Work Text:
”Damn,” she exhales, “remind me never to cross you.” It’s something she jokes when he’d swung his crackle rod through the air a few times to warm. He wasn’t aware of her piercing gaze on his back, but it felt good, but like always it made him ache. Lately, at least. Like an injury becoming more prominent after being masked by a flood of adrenaline, the awareness has only started to seep in.
Regardless, her approval still fills Gray with warmth. He turns around and looks at Carmen, her poison red lips turned up at the corner. Every glance at her tore him apart viciously and put him back together again, never the same each time. Carmen extends her leather gloved hand as an invitation to head out, steady and unwavering as always.
The movement looked so slow to him.
Was he lucky? Why did he hesitate? Why couldn’t he appreciate what was given to him that moment, why was he such an ingrate?
“Why would you cross me?” Gray replies instead, a tangle of a choke and a scream willing to escape from his throat, instead releasing itself with a tremulous breath out. His smirk mirrors her own, except it was empty, it was all empty.
Gray’s two fingers are still pressed against his comm long after she hangs up. He’s basking in solitude in the Vienna sewer, getting used to the perpetual drip that echoed throughout the caverns or his gentle footsteps making a cacophonous noise. Gray had joked that the acoustics of the tunnel were like the Musikverein—better, perhaps? The musical soul in Vienna had been in the sewers all along.
His breathing is rapid but quiet after managing to outrun the ACME agent that chased after him, vexed French voice slowly fading away as he headed further down the cobblestone tunnels. It would be a while before Chase came after him, but Gray had an ample amount of time to prepare. He believed so, at least.
The tunnels are uncomfortably humid, and they reek like old water and something rotting. It’s insanely hard to identify, but he just knows it’s beyond foul. Gray presses a hand up to his nose in a vain attempt to drown out the sickly scent, but like all things, it finds him anyway.
His grip on the crackle rod is frail and unsteady, where the more he tried to force himself to dig up that precious muscle memory and tighten his hand, the weaker it became. Gray steps in a viscous puddle of god-knows-what—
“Fucking HELL!”
—with a face contorted in unfiltered disgust. Furious, he drags a hand down his face as the echo of his cry bounced off the walls continuously, continuously.
“You know what?” Gray snarls to no one in particular, cleaning his boot by scuffing it on the stone below (the floor is likely more riddled with contaminants than the puddle, but it doesn’t matter” in a demi-comical manner as stiff as his words.
Nothing ever comes out, however.
He opens his mouth again and shuts it, letting himself be absorbed by how stupid the whole situation was. Gray pinches the bridge of his nose so hard the pressure lingers long after his hand is gone, looking around instinctively to reassure himself that he was alone for a precious few minutes.
The newfound silence is blindingly overbearing. Carmen’s sweet hardened voice was overbearing. The Faculty’s voices were overbearing. Everything was fucking overbearing.
His head feels like when he first woke up in the hospital, throbbing and splitting, Gray unable to do anything except move his eyes around and let himself be swamped by the pain that the shoddy meds failed to dull. The new exception this time was that Gray was liberated from the mysterious and shady circumstances that landed him there in the first place. Although now he knows why, thanks to the CIA director or whatever the hell that woman called herself again—the truth had long been stripped of its sugary coat of lies. Though he felt indifferent to it, doing little more to shove the life-changing moment aside with an apathetic shrug.
He was able to admit that having Carmen by his side once again after years was an ill relief, but Gray was never able to shake off the impending and inevitable thought in the back of his mind—it wasn’t Carmen herself, per se. Her nature, mind, memories—everything about her was mismatched, a cup of fine china that had been pieced back together. Looks the same until it’s felt, never quite as smooth anymore as its counterparts, because the cracks linger. They always linger.
Despite how much he wanted to quash that feeling under his boots, Gray couldn’t repress the thought that Carmen’s arms around him didn’t bring the same butterfly feeling in his chest. Not like when they’d embraced in Auckland under different circumstances, and as completely different people…! It was a bloodsucking memory he couldn’t shake off, although he wished he could. He wished it could have gone down the goddamn drain like all his other memories had previously done.
Though it’s still very real and living in his head, so Gray holds onto it. Shoves it in a “rainy day” file; god knows he might need it eventually—when he finally receives what all turncoats do.
He remembers that night so vividly, yet it’s also just an insignificant speck on the horizon. Gray can recall the lush scent of trees in the Auckland forest, the shade of lipstick Carmen had slathered on.
