that maybe sewing Frank up properly and getting well and truly soused on Victoria's good wine might be the best plan for the rest of the evening. She'd probably come home in a couple of days to find a suturing needle and wadded-up gauze still all over the guest bathroom, if she ever checked the guest bathroom, but that didn't seem like much of a concern. Cooper stepped barefoot on the broken wine glass and Frank fished it out with tweezers and lay down on the bed side by side staring up at the ceiling, on top of the bedspread that was already slightly bloody so who cared, what the hell, a bit more couldn't possibly matter. It was like the times he'd stepped on glass back in those blank company homes, smelled bleach, known something had happened there but had never asked what it was.

"How many people did you kill to keep me alive, Frank?" Cooper asked as they lay there.

"Enough," Frank replied. "Victoria did some of them." He turned his head to look at him; Cooper looked right back at him. "Marvin blew one up."

Cooper chuckled and it hurt. Frank leaned close and Cooper let him brush his mouth against his, not quite chaste, semi-awkward, but warm and winey and not unpleasant. Maybe the opposite of unpleasant.

"You're a good guy, Frank," Cooper said.

Frank gave him a tired smile. "Not even close," he replied.

Cooper reached over, brushed the pad of his thumb against Frank’s jaw.

"Close enough," Cooper said. And he turned out the light.

***

They were out of the field for three weeks as spring edged closer to summer and the trail they ran through the woods every day after then could run again got progressively drier, the days they got back to the house caked in mud fewer and farther between. Victoria seemed grateful for that, at least, judging by the approving smile she’d give them as they let themselves back into the house. They both had keys.

Frank mended the roof and Marvin put in some kind of lunatic security system that no one understood, no one wanted and no one really trusted but hey, that was Marvin. Cooper started helping Victoria out with the cooking because apparently while they were still technically recuperating she wasn't going to let them live on microwave meals and beer, though he had to admit he couldn’t think of a time she’d let them do that before, either. He even went out with her on a job one weekend, a relatively short hop on the train up to Boston, adjoining hotel rooms and then he spotted for her when she pulled out her rifle to hit a guy out in the woods outside of town. He suspected it was a ploy to get him alone for a couple of days and grill him for progress and that wasn't exactly progress on his injuries, though lying on the ground in a wood somewhere in Massachusetts for three hours hadn't done his shoulder any good at all. There was a reason he'd never been a sniper. He didn’t like staying still any more than Frank did.

"How's Frank?" she asked, out of the blue as they were lying there like idiots by the side of the hill in the ugliest camouflage outfits he'd ever seen; he'd been a Marine, he'd seen some really ugly camo in his time.

"Frank's fine," he replied, still peering through the scope.

"And you?"

"I'm fine." He looked up for a moment, at her, then back down into the scope. "But that's not what you really want to ask, now is it."

"Of course it's not, you marvellous boy," she said, and reached over to pat him on the camouflaged head a little like he was five years old, all the while still focused on the spot she’d picked out through the trees. He remembered his kids at five years old, skating on the pond in the back yard in winter, kicking a soccer ball in the summer. He remembered how his wife had been with them, and that he’d never, not once, even thought about leaving the job for them. Maybe he should’ve regretted that. "I want to ask about your sex life but I can't think of an appropriate segue."

“I’m not discussing my sex life with you, Victoria,” he said.

“Oh, come on,” she said, only marginally wheedling. “Just think of me as… sexually avuncular.”

In any other situation, he might’ve laughed. As it was, he just squinted at her in a way he hoped conveyed the thought that she was anything but avuncular, and though she didn’t actually look at him as he did it she probably got the point. And besides which, what he hadn’t said and the way he hadn’t said it probably told her all she’d needed to know.

The kill itself was quick and they hightailed it back down out of Massachusetts. Frank and Marvin were playing cards at the dining room table and it was just like they’d never been away after that; Frank dealt them both in and Victoria sat in something resembling the lotus position on a dining room chair while she won all of the cookies that were apparently standing in for poker chips. The Marvin sloped off to his camp bed in the gatehouse basement and Victoria said goodnight with a nod and a knowing smile before she disappeared away up the stairs.

“You ever get the feeling you’re being set up?” Frank said.

