John’s grip on the gun was steady, the pistol trained on Santino, not wavering in the least even when Winston stepped forward, trying to calm him down. Taunting John Wick had been juvenile—possibly even suicidal—but in this moment, balanced between life and death and ruin, Santino could not begin to care. He smiled.
John turned, a faint spark of surprise actually filtering through his fatigue. Filthy and thin as his mortal shell was now, he should still be invisible to humans if he wanted to be - and the shorter, stocky middle-aged human with as fussy a face as his voice looked and felt human. He was impeccably if unassumingly dressed, in a three piece dove gray suit and a pale blue tie, knotted under a shirt collar pressed to razor edges. Wire-rimmed spectacles perched high over the bridge of his nose, behind which sharp, pale blue eyes regarded John with disapproval. Had John run into him on a street, he would’ve walked by without a second glance.
Six months, no yellow cape, and one and a half thankfully harmless gun accidents after, Harold and Nathan had settled into a routine. The Machine would send them a number, and Harold would try his damnedest to resolve it through a computer. Usually, this endeavour would end in failure, because despite the advent of technology, the idiocy of certain members of humanity was so fundamental that not even computers could provide any sort of real solution.
This meant that Nathan often had to intervene. Sometimes they hired help: which had worked out with varying degrees of disaster. Sometimes they tipped off the police. Sometimes Nathan and Harold ventured out, bickering all the time, and the success rate of this latter tactic was usually at around 24%. It also usually served to further erode Harold’s already falling opinion of humanity.
Clark had no idea why he had been sent to cover the fundraiser. After all, events like these were usually private affairs, where fortunes were pooled together to be gambled on politics, with the press informed later through leaks, if at all. The Daily Planet hadn’t been the only newspaper invited along: Clark recognised Julie from the New York Times, and Dean from CNN, among others, and they all seemed equally bewildered. Wayne Enterprises, usually notoriously neutral in national politics, was forming a SuperPAC.
After Ground Zero in Metropolis, Bruce read a lot of science fiction. He’d never particularly bothered with the genre before: even after retiring as the Batman, it wasn’t as though Bruce had very many hours in the day to devote to stories about imaginary alien civilisations and spaceship battles and evil robots. Life was strange enough, or so he had thought. Then life itself had turned into science fiction, and standing outside the blast zone, comforting a child, Bruce had felt small for the second time in his lifetime, small and powerless and utterly helpless.
Finn lowered his vibroblade, turning on his heel, and he grinned as Poe ambled over in his measured flyboy swagger. Damn but Finn sometimes wished that he could walk like that, like he could take any punches that the ‘verse wanted to throw and still come up tops. Finn had tried practicing once, in the room that the Resistance had given him after he’d woken up in the med-bay, but he had only managed to awkwardly trip over his own feet and had bruised his hip against his desk.
Napoleon refuses the CIA deal and ends up in prison, as the infamous Russian's cellmate. Super good story building with the developing relationship as a sort of side-plot.
Illya raised an eyebrow, then straightened up sharply, nearly hitting his head against the top bunk, when Napoleon pulled out a small, battered chess box. It was a tiny set, not even as wide as Napoleon’s hands were long, and it was scratched alarmingly at the flanks, but when Napoleon tossed it over, Illya rubbed his fingers reverently over the black and white lacquer top before he remembered himself.
Napoleon sat, if on the edge of Illya’s bunk, and grinned at Illya, clearly pleased with himself. And the little jackal should be pleased. He had seen a glimpse of Illya’s levers and had quite quickly done his best. The jackal, skulking carefully at the heels of a wolf, trying to seem useful enough to avoid its jaws.
New York was having a swelteringly hot and humid summer. Napoleon had tried to beg leave from Waverly to escape northwards, maybe as far as Canada, but it had been vetoed - apparently, a mission was imminent.
Bored, Napoleon spent his days driving around aimlessly in the morning in his Bentley and sleeping off the rest of the day in his air-conditioned penthouse, and so had been cruising down Brighton Beach, wondering whether he had the energy to park somewhere and walk down the shorefront, when he saw a familiar, tall blonde figure duck into a shop. Surprised, Napoleon slowed down. It was Illya: that height and cap were unmistakable.
Other than Napoleon and the CIA watchdog assigned to him, the prison bus was empty. It was once a schoolbus, but had since been rudely repurposed, painted a dark charcoal gray with the words Virginia Department of Corrections printed in neat white paint under the murky windows. Outside, flat, baked farmland went past, acres of it, dotted sparsely with trees. There was no air conditioning in the bus, and the windows were open only in varying slivers; Napoleon felt like he was baking, himself, in clothes that were three days old. His shirt stuck to his back, and his jeans felt uncomfortably stiff on his legs.
Napoleon watched the trees go past in a daze. His hands were cuffed to the chrome ring attached to the seat in front of him, and his legs were hobbled. It was hard to believe that only four days ago he had wandered through MoMa with a gorgeous leggy blonde on his arm, then wined and dined her at a nice French bistro. Strange how quickly the worm turned, just on the back of a single mistake.
"In the first month of being co-opted into working with Illya Kuryakin full time at U.N.C.L.E., Napoleon stole Illya’s father’s watch four times, twice out of spite, once out of drunken curiosity, and once out of sheer boredom. After the fourth time, Gaby sprained one of Napoleon’s fingers and threatened to do worse if he did it again."
Mad Max / Inception fusion WIP.
You could say that I first got a Clue that my governor maybe, kind of, had a sort of Thing for me when Molly started methodically oversalting all my food and drink. Including the hot cocoas.
“This is your next target,” Merlin said into Harry’s earpiece, as Harry leaned forward to look at his laptop screen.
It blacked out, for a moment, then a clip out of some interview began to play. The video was in black and white, crisply and tightly shot, its subject a young man shown seated from the waist up, against a pale gray background, grinning at the camera. He was probably in his mid twenties, dressed down in a black leather jacket over a pale t-shirt, loose over denim jeans, his hair long enough to feather slightly over his forehead, a hint of stubble over his chin. He was also, quite possibly, the most beautiful young man Harry had ever seen, and disturbingly… familiar, somehow.
As the young man laughed noiselessly at the camera, elegant serif type faded over the lower third of the screen: Gary Unwin, by Vanity Fair. Harry blinked, and studied the young man’s pretty face more closely, the crinkling around his eyes, the joyous curl to his mouth, the way he sat, relaxed yet alert, like a hunting hound, waiting to come to heel.