A simple superficial cosmetic, but regardless found himself wandering into sketchy drugstores at 1 a.m. to guess what her shade was. The sick solace seeker’s game of Jeopardy. (He still played it to this day—so far Gray called Carnation 140, Noirish 331, and Prowl 271.)
Are we the good guys? The phrase echoes around the caverns of his mind. Was he really was that naive and stupid, or was the need to do good ingrained in him from birth?
For a night, was he willing to defect and turn his back on VILE for Carmen even without knowing who the hell they were?
Gray fiddles with the dial on the rod and turns it to the highest mode to warm it up. The green electricity that could kill in the blink of an eye was cathartic—so then and there, he notes the immense difference between him and Carmen, the factor that set them on opposite sides of a river.
The real Graham Calloway was a klepto, a killer who instinctively knew how to retract his arm to deliver the final blow by raw muscle memory. The real Carmen Sandiego was every bit the opposite, instilled with good nature, despite the fantasies that the Faculty forced her and themselves to believe. And she wasn’t going to go against what her innate ways were.
He’s dredged up from his thoughts with the hard noise of leather shoes hitting the stone, growing louder by the second. He winces. Don’t do that to the Italian leather! Gray sets his jaw and luckily moves behind a pillar of stone, the rod switching from his left hand to his right one as he began prepping for who was about to arrive.
He can hear heavy breathing coming from the suit—Chase, as he’s come to realize by eavesdropping on covert radio comms—and he finally comes to stand in the middle of the tunnel, emanating husky gasps. Gray peeks over the edge with the rod behind his back. It’s noisy as he dials it up, but with the way the brash agent is huffing like an engine, the racket the device makes is successfully masked.
He aims the weapon like a sniper and is just about to strike, but Gray’s assassination attempt is only interrupted by the light voice of a woman coming in through Chase’s comm, reaching the operative’s ears like a feather. He grits his teeth and presses his back tight against the brick wall again, the live rod still crackling with hundreds of thousands of volts.
He hears a ”and that is why you are the smartest person I know!” from the agent as he takes a big breath and dashes out the sewer tunnels, footfalls starting again, descending away from the tunnels. Gray scoffs exasperatedly and turns the weapon off, miffed, stepping out from behind the wall as he tucks the rod back into his suit.
“It’s your lucky day,” he snarls to absolutely no one (or at least he believes so), voice ricocheting off the walls, ”flatfoot.”
He drags the back of his hand across his mouth and spits on the ground, keeling over to catch his breath.
“Tch. Should’ve known what was good for him.” Tigress scoffs from a few paces ahead of him and kicks the mangled, unrecognizable dead body of the guard, which is lying splayed in a physiologically impossible manner. Gray shuts his eyes so tight they burn. His sides clench as he tries to repress the bile building up in his mouth.
The stench of burning flesh fills up his nose. Gray knows well enough that a stench like that never really leaves, no matter how much he snorts lemon juice or hydrogen peroxide or whatever the hell war vets do.
“Don’t be a pussy.” His blurry eyes trained on the concrete below are forced up by a sudden clawed hand digging into the back of his suit and yanking him up.
Despite his current situation, he manages to make her scowling face out behind his blurred and stinging vision. “Christ, what irony. Do you ever listen to yourself?” Gray snaps with a jaw clenched so hard his words sound pressed and weak, despite the fire he attempted to put into it.
Tigress purses her lips and lets go of his suit. Gray feels around for the man’s guard keycard and reassuringly pats the slim figure that’s tucked away in his pocket. He nods; she nods. The guard saw their faces and was a few words away from summoning for backup—what other choice did they have?
“I don’t get it,” Tigress grumbles under her breath as she rolls the body over on its stomach with the tip of her boot, grimacing. She looks around for any witnesses, thin blonde hair swishing like palm leaves with her movements. Her eyes land on him again and she contorts her face more, looking absolutely disgusted by the sight.
“Haven’t you, like….” Tigress makes a questioning gesture with a hand; the way she talks to Gray like he’s three is only throwing more tinder in the fire. “...y’know…killed someone before? What’s up with that? This is literally like a repeat of the time you snuck and ate some of, uh—”
“Maelstrom’s clam stash.” He interjects almost instantaneously, swiveling his head to look her right in the eye. Mask, anyway. “Oye, you’re stupid, but I know you can figure out why.” He runs a hand through his own usually silken hair, tangled by the wind. “Cut the second time newbie some slack—it was only roughly a week ago that I was a brain-dead tool making hippie-ass flower crowns with Carmen and singing kumbaya.”