“Only when I am,” Cooper replied.

But if there was a way to fight Victoria Winslow they hadn’t found it yet. They went upstairs, went into Frank’s room, and it was just like every other night for the past three weeks, half-naked fumbling once the lights were off, getting themselves worked up but the next step just wasn’t there somehow. Cooper chuckled, Frank sighed, they kissed that same not-quite-chaste kiss and they went to sleep.

In the morning, Victoria had a job for them. She sent them out to Chicago and when they checked into the hotel there was a king bed there and this time they didn’t question it, just dropped their bags by the door and started work on the plan. Just some files that needed to be retrieved, the kind of corporate espionage Cooper had spent some time working against and it was even one of the buildings he’d worked in, the HQ for the company he’d worked with. He knew the security system inside out and when Frank went in wearing a very well cut suit and a pair of Italian leather shoes that had probably cost Victoria’s extensive bank account twice what Cooper had earned back at the CIA in a month, a camera mounted in his unnecessary glasses, it looked like nothing had changed.

They went in the next day, avoiding the cameras, hiding in the blind spots, Marvin chattering incessantly over the radio like that was helpful in the least. They were in and out of the seven-storey wide-sprawling corporate HQ in twelve minutes, heads down, back in the car with the copied disk safely stowed in Frank’s inside pocket; Cooper had always found the company’s CEO to be an insufferably supercilious prick so it couldn’t’ve happened to a nicer guy. But then they were back in the hotel room and Cooper knew as the night wore on that it’d been a damn fool rookie mistake to go back out there to Chicago. He should’ve known. It was such a short drive and maybe they wouldn’t be there but maybe they would, maybe they would. Maybe the kids would even remember him.

“You can’t see them,” Frank said, watching him as he paced though he was pretty sure he’d never paced before in his life and this wasn’t exactly the time to get into the habit. He stopped dead in the centre of the ugly hotel carpet and he clenched his fists, or at least clenched one and a half of them and then shook both hands out in frustration.

“I know,” he said. “You think I don’t know?”

“I know you know,” Frank said. “I just don’t know if you care. At least not right now.”

Cooper smiled bitterly. “I care.”

Frank stood from the table by the window, left his glass there. “Did you care last time, too? They could’ve been killed.”

“You were there.”

“And what if I’d not been? What then?”

Cooper set his jaw, squeezed his teeth together tight. He knew what Frank was getting at but it wasn’t something he even wanted to think about, how he’d essentially painted a huge neon sign over his family for anyone who cared to see. If Frank hadn’t been there they’d’ve been dead and Cooper might as well have pulled the trigger himself.

So that was when he hit him, with the hand that couldn’t form a fist so it wasn’t a great shot but he caught him at the hinge of his jaw just under his ear and Frank turned, plowed his fist right into Cooper’s gut. It was a crappy, pointless idiocy of a fight, knocking over glasses, pulling down a shitty hotel painting in a shower of glass as it hit the desktop. Frank went down and swept Cooper’s feet from under him; Cooper smashed him in the chest with the flimsy hotel phone and Frank pushed him back so he tripped over his travel bag and tried to break his fall with his bad hand as he went through the surprisingly solid coffee table that wasn’t quite solid enough.

The TV went next, Frank’s elbow in it then Cooper’s fist, followed closely by the mirror over the dresser and there was someone banging on the wall from next door telling them to keep the fucking noise down! but that didn’t exactly help. Cooper pulled his knee up into Frank’s gut and Frank smashed his elbow down over the back of Cooper’s neck and then they were on the floor and they were kissing and Cooper didn’t know how the fuck they’d got to that. Suddenly Frank was on top of him and they were kissing, open-mouthed, hot, too hard because Cooper’s teeth had opened up the inside of his lip but neither of them seemed to care if it tasted of copper and whiskey from the mini-bar. He’d got his bad hand at the back of Frank’s neck, his scarred wrist holding him in against him as his left hand got in under Frank’s shirt and pressed to the small of his back, over skin, nails raking hard. It was dumb because management had to be coming up to investigate but Cooper guessed no one had ever accused Frank Moses of being safe and besides, they were both hard, disconcertingly hard, rubbing against each other like there was a shortage of that going round and they needed to get it while they could.

