“It’s cute you think I need a man to protect me. I’m Barbara Gordon, I need no man.”

There was a rare comfort to the feel of cold steel pressed into his hand that his colleagues might have found unnerving had he ever the mind to tell them. He had seen the seeds of suspicion sown months ago when they had visited an army barrack as part of a public relations tour and the eyebrows of everyone in the armory had shot up when he kindly declined the offer of a cadet to show him how to put together a rifle and assembled it himself. 

The serene smile as the rest of them struggled with the task and stared at him curiously had not betrayed anything to them save an ease around weaponry that was rare among them altogether and Cesaro didn’t mind whatever it was that they thought of him or the assumptions made then as long as they never got between him and his job. 

The firing range was a favored haunt of his however in between their constant travels and gym time. It helped him focus beyond pumping iron and the thrill of crowd and as the last of the shots rang from his rifle, he took off his mufflers to examine the target as it was brought closer to him.  Headshots. every single one of them.  Some things never left a soldier even almost a decade away from the battlefield.  Grinning self-assuredly, he clicked on the safety lock on the rifle before placing it on a nearby table where his coffee had gone stone cold but the caffeine addict in him slugged down the noxious concoction regardless, rejoining in the silence and solitude.  The sound of something clattering in the distance however immediately made him stand a little straighter. There was next to no one here this time of the night save the owners of the place. 

“One of you tell me what the hell I drank to agree to this gig because I was fifty shades of fuckin’ done twenty minutes ago an’ countin’.”  The rattling sigh from Roman as the multitudes of doggy faces peered down upon him while he laid spread-eagled on the grassy knoll of a local park only grew deeper as they all looked about perplexed as he was on the reason he had, first and foremost agreed to Lita’s charity dog run for A.D.O.R.E on a weekday and secondly, why he had thought for a moment that gamely taking seven of them at once, all large breeds to run with to the finishing line was anything that remotely resembled a good idea. 

“You. Asshole numero uno. What you got you got to say for yourself?”  He pointed at the Pitbull who panted back at him nonchalantly, clearly proud of itself for having run him to the ground.

“No? How about you, Beethoven?” His attention shifted to the tail-thumping St.Bernard who was looming directly over his head and the hound had about as much grasp of the situation as the pitbull did, its answer coming out in thick ropes of drool that spattered down upon the Samoan’s nose and mouth.  “Paaah! Pffffwah! Jesus fffff—-man I knew I liked Tchaikovsky’s shit better for a reason!”