Tigress says nothing else, but snorts and swipes the keycard from the still mildly incapacitated Gray’s pocket. He straightens out a little bit, not even noticing it was gone, trying to calm the rocking tempest residing in his stomach by taking in gulps of sweet air. “And? What makes us think that you stopped?”
It’s such a light remark in itself, but her voice darkens, deepens. Gray looks up and hobbles after her. He spits on the ground again, sour taste ebbing away. “How am I supposed to know what you mean by that?” he says in a hoarse voice, “Back to spitting ya bullshit again?”
“Nah, see, that’s not gonna work here.” Tigress points a claw at his form, which was rising to its full height.
“I don’t go with your little ‘play dumb’ mentality. You’ve gotten soft, haven’t you?” It sounded more like a flat-out comment than a question, dripping with venom, and for a fraction of a second Gray considers it. He shakes his head rapidly and looks at her right in the eye, but Tigress beats him to whatever he was going to proclaim.
“And you know what? It's not even a random idea thrown into the air anymore!” Her sneer slices into him like a cold scalpel. “You weren’t the one getting reprogrammed to be a so-called killing machine like she has.” Tigress taps the side of her head stupidly, mockingly. “Like it or not, the Carmen she used to be is still rubbing off on you—and it shows.”
Gray tastes bitter bile at the back of his throat. He sickens himself even further by, even if it was for a fraction of a second, questioning if her claim was true.
“You’re….mad, you know that, right?” Gray takes one long stride to where she stands, chuckling, and it irks him even more that his words seem to have no effect on her at all. “Delusional. Whatever Kool-Aid you’ve drank was no doubt tainted with jealousy.”
Tigress’s rolls her eyes and turns around, back facing Gray as she uses the keycard to open the door. “It’s getting old, Gray. You know, the Faculty can believe whatever they want, but I know. I know.”
Gray almost chokes, legs feeling like unsteady pillars of sand below him, every word a slap in the face.
Was she painfully right? Why didn’t Gray shrug it off like her usual attempts to get under his skin? The bile in his throat turned to liquid rage, hot, hot everywhere.
He draws a cold, shaky breath through his teeth, and without putting much thought into the action, lashes out in a single movement and grabs Tigress’s thin wrist, yanking her firmly and suddenly so that they meet eye to eye.
She lets out an unintentional yowl, clearly caught extremely off guard, though the keycard still remains in her clawed grip. He clamps his hand down harder against the joint.
Tigress tries to yank her hand away but learns early on that Gray isn’t planning on letting go.
“What the hell, Crackle?” Tigress’s voice was quiet but shrill at the sudden display of ultraviolence, escaping her lips like steam. Her valley accent made the last words in her mouth rise up an octave as her eyes widened.
He’s seeing red, but lately, that’s all he’s been able to see.
“What is wrong with you?” She presses her hand into his shoulder and attempts to push him away, but the electrician stands his ground, clenching his hand harder around her wrist until he himself feels weak. Tigress’s hand digs into the fleshy part of his shoulder, making meek gasping breaths through her teeth, but her attempts to injure are as fruitless as a desert harvest.
She does keep her claws retracted, however. Touching, Gray sneers to himself.
“Oh, you just don’t get it, kitty cat, do you? There’s a line.” He growls with a set jaw into her face, his fist around her wrist threatening to snap it; Gray probably could if he wanted to. He does, actually. “And you just crossed it.”
Tigress tries to open her mouth.
“I don’t WANT TO HEAR IT!” Gray suddenly explodes and yanks her closer by grabbing her opposite shoulder, mere inches away from her paler-than-dead skin. He pivots around and slams her back into a nearby column, ignoring the sudden screech she makes as he does so. “You’ve always—always!—held a grudge against her like a goddamn lil’ toddler.”
El Topo nor Le Chevre are nearby to separate the two, and Crackle doesn’t know whether to be relieved or alarmed. It’s only now when he realizes that he’s been wanting to do something like this for the longest time. No more infantile teasing, no more pretending like she wasn’t an annoying little kitten back during the rose-tinted era of adolescence.
Her clearwater eyes are wild, filled to the brim with fear of every kind. “Let me GO! You’re going to get us busted, you fucking psycho!” Tigress hisses in desperation, too proud, however, to reach the point of beseeching.
Tigress finally reaches her breaking point and sinks her claws into the thick shoulder pad of his suit, reaching the skin below with stinging grazes. With Tigress’s pulls intensifying by the second, and his skin being sliced below, Gray suddenly lets her go with a jerk.
“Get OFF!