Cooper turned, quickly, had Frank down on the floor in a second and planted the heel of his right hand in the shards of safety glass that had come from who the hell knew where they’d destroyed so much of the room. He cursed and sat up on his knees over Frank’s thighs; Frank rolled his eyes and took Cooper’s hand, sucked the tiny piece of glass from his palm and spat it out on the floor. Then he dragged him in again and fuck, fuck, Frank’s hips shifted against his and his mouth found Frank’s and it took no time, no time for them both to wind up coming without ever actually having taken off so much as their goddamn shoes let alone anything else, flushed and panting and staring at each other like neither of them could believe any of it had just happened.

“We should go,” Frank said.

“We should go,” Cooper confirmed.

So they dragged themselves up, damp and bloody and faintly disgusting, and they vanished.

At least, Cooper thought wryly as they boarded the first train out of the city, he hadn’t done anything really stupid.

***

They didn’t go back right away, something about throwing any interested parties off the scent though Cooper couldn’t imagine who on earth would be interested in finding them based on a theft that would go undetected for weeks and a hotel room that they’d skipped out of but left $500 in cash on the dresser by way of at least partial compensation for the general destruction. Even if that cash never saw the light of day, they’d charge one of Victoria’s fake credit cards for the damage and it would all work out in the end, no need to even try to track them down and press charges, no need to get the police involved though their fingerprints wouldn’t pop in any database. It’d be particularly pointless to try as their names at check-in were not their names.

They rode the train up to Minneapolis on tickets valid all the way out to Seattle, slept a couple of hours on the way in something approximating a bedroom where they cleaned each other off and patched each other up and then fell into separate bunks because there was nowhere near enough room for two people on either of them. When exactly bed with enough space for two had become a consideration was anyone’s guess but Cooper was absolutely positive it was Victoria’s fault.

“Coop?” Frank said, from the top bunk in the dark once they’d turned out the lights.

“Frank?”

“You know fistfights aren’t generally considered foreplay, right?”

Cooper laughed, muffled the sound with his pillow though pressing into it made his bruised jaw ache.

“So buy me dinner first next time,” he said.

They took a flight up to Toronto, their counterfeit passports impeccable as always, sitting side by side on the passenger plane though it was hard to have anything like a private conversation when they were two assassin-spies for hire with shared anecdotes that consisted mostly of stringing people up or shooting people down and Marvin’s interesting affinity for high explosives. Frank started reading another goddamn trashy romance novel that he’d picked up in the airport and Cooper was sure he’d seen him read that one before but let him get on with it anyway, right up until he’d had enough, absolutely 100% enough, and snatched the book away. Frank didn’t look impressed.

“If I hadn’t just had to courier my sidearm back across the country,” Cooper hissed, getting in nice and close by Frank’s ear, “I’d shoot out the goddamn window just so I could toss this out of it on principle.”

Then he stuffed the book into the rack on the back of the seat in front and settled back in his seat with a self-satisfied smile to read a copy Cosmo that interested him not one iota but kept him from looking at Frank. Frank was looking at him like he’d entirely lost it. Maybe he had, who knew, but he guessed he’d be in extremely good company if he had.

They left the book on the plane when they disembarked. Frank glanced half-longingly at a rack of brand new trashy novels on their way through the airport but stayed stoically away from them and Cooper could only look at this as a victory, albeit a small one.

They were in the airport for three hours, drinking coffee and eating unpleasantly dry muffins before their next flight. Cooper had had worse in the way of journeys, he guessed, reminiscing as they sat there at the café table about deployment in Iraq and a chopper than had almost crashed in the desert and it turned out Frank had been there the first time around which likely did nothing to make Frank feel any younger or Cooper any older or either of them any closer to the other except somehow it did, something about it winding up taking them into some sort of shared Marine space where it was all oorah and firearms and crappy haircuts that Cooper did not miss. When Henry had informed him Frank had basically identified him by his ‘cute hair’ he’d almost felt like shaving the whole lot off but damnit, he liked his haircut.

It was a short flight down to Baltimore from Toronto and Victoria picked them up at the airport, drove them home as the sun set. Cooper purposely sat in the back seat so he was out of the immediate line of fire and kept his head down on the hour or so’s drive back out to the house. Of course, Victoria had another job for them when they got there.

