Tonight, the sky is empty n' yer not with me.

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Sniper finds Spy in the workshop. He peers into the room, a little curious to see Spy sitting on a stool with his head bent to an opened sapper. There’s a soldering kit by his hand, a hot cautery pen between his fingers, and a bottle of beer within reach. The shirt he wears hangs loose at his shoulders, the fabric worn and gone gray, with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. One leg bounces restlessly against the floor, the other has a foot resting on the opposite knee.

Sniper thinks he shouldn’t be seeing Spy in this state. It looks too casual and unguarded, like he’s caught Spy in a private moment. He’s about to duck back into the hallway when the hot wire sparks from the sapper stops.

“Either come in, or go a hundred meters away if you want to keep staring,” Spy calls out without turning around. “Maybe go to the opposite building with your scope. There’s the window with a sightline.” He waves a hand in the general direction, smoke wafting from the soldering pen.

Sniper rolls his eyes but his feet take him inside the workshop. He stops next to Spy, parking his hip against the workbench to lean against it. The beer bottle is too irresistible to ignore so he tips it from the neck, checking the label, and snorts when he sees that it’s some kind of fancy foreign import. No pisswater hops, no matter what the occasion. He leaves it be and crosses his arms.

“Making improvements?” he asks, tilting his head to get a better look at the sapper. The paneling is open, circuits exposed, wires in a tangle. Sniper’s no good at this kind of stuff, so it’s not like he can offer any help.

“Making attempts,” Spy says absently. He takes two wires and twists them together. The needle of the sapper’s meter doesn’t move. He frowns and takes the bottle of beer for a fortifying sip. His fingers are covered in soot.

Sniper assumes Spy expected the sapper to do something other than nothing at all. He eyes Spy’s hand on the bottle, the condensation at his fingertips collecting the black ash from his nails. “Take it to Truckie?”

Spy puts down the bottle and picks the pen back up. He untwists the wires with a deft flick.

“Very occasionally I find that it behooves me to fix my own equipment,” he says. With a sly smile, he reaches over to hold Sniper’s chin, fingers curling to give Sniper’s jaw an admonishing squeeze. “I’ve been repairing my own gadgets even before I signed on to RED. Back in my day we did not have an on-call engineer at our disposal. Before your time.”

“Yeah, back when you lot were hittin’ each other with clubs and rocks,” Sniper says, not minding when Spy lets go, no doubt leaving black sooty streaks at his cheeks. Spy’s fingertips are noticeably cleaner. “Not much to fix for a stick.”

“Well, it keeps me busy in any case,” Spy says, shrugging. He gives Sniper a very amused look. “You know what they say about idle hands.”

Sniper doesn’t think he’d been that obvious, staring at Spy’s fingers, but he makes it a habit to work with sightlines that are usually straight and dead on the mark. 

“I don’t, actually,” Sniper says, setting one elbow on the workbench. He leans close, letting himself be within easy reach. His jaw still tingles from the grit Spy had left across his skin.

Spy quietly laughs, seeing right through him. He sets the pen back down so that he can have both hands free to draw Sniper in. One hand at his neck, the other at his waist.