Tigress skids across the ground with a wild yell but anchors herself using a clawed hand and her heel, curling her lip and glancing up at him from the ground. He’s panting, cold sweat dripping from the side of his head, Tigress equally as frazzled, shaking, guarded.
They hold eye contact, unable to break away or resume the mission. It’s been called off the moment his temper broke free, fucked it all up.
Gray presses a hand against the bare spot over his shoulder, giving himself the luxury of breaking the standoff and looking down for a few moments—blood seeps from the three near-identical gashes, imprinted on his palm when he slowly draws it away.
The taste of metal floods his mouth—it was only natural to have Gray’s blood be the only one spilled—Serves me right and more.
The need for air fills up his lungs and he pants, hand clenched around the baggy material of his pants. What was he thinking about earlier? The fine line that distanced him greatly from Carmen in their mannerisms?
The silence, tense and absorbing all between them like a vacuum, is loud.
He’d never thought about how evening Vienna air was crisp, too fresh, reminiscent of simpler and sleepier times on the Australian coast.
Gray’s eyes are feverishly looking around at the nightlife that’s occurring around as the rest of his teammates talk on their table situated inside the local fair, words rushing around him like a blizzard and complicated to pick out. Their conversation went so fast, but the time went so slow.
His hands wrap around his styrofoam cup of cocoa, relishing the tingle of the newfound warmth around his frigid palms.
Gray chews on the inside of his cheek and waits. Le Chevre and El Topo had gone from engaging in a conversation with Tigress to having an animated discussion amongst themselves, the blonde woman scratching letters in the wooden picnic table with a flat expression. She avoided Gray’s gaze at all costs; the only times they had made eye contact she’d narrowed her azure eyes and seemingly tried to wish death upon him (essentially, if looks could kill, Gray would be alive and well) but she got an A for effort.
The guilt from that fight, although months ago, thrived in the back of his mind, but it wasn’t something he dwelled on too long. He’s swept with a sudden warm wave of relief when a red coat from his peripheral vision appears, and everyone seems to notice it save for Tigress.
“Carmen!” Gray suddenly calls out with unrestrained enthusiasm, cup of saccharine liquid abandoned, but she only gives him a snarky smile in return. From behind, he hears the goat and the mole mimic his greeting, save for Tigress, who lets out a barely audible “hey.”
“Partying without me, huh?” Carmen snarks, though it’s mainly directed at him. Her silver eyes catch his gaze; Gray feels a chill run down his spine at both the sheer disquiet and hypnotic aura alike. “What did I ever do to deserve this?” The woman places a hand over her chest in mock grief.
Gray beckons her to sit at the table, the smile that had been temporarily wiped able to grace his face again. “What can I tell you, mate? We told you to meet us here at 9 o’clock, right on the dot. Not our fault your watch is still set to San Diego time, eh? ” He teases, nudging her with an elbow.
“Took up a side quest,” Carmen tells him back, smile growing and eyes shining with dark mirth. “You know how it is.” She gets up and sits right smack dab next to Tigress, the blonde looking like it was taking every last ounce of self-control not to snap. Carmen notices, which makes it better, and wraps her arm around Tigress’s shoulders. Gray swears he can see the latter begin to tremble.
“And you didn’t once think of calling us down to help?” He tries to convey the sentence with a splash of amusement, but it sounds more worried than he wanted to. The corner of Carmen’s lips go up.
“A girl can’t impulse shop?” She replies lazily, intertwining her fingers from the arm that was around Tigress’s shoulder with her opposite hand.
Gray doesn’t get the chance to reply when he looks back to where she was and notices the sudden empty spot next to Tigress, seconds too late before her gloves land firmly and suddenly on his shoulders.
“Ow!”
“Gotcha.” Carmen’s voice rings from above him, tilting his chin just a bit so that they can meet eye to eye. He’s lost again in her eyes, mouth slightly ajar, snapping out of his stupor as she shakes him side to side in an effort to get him to stand up. “Come on.”
And go...where? He thinks but dares not to say it out loud, instead taking the opportunity like a sip of honeysuckle, clambering off the wooden table to catch up to where she was.
“Relax, we have a bit of time to kill.” She tells him nonchalantly. Gray’s stomach suddenly felt leaden—either she was able to read his mind clear as day (which meant Gray was in more trouble than he thought) or she just saw his ghostlike complexion.
He turns to a nearby maze of mirrors in a tent to look at himself. His reflection almost looks like him, but not quite the murderer-turned-good-samaritan he used to be. His complexion appears similar to coffee watered down with too much milk until it overflows, leeched of any rosy color. Gray lets out a laugh devoid of any pure joy, a movement out of self-preservation that was mainly an effort to make himself feel better.