“This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Cooper said, leaning over the kitchen counter.

“Then you’ve not been paying attention,” Frank said. He guessed that was fair.

Victoria just smiled triumphantly. And despite their interesting array of facial bruises and butterfly bandages they were back out on the road again in the morning. They caught a flight out to Germany and the whole way Cooper could only think of Victoria’s wide smile. She had plans; he didn’t pretend to know what they were but he’d never met a better manipulator in his entire life.

They checked into another hotel, Cooper unsure how many he’d seen since he’d apparently officially joined what he could only loosely term a team but all of the carpets and beds and bathtubs were all more or less blurring into one despite his training to the contrary. It had been a long flight with two near-perpetually screaming children keeping everyone awake so more or less all they had the energy left to do once they’d miraculously managed to check in early around 10am was fall into bed and wake up six and a half hours later with Cooper’s arm jammed in under Frank’s hip and Frank’s leg somehow under Cooper’s thigh like they’d decided to play a game of somnambulant Twister.

“Does room service count?” Frank asked, rubbing his eyes blearily as they disentangled themselves, Cooper’s arm still tingling and Frank flexing feeling into numb toes.

“As dinner?”

Frank did something halfway between a wink and a squint and rubbed his eyes again. “As dinner.”

Cooper chuckled. “It counts,” he said, trying hard to keep a faint smile from his face as he headed into the bathroom, turning on the shower.

It maybe wasn’t the best idea they’d ever had but Cooper hadn’t been making great decisions for some time now. He didn’t flinch as the bathroom door opened again once he was under the spray, wasn’t even particularly surprised though maybe he should’ve been given it was Frank freaking Moses and he didn’t exactly have the best track record for making things work. Frank’s hands settled at Cooper’s hips as he stepped in behind him, naked as the day he was born though it was tough to imagine Frank any other way than he was right then. One hand flattened over Cooper’s chest and then swept down slowly, the barest rake of his nails against his skin as Cooper leaned back against him just a fraction, not enough to topple them disastrously. Frank’s mouth went to Cooper’s neck, hot even under the hot water just where the back of his neck swept down into his spine. Cooper rested his hands against the wall and Frank’s hand moved down again, wrapped around him, gave a careful if not tentative squeeze. There was very little about Frank he could call tentative.

It wasn’t the best idea they’d ever had but apparently they decided to do it anyway, maybe work off some tension before they needed to get out into Berlin, onto the job that had to be Victoria’s idea of a practical joke. He was hard in moments under Frank’s hand and Frank’s erection pressed right up to the crack of his ass, slid against it and that was fine, apparently, fine for both of them, enough for both of them as they shifted against each other. Frank’s other hand tightened at Cooper’s hip as he stroked him then went back, pressed over his own cock, pressed himself down at the small of Cooper’s back with each thrust of his hips. It was enough until it wasn’t and Cooper turned, half-blinded by the water running into his eyes and maybe it wasn’t perfect but he tugged Frank in against him, the kiss hot and wet as they both wrapped one hand around the both of them together, almost too tight except that felt just tight enough.

Frank looked stunned when he came, like he was bowled off his feet as Cooper’s right hand rested over his shoulder and kept him upright. Cooper guessed he probably didn’t look too much different himself as he brought his other hand up to Frank’s other shoulder, thumbs brushing his jaw.

“Dinner better be damn good, Frank,” he said, nearly smiling.

Frank laughed and he kissed him again; Cooper could live with that as a reaction.

***

“Sarah.”

Cooper looked up; it was indeed Sarah. Sarah and Han, to be more precise, standing at the bar as Cooper and Frank sat there in a booth at the opposite side of the half-dark room. The two of them were together but not together together, that much was evident from the way they stood, the way they talked though obviously Cooper couldn’t hear what they were discussing and the inconsistent light meant he couldn’t lipread. But he had a fair idea that this was why Victoria had sent them, make or break. He could’ve slapped her except she’d probably have dodged somehow, ten moves ahead of him, and he honestly didn’t like his chances against her.

