Work Text:
The very first time it happens it's on their fifth job.
The very first time it happens, Numbers is doing his very best to pull the answers form their target before he needs to start pulling teeth. The guy’s some overfed business-owner who’s now stuck on a loop of begging and complementing Fargo in hopes of getting out.
Numbers is all about done with the first step of interrogation and turns to face Wrench, raising his hands to shoot him a quick Tweezers.
In response, the other lifts two fingers to his chin and waggles them once.
It takes a moment for Numbers to really catch on, mentally going through similar signs until it hits him.
He’s glad his back’s partially to their victim because he snorts, muffles it, then cracks an involuntary grin.
Wrench had sarcastically combined ‘cute’ and ‘rat’ into one sign, face stone cold as to not reveal anything to the businessman.
The joke’s so fucking dumb and Numbers’ so fucking tired, and he really really hates Wrench for being able to crack his resolve so easily. He decides to not encourage his partner and turns back around.
The businessman confesses the information in the blink of an eye right after he sees Numbers smiling.
---
After the first time, he tries to not crack up so much. This doesn’t mean Wrench doesn’t find other ways to get under his skin.
On jobs, Numbers fluffs himself up, takes care of his hair, puts on puffy clothes: makes himself look bigger. Wrench once compared it to a small angry bird making its feathers stand on end to look more menacing (it ended in a long bout of Numbers wearing a sleeping mask around the house to avoid any conversation). On jobs, Numbers looks different but along with that, he acts different too.
He’s aware of all his movements, he doesn’t fiddle with his sleeves, doesn’t lean on Wrench without reason, doesn’t tap his foot.
Numbers on the job and Numbers at home are different people.
Except when Wrench accidentally jabs his side with a finger, Numbers still yelps and jumps.
And Wrench knows he’s ticklish so he really has no excuse for doing it again.
He’s poked Numbers four times before the other finally puts enough distance between them to be safe. Wrench is grinning and Numbers really really hates him at that moment.
---
They’re on a small, small case in some tiny town which barely registers on a map. Some big fish of the criminal world is hiding there and they need to catch him. This one doesn’t require any form of interrogating but what it does call for is to, and he quotes, “make him look all pretty for the police”.
They’ve dumped bodies alright but Numbers knows this one will require a new form of brutality – a creative one. So he finds himself burning lasers into his coffee, mentally preparing himself for the next few hours. It’s their seventeenth job. He’s getting around to being professional. Totally.
When they’re leaving the diner, Numbers walks into a glass door.
He’d like to blame Wrench because of course, the doofus had to be signing something, reeling Numbers’ attention away from the quickly approaching obstacle.
Numbers storms into the parking lot, followed by Wrench’s signature snort-and-giggle. He’s about to throw a major fit because he’s already one foot in character when he finds hands on his face.
Wrench studies his forehead and smooths a thumb down the bridge of his nose, raising his eyebrows and then nodding in affirmation as if the incident needed a thorough examination.
He claps Numbers on the shoulder and continues to their car, casual and purposefully ignorant of Numbers going red, sputtering, and staying frozen on the spot with his throbbing nose and forehead.
---
Numbers doesn’t freak out around blood anymore and calmly wipes the specs off his chin and nose. The bashed-in head of their target isn’t spared a second glance and Numbers sniffs and turns around, the image of perfect tranquility.
There’s some part of him that does a little ‘whoop’ and a mini inner party at mission: complete, person: killed, Wrench: safe. Speaking of his equally quiet partner, Numbers finds him in the dark with eyes accustomed to tracking down the taller hitman.
Wrench is staring at him.
Number frees his hands to shoot a smooth What?
It’s past midnight on the outskirts of a bustling, well-lit city from which they’d dragged the protesting form of the man who’s dead on the floor between them. It’s past midnight and Numbers has sore arms and a bruised knee and he’s ready to let Wrench drive them back to some remote motel with no visitors except them. Ready drop asleep and then wake up to the smell of shitty coffee.
It’s past midnight and nothing prepares Numbers for Wrench’s eloquent answer:
You’re pretty.
Numbers feels his face go lax without his will. Feels the ingrained scowl of a long day and the squinted eyes of an after-fight all disappear into the silence and darkness around them. The moonlight paints a picture he involuntarily seals away into his mind for all of eternity: Wrench has a split lip and he’s standing under the high window of the barn, just so that his features are sharpened and illuminated by the electric blue of the moon. He’s holding a crowbar in his left hand – the hand he didn’t need to sign the damning words.