Gray finally caves and asks her. “Where exactly did you want to go?”
Carmen doesn’t turn to look at him, but the rise and fall of her tapered shoulders lets him know. “Is there any place in particular you wanted to go?”
“No, hah, that’s not why I ask-”
“See? Just relax and enjoy the walk, take it as a lesson. You don’t need to know everything.” This time Carmen does turn to him with a hand in a gentle gesture as they passed multi-colored carts selling a variety of savory meats. “If you just… chilled out for a moment and enjoyed the ride, maybe you wouldn’t be a neurotic mess like you are now.”
Gray’s eyes widen, trying to play it off at the beginning. “Ouch,” he muses, rubbing his arm like it’d been bruised. “Care to explain what that means, Sandiego?”
Carmen closes her eyes and lets out a laugh filled with amusement and something else Gray couldn’t quite identify, shaking her head. “God, you can be so stupid sometimes.” They’re illuminated for a few moments by flashing lights when they reach the lane of carnival games.
“Every time we go on a mission, nerves get the better of you. I doubt you know it, but it’s so evident it’s almost funny.” Carmen playfully shoves him in the side with a free hand. “It’s always ‘Carmen this, Carmen that, it’s too dangerous, let me come with’”—she makes an elaborate show of mocking his accent.
Gray rubs the back of his neck. “Well—’ His hands throw themselves mildly up in the air in a question, but his mouth remains open because the rest never comes. Carmen cuts him off by placing her body right in front of his way, squaring her shoulders to look at his eyes. Thoughts turn to bland mush when he catches sight of her eyes again, the ache sinking its claws into him again.
“You don’t think I’m capable, do you?” Carmen’s words are given a hostile connotation, yet it’s not strong. Amiable, even. She can never and has never come off the way she does to Tigress, but it still gives his chest a hollow feeling.
Gray could easily make up something to cover himself, but it doesn’t feel... appropriate. He’s got to accept for once in his goddamn life that he’s been backed into a corner, and tell her what she wants to know—if Chief can’t save Carmen, he at least owes her that much.
“Of course I think you’re capable. Beyond that, of course!” The operative forces himself to look right in her platinum orbs, which are steadfast on his own. A roiling boil of conflicts brews inside him like a cauldron. He’s not allowed to talk about her past, their past; so many things he wishes he could say in this moment vanish thinly into the cold air.
Carmen’s eyes narrow as she pushes her face closer to his; a breath hitches in Gray’s throat before the woman cracks a smile that reaches her eyes. “Of course I am, pendejo.” Her hand gently grips his left shoulder. ‘I’m just teasing. Yeah, you can get crazed as hell, but… you’re a good guy. I know you mean well.”
Good guy. Gray internally winces at the phrase.
Regardless, he winks in response. Quashing that sick feeling that lingered was all he could do. There was no dwelling on it like he’d done before, it only hindered him even more.
Gray only just notices that Carmen’s looped her own arm around his when she pulls on him slightly to change the direction that they were walking in, his cheeks feeling rosy against the cold at the sensation. There’s a part of him that loves it, and a part of him that wants to break free. It was too domestic, too casual for the current situation.
Quit being such a little bitch and go along with it. Gray tells himself, his opposite hand landing on her shoulder. He catches sight of her face in his peripheral vision, a small yet whole smile freshly painted on her lips.
He wants to close his eyes and relish the sensation, wishes they were sitting or lying or doing anything but walking.
“...one second...need to deal with my old traveling companions…”
A sudden blast of cold air hits his arm and when he looks around, Carmen’s gone. He’d tuned out so much of what had happened that he barely heard anything comprehensible of what she’d said. A cloud of disappointment hung over him, but Gray was reassured that whatever she did, whatever happened, she at least came back—he knew that much of her.
Pursing his lips, Gray forcefully shoves his hands in his pockets subconsciously until he feels a smooth, cylindrical object like the bullet of a rifle hiding in its depths. Wrapping his fingers tightly around it, he fishes it out and realizes what it is. An impromptu trip to a high-end beauty shop in Downtown Vienna, lit by fluorescent lights that hurt his eyes had resulted in one less lipstick being swiped off the shelves, another one to add to his foolish pile.
The shade this time is Carnation 130. Looking at the color and matching it to the vivid memory of Carmen smiling just a few seconds ago, he thinks yeah, we’ve got a winner.