He didn’t tell Frank to ignore her because that wouldn’t’ve worked worth a damn, Frank was his own man and orders didn’t seem to work all that well once his mind was made up. But Frank just watched her across the room, waiting for her to notice the two of them, waiting for her to be the one to make the first move and Cooper just sipped his drink like he wasn’t paying any attention to the situation at all. He was. Closely.

Inevitably, she noticed them. She noticed them a couple of seconds after Han already had, his jaw tightening just a fraction as he did so, but that was to be expected when they’d just stumbled into what might’ve been an op and might’ve been a well-earned night off, might’ve been any of a dozen things and Cooper didn’t like to speculate. But Sarah noticed them, her gaze fell and fixed on Frank and a small smile just verging on awkward came after. It couldn’t’ve been an op because she lifted her drink to him in a strange kind of greeting like she didn’t realise they could be there on business and Cooper watched as Frank mechanically did the same in return.

“You’re going to blow our cover, Frank,” Cooper said, his only warning because he was pretty sure nothing was going to help. He said it in Russian because hell if he was going to be the one to blow their cover when they were there in Berlin posing as Russian businessmen because it was the only language other than English that they both spoke fluently enough to get away with it. What made it even more fucking ludicrous was that aside from the fact that they were both sitting there wearing well-tailored suits, unarmed in a bar in Germany of all places, Frank quite clearly had his arm around Cooper’s shoulders and that should maybe have tipped Sarah off to the fact that the situation was not at all usual. It wasn’t usual. They had a mark for something like a con and if the indirect approach failed they’d be stuck with something not unlike a Schwarzenegger movie as their alternative. Cooper enjoyed a good explosion as much as the next guy, assuming the next guy wasn’t Marvin, but many more and he was pretty sure Frank was going to be making arrangements for a hearing aid fitting in the not too distant future. As debonair as he was sure that would look, they could both live without it.

She came over. Cooper cursed in Russian under his breath; running and hand grenades it was, then.

“What are you doing here, Frank?” Sarah asked.

Frank removed his arm from around Cooper’s shoulders. “We were on a job,” he said.

“Were?” Han said.

“I think we just blew our cover.”

Cooper dropped his head into his hands as Sarah took a seat and Han followed suit.

“You’re Cooper?” Han asked, as Frank and Sarah started to talk, shuffling closer together at the opposite end of the booth. Cooper nodded into his hands, one elbow of his expensive suit in something sticky on the tabletop and that was just perfect.. “You’re pretending to be Frank’s boyfriend?” Cooper just laughed, stifling the sound against one palm. It had never seemed like a great idea to begin with, and being out with Frank in public was so fucking strange Cooper couldn't even start to explain it. “How did you get involved with this lunatic?”

“It’s a long story,” Cooper said. Han looked very much like he could believe that, given his experience of Frank Moses. Victoria had told him the story.

“Tell me over a drink,” Han said. “We should leave them to talk.”

“Yeah,” Cooper agreed, grudgingly. So he moved away with Han, bought a bourbon each at the bar and they sat together and though all he had was Frank’s word that Han Cho Bai was one of the good guys he showed him his hand and the scars over his wrist and he told him the story. He told him how he’d gotten himself shot that day by an inept ex-intelligence analyst defector on his way out of DC, how he’d wound up in a crappy job with exceptional pay and then there was Frank Moses asking him to join a team he’d had no intention of joining right up to the moment when he had. Han listened as he sipped his drink, looking cool in a way that Cooper thought maybe he might’ve looked, once, if he’d tried hard enough. Of course, it didn’t look like Han had to try and maybe that was the difference, but at least he listened politely. Maybe it helped. Besides, he got the impression that Sarah had already told him everything.

“What about you?” Cooper asked.

Han shrugged. “I just like killing people,” he said, and smiled. “The money helps.”

In any other circles, that might’ve seemed strange. Cooper realised he had an odd definition of strange these days.

