#bitterarcs

Thankfully the coffee was lukewarm because she just choked on it.

>D

There's a saying about this sort of thing.

Nero had heard it once as a boy, a casual bit of banter between scientists as they took blood and prepared to run their simulations. One of them had been holding his scrawny, bruised arm in their hand as they complained about the worsening state of the facilities.

"It gets worse by the day," they'd said as the needle had bit through the skin, more painfully than it had needed to be. "But we're in it, so we don't notice. Y'know, like frogs in boiling water. They acclimatize. Then it gets too hot to jump out."

Now, Nero had never seen a frog. The closest to boiling the water in DeepGround got was tepid, spitting showers in the barracks. But he had understood the sentiment, watching the staff grow more and more uneasy as whatever justifications they had for their work in DeepGround fell off. Some stopped coming, others joined them on the wrong side of the glass.

He understand the real meaning of it as he looks at Reno, the cocksure grin doing little to hide the discomfort of revelation he was on the cusp of receiving. That things were indeed too far gone, that Nero himself was living proof of what awaited a lifetime of servitude.

"Yes," Nero says simply, holding the redhead's wrists loosely in one metal hand. "But not tonight."

He squeezes them tight enough to bruise, catlike amusement flickering in those ruby depths at the pain in the redhead's eyes. He shifts his weight on his lap, soft flesh and blood hands loosely wrapped around his throat.

He could kill him.

They both know that. Before Reno's fingers could twitch towards the control, shock him into obedience, Nero would have his head turned all the way around.

The Sable's fingers flex as the idle thought presses into an impulse and he feels the redheads pulse race, but the thought passes. His grip relents, clever fingers finding mismatched buttons. They're undone. Redone. Hiding ugly scars and company secrets. Whatever this is between them is not as easy as temptations of the flesh, the calling of violence and blood. It's something worse, a never ending cat and mouse game that occasionally risks something tender.

A boiling frog.

Those cool hands rise cup his cheeks, tilting his head up. The Sable shifts in his lap, pale lips ghosting over his handler's in the ghost of a kiss.

"The better question is, why don't you?"

Rufus clicks his monitor off, interest sufficiently piqued.

he had a few rules he stuck by, and one was to stay clear of the rec room. he was the director of the turks; the one who decided on assignments and training, who got partnered with who and the person who signed off on whether his turks were mission ready or not.

he was their supervisor and though some would disagree with him, it wasn't possible to be both friend and leader. there was a distinct line that needed to be acknowledged - it didn't take from the trust he had in his turks, but veld knew that the burden of management meant that he was the one making the hard decisions and sometimes those decisions could be taken personally.

a rec room was for rest and relaxation; debriefing and bitching about management and red-tape.

but emma wasn't answering her phone, which was very unlike the blonde, and he needed to discuss an upcoming recon assignment he had put her on.

walking around the corner unannounced, veld barely gave the red-head a second glance when he scrambled to try and hide a pack of cigarettes. stumbling over his words as he tried to cover his non-chalance.

Oh the things he wanted to say. It would be so easy to out himself to put Reno in his place. So, so easy.

He shouldn't--

unprompted | always accepting! <3

If there ever was a more dangerous day to be a Turk, Fools Day was it. Usually, on a day to day basis, there was an unspoken rule within the offices - no friendly fire would be permitted within the walls of the Investigative Sector of the General Affairs Department. On Fools Day, however, this rule was null and void - and so it was on the one day a year where a Turk wouldn't be punished for insubordination that Tseng, as Director, would inevitably have to dodge the most bullets, so to speak.

As it were, Tseng had already neatly side-stepped a bucket of water balancing precariously on the hinge of the entrance to the offices, disarmed the stink-bomb tied beneath his seat, and removed the whoopee cushion attached to it.

The suspicious white stains caused by the ominous glow of the newly-installed black lights overhead were, at the very least, not something that would deter any work from being done. The stuck keys on his keyboard, however ...

Tseng looked up from his attempts at logging in to his console - Elena was finishing up the final stages of her training, shadowing a mission in the sector 6 slums, Rude was present, at least - a possible suspect, but this didn't exactly scream his style.

Tseng's eyes fell to Reno. Relaxed posture, quiet focus on the terminal in front of him .. and there was the outlier. Quiet.

Rather than push the subject, Tseng instead began to start on the physical reports requiring his attention, signing and marking those that might need to be investigated further, those missions that could be retired ...