Numbers takes the moment to mull over all of this because really? He’s pulling time, looking for an answer.
He raises his hand three times until finally giving up on finding something to sign and just nods.
And there Wrench went and completely tripped him out of his cool hitman mood and now Numbers just feels weird. Weird because on one hand who fucking says shit like that but on the other he’s like to have it said to him again, and specifically by Wrench and that’s really concerning and he doesn’t know what to do so he tries to sleep.
He can’t.
Numbers catches Wrench smiling as they drive back.
---
Don’t punch me Wrench signs, please, he adds.
Before he’s finished the ‘please’, in that ugly abandoned parking lot, Wrench leans down and kisses Numbers.
Numbers still had his eyes on the other’s hands, awaiting some form of follow-up, something like ‘Don’t punch me please but your favorite coat got shards of the guy’s skull on it’ or maybe ‘Don’t punch me please but I think this isn’t the guy we were supposed to get after all.’
Instead, Wrench is effectively crowding him against some dusty car with blown tires.
His hands are framing Numbers’ face, gloves cold but they still sear into the shorter’s skin. It’s infuriatingly careful, like when you’d stretch your hand into the shower to check the temperature. The moment Numbers realizes he’s somewhere thought of this kiss as infuriatingly gentle – not any other kind of gentle but specifically infuriatingly so – he starts kissing back. There’s no actual space between them now because Numbers steps up into the warm expanse of the other’s body, digging his hands past Wrench’s unbuttoned jacket to rest on the small of his back.
Numbers had smooched his fair share of girls (and boys) but Wrench is an experience. For a person who uses their mouth mainly to eat and to shoot Numbers very very disapproving scowls, he’s already stealing all the breath from Numbers’ lungs with his sinfully artistic use of lips.
Numbers knows deep down that that’s probably baloney in sane-person language but his mind is going a mile a minute yet not going anywhere at all so he lets it all slide.
A wet cough echoes against the cement.
And here they thought they got that bastard well enough.
Wrench breaks away and gives Numbers a pat on the cheek before leaving in the general direction of the noise, gun already drawn.
Wrench has to finish the guy alone because Numbers stays right there at the car, eyes wide and breathing like he’s been suffocating for his entire life.
He wants to punch Wrench now – for having the professionalism to detangle and leave. He already wants his partner back in preferably a 3cm radius.
---
Numbers is feeling his skin cells die against the bitter biting wind of the blizzard as he strains his stinging eyes on where Malvo was just moments earlier. His hands weighed down by his weapon and his demeanor set on Stoic Hitman, Numbers carefully treads the snow, not feeling a pang of fear or apprehension because he’s gotten himself in the killer headspace.
His eyes jump to the thin red trickle on the ground – Malvo – and he begins to follow, glancing between the blanket of whiteness and the blood trail, looking, looking, looking, but not seeing a thing.
As he begins to near a building to which the trail curls into, there’s a faint grunt behind him. Numbers doesn’t jump in fear of it being Malvo because he’d recognize Wrench making even the smallest noise from a mile away.
And just with that little noise, Numbers is stuck. He’s stuck between the suspiciously thin blood trial – Malvo – and Wrench being trapped in his own personal silence and the lacking visuals of the blizzard.
He’d always hated ditching a job or letting an opportunity slip – hell he’d run through a forest to catch up to Lester after the electric shocker incident. But in that moment warmth starts to bleed through the cracks of his carefully built professionalism. The warmth of waking up with Wrench’s nose at the base of his neck, the warmth of sitting at the kitchen bar in a shirt too big for him due to being stolen from Wrench. The warmth of being cooked for and then the warmth of letting himself turn to putty – relaxing and being at ease in the company of another human being.
And honestly?
At that moment, in the cocoon of the blizzard, Numbers makes his choice.
He shoots the building a fleeting glance and turns on his heel, speed walking to where he heard Wrench.
He remembers how angry he used to get whenever he broke his job-mentality, how he used to mutter ‘wow I hate him’.
Now, all that roots into his mind as he sees the hulking shape of Wrench in the white haze of the snow is quite simple:
‘God, I love him.”