“We’re going to help,” Sarah said, when she and Frank came over a few minutes later. Han didn’t disagree, apparently easygoing where operations were concerned. Cooper guessed he couldn’t be the lone dissenter as much as it sounded like a really bad idea and so that was that, they filed out of the bar, they swung by Han and Sarah’s hotel to pick up gear then by Cooper and Frank’s, Frank keeping Sarah outside the room and Cooper could guess why that was considering how the king bed would look sitting there in the middle of it all. But Cooper could be professional and not some kind of sentimental jackass about it so they went along, they got into Han’s SUV and they did the job with all the requisite small arms fire and leaping off of buildings and smoke canisters and night vision devices and after four small-to-medium explosions and Sarah laughing her way off site like a freaking gleeful hyena, they had what they’d come for. Cooper took the disk back to the hotel for security purposes and left Frank with Sarah and Han. He could be professional about it. Really. He hadn’t forgotten how, the CIA wasn’t that far into his past.

Except then he decided screw it, he’d get the next flight out of Berlin, make sure no one put two and two together and came up with his hotel room, make sure he got the disk to Victoria; Frank could read all the shitty romance novels he liked on the way home without Cooper there to stop him. Maybe he’d bring Sarah. Hell, maybe he’d bring Sarah and Han. He needed to remember to kick Victoria’s ass for that or at least spike her casserole with peppers or something similarly petty before he got on with his life like the melodramatic jackass he was currently acting. Frank could take care of himself. So could he.

He caught a cab to the airport and settled down in the lounge to wait.

***

Victoria didn’t ask where Frank was. She took the disk and she went into Baltimore and when she got back she still didn’t ask where Frank was, just made a pot of tea in her rather flowery china teapot and Cooper didn’t really know how to say no as she poured him a cup in the sitting room.

“I’ve arranged for a cut of the payment to go to Sarah and Han,” Victoria said.

Cooper nodded. Of course, she hadn’t asked where Frank was because she’d talked to him. She knew where he was. So he finished his cup of tea and he went out for a late afternoon run because he knew he was being a petty fucking idiot and who knew, maybe it would take his mind off of that fact for a while, at least.

Frank decked him when he got back to the door, laid him out flat on his back on the porch with his upper back hanging over the steps in a highly uncomfortable position, then held out his hand to help him up. Cooper let him pull him to his feet except Frank let go almost too soon; he was nearly down again in a second and maybe that had been the point.

“Don’t you ever pull that crap again,” Frank said as Cooper just about caught himself and he stalked inside and straight up the stairs, leaving him standing there with a bruised jaw by the front door in his tracksuit. It was a pretty bold statement if nothing else.

Victoria popped her head around the kitchen door where she’d apparently been loitering, listening, just like always. The whole freaking house had ears and they were attached to Victoria Winslow. “Well, go after him!” she said, with a despairing shake of her head, and because refusing Victoria anything was not at the top of Cooper’s to do list he did just that; his petty moment of revenge was leaving his running shoes on instead of kicking them off onto the shoe rack by the door and tracking bits of dirt and fragments of leaf all up the stair runner as he jogged upstairs. He figured she’d cope.

Frank was in his room. Frank was in Cooper’s room, that was, littering his bed with a box full of well-thumbed trashy romance novels by the time he got there like that was a sensible solution to whatever the hell the problem was and Cooper slammed the door behind him. Frank didn’t look up because Victoria wasn’t exactly the door-slamming type and who the hell knew where Marvin was, up a tree, in the basement, wearing a chicken suit in next door’s barn. Nothing would’ve been too much of a surprise.

“What are you doing, Frank?” Cooper asked.

“Making a point,” Frank replied, and Cooper half expected him to whip out a can of lighter fluid and set fire to the books, bed and all. What he actually did was huff, throw the now empty box out of the open bedroom window and sit down on the bed like he didn’t actually know what to do next or even exactly what he’d done before. Frank Moses at a loss for what to do was new. Newish, at least.

“Where’s Sarah?”

“Sarah’s in Germany.” Frank glanced at him over his shoulder. “You thought I’d bring her back here?”

“You didn’t think you would?”

Frank sighed and looked away again, out of the open window whither had flown the box, minus its cargo of books, only moments before. Frank had been keeping it in the back of his closet and Cooper had had an irrational urge to take them out into the back yard and burn them on more than one occasion, but now they were strewn haphazardly all over his bed like that meant something. So maybe that was Frank’s point; it did mean something. It actually did mean something and Cooper should maybe have been surprised he was surprised but there it was: he hadn’t expected it. It took him off guard, suckerpunched.

“She asked me to stay,” Frank said, casual, like he was pointing out the sky was blue or discussing Marvin’s strange belief that the fish in the pond by the woods were some kind of secret government experiment. Who knew, stranger things had happened. In the scheme of things, the matter at hand pretty much was a stranger thing.

“So why are you here?” Cooper asked.

“I don’t have great memories of Germany,” Frank said.

Cooper crossed his arms over his chest. “Stand up, Frank,” he said. Frank stood, turned, shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Don’t tell me you couldn’t’ve persuaded her to go somewhere else.”

“She likes Berlin,” Frank said. “She said it’s very cosmopolitan. She’s not going back to Kansas.”

Cooper sighed, shook his head. “Marvin’s right,” he said. “You really suck at this.”

There was a pause, practically palpable, where Cooper half-glared and Frank frowned except then the frown started to ease and the glare started to ease and Frank finally got that Cooper got it, the fit of stupidity that’d ended up with thirty well-read novels strewn all over his bed. Frank smiled wryly. “I might’ve been… concerned, when you weren’t at the hotel when I got there,” he said. That was a start, at least.

“You don’t think I can take care of myself, Frank?”

“Sure you can.” He pulled one hand out of his pocket and rubbed it over his head, palm scraping against the week’s growth of stubble over the back. “You’re like me twenty years ago.”

Cooper chuckled. “Did Frank Moses just pay me a compliment?”

Frank’s wry smile turned a little less wry. “If you call that a compliment.”

“From you, yeah, I call that a compliment.”

Cooper stepped closer. Frank took a step after that but then they were only two steps closer and that wasn’t remotely helpful so Cooper closed the rest of the distance across the room in three long strides, quick strides, one hand going up to the back of Frank’s neck as he kissed him just a little harder than he’d meant to. Frank didn’t seem to care about that, on the other hand, because apparently they’d just established that neither of them needed to say anything else about it to understand the situation, Frank didn’t need to say he’d come back for him because he’d wanted to and not because he’d half wondered if he’d gotten himself killed, Cooper didn’t need to say he was relieved that he’d come. They just pushed and pulled at each other as they stood there, Cooper still in his sweaty running gear but that point seemed pretty trivial in context, maybe kind of useful when Frank pulled up at the hem of his sweatshirt and it came off in one easy motion, no buttons, no zipper, and tossed it aside onto the floor.

They fell onto the bed, pretty much actually falling as they tripped over the running shoes Cooper had just toed off without unlacing, landing in a heap of romance novels where neither of the pictures in any of the cover art looked like either of them but who really gave a damn about that. They swept them aside, pushed them all off the sides of the bed onto the floor and then Frank stretched out on top of him, propped up on his forearms as they looked at each other in the failing sunlight through the window. Frank looked older like that, the low sun picking out all the wrinkles in his face, but Cooper couldn’t’ve given a damn about that if he’d been paid to. If he’d been going to care at all it would’ve happened months ago, when Victoria first started her weird little crusade to fix the two of them up together; if he’d been going to object he’d’ve done it right back at the start. If he’d been going to object, he wouldn’t have left his boring job for this, whatever the hell this actually was.

Frank managed to work Cooper’s sweatpants down over his hips; Cooper somehow managed to pull Frank’s t-shirt up over his head in the process, only getting it stuck under his chin for a couple of seconds on the way, and then Frank pulled away to unbuckle his belt and it was strange watching him do it, really strange but in a good way that Cooper hadn’t really ever imagined would be the case. There seemed to have been a running joke throughout his career about military men and close quarters, don’t ask don’t tell, but back then he’d never seen anything like that, never done anything like that himself. He wondered as Frank leaned down against him, bare to mid-thigh against him, Cooper still lying there in his damp shirt with sweats pushed to his knees, both of them still in really fucking sexy sports socks, whether Frank ever had. He didn’t ask. If Frank wanted to, he’d tell him sometime. He got around to the important stories in his own time.

“Frank,” Cooper said, as Frank’s mouth met the crook of his neck, pulling the collar of his t-shirt aside to do so. Frank ignored him, mouth moving up to his jaw, rasping against stubble. “Frank.” No response; Frank’s mouth found the hollow at the base of his neck, the dip between collarbones, mouthing there over the fabric of his shirt. “Frank.” He pulled back, finally, looked down at him. “Marvin’s at the window.”

Frank turned and there was Marvin, staring goggle-eyed from the top of a ladder with one of the pond fish in his hand. Made sense, in a way, when you knew Marvin.

All either of them could do was laugh.

***

They went down to dinner after that, after they’d shuffled off of the bed without giving Marvin a total eyeful, after Cooper had finally had a shower and Frank had retrieved the box and stacked the books back into it. Victoria said she’d keep them; they might be worth a read. Cooper made her promise she’d donate them to the nearest goodwill as soon as she was done so he’d never have to look at the fucking things again. It wasn’t like Frank didn’t have photos of Sarah he could look at instead of reading the damn books if he wanted to and it wasn’t like he’d stop him; he still had one last photo of his family tucked away in a box with one of his SIGs, after all. He’d allowed himself that much.

“Would you pass the peas, William?” Victoria asked, and so he did, holding them over the dining table with his left arm, attempting to wield a fork with his right. Victoria seemed strangely houseproud for a killer, he thought, with the table setting, three forks with each meal though usually Frank only used one and Cooper had forgotten what the third one was for years ago.

“Can I call you William?” Marvin asked. He usually concealed one of the other forks about his person and Victoria had to pat him down after every meal or risk the piecemeal abduction of her silverware. Somewhere along the way that had gotten to be normal.

“No.”

“Will?”

“No, Marvin.”

“Bill? Billy?”

Cooper suppressed a smile as Frank snickered into his broccoli. “Absolutely not,” he said. “Pass the carrots, Marvin.”

Frank called him William in bed that night, experimentally, amused, and it didn’t seem even half as weird as Marvin saying it. It was hot in his room because they’d closed the window and it seemed neither one wanted to leave the bed to open it again; instead they got warmer as they shifted against each other in the dark, lights off but basically only so they wouldn’t attract Marvin’s attention, face to face because if they wanted to go all the way then they’d get there in the end and if they didn’t then this was enough, more than. They had time to work that out, whether all they wanted was to make out on the couch in Victoria’s sitting room until she came in and told them they had a room for that particular activity, sometimes getting each other off with their hands or rubbing against each other like Frank even knew what the word frottage meant. Cooper tried not to laugh under his breath at how ridiculous it was that they wanted this but they wanted this. It was nonsense but nothing about life had made even that much sense in a while.

They’d be out in the field again in a couple of weeks, maybe three, maybe Victoria would leave them be for a month or more now she was satisfied her work was done with the two of them. Maybe they’d wind up landscaping the garden or fixing the garage door opener or maybe they’d be killing a guy in Taipei with their bare hands and piano wire but the whys and wherefores didn’t really count. They’d come back to Maryland and back to that house and Victoria, Marvin who sometimes made pancakes in the morning that were pretty good if he said so himself and he did say so himself, pretty regularly. They’d come back to nights in bed where all their did was talk tactics, or compare scars without their clothes, hands on bare skin, and as Frank pulled up onto his knees to take Cooper’s erection in his hand he wondered what it’d be like to go down on him, use his mouth for a change; maybe he’d find out in the morning before they went out running like they always did. Maybe they’d add to this one element at a time till they had what worked for them, till their on-the-job shorthand translated into everything else.

He guessed he’d lost his family but he’d found something else there in a chintzy house that belonged to a British woman who made boeuf bourguignon twice a month and killed people now and then just to keep her hand in.

“You wanna buy guns tomorrow or do we need to hit Home Depot?” Frank asked, leaning down, his mouth brushing at Cooper’s jaw as he spoke.

“We used all the duct tape last week,” Cooper said, pressing his right hand flat to the small of Frank’s back with his left, palms hot against slick skin. He hadn’t even thought about the efficacy of his left-handed aim in months; somehow he was just as good with his left hand as he’d ever been with his right; maybe all he’d needed was a change of perspective. “Can’t we do both?”

Frank chuckled. “We can do both,” he said. “I could use a new power drill and an AR-15.”

They had the sweetest pillow talk.