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She has the softest sing-song lilt to her accent that is not even Ireland; she is from places else entirely, and it is like the curve of an echo coming back from black shadowed caverns that are deep, deeper than the eye can see. Sebastian is afraid to turn on the light, and find that the room is smaller than he thought, smaller than before. He is afraid to turn on the light, and find that her eyes are brown, and not black. He is afraid to find out that the woman breathing beside him is only a woman.
He is sleepless in the night.
——
She is not a woman. Only.
——
The panther covering her back is like a dripping black watercolor portrait, ephemeral permanent, and feral come alive with the flex of shoulder muscle, when she pumps a shotgun, expertly. Her tattoo is a curious fluid piece that reminds Sebastian of hot India sun shimmering, and the growl artillery smoke cloud of war, but most of all of big cats slipping between tree branches, tall grass, hidden stripes, hidden spots.
She is wiping bits of blood and brain off her cheek. Sebastian kneels beside the now headless mess of naked male nothing but flesh, and begins to cut off his fingers. Later, they dump the body and her sawed off shotgun. She likes the sawed off, she likes the guns that are ephemeral permanent, the type that can’t be traced back to her, how it keeps her hands clean. She wraps her legs around his waist and leaves a bloody handprint on his back. It’s still dark early morning, and he is alive after another night, in her, in him, in him in her, and he wonders what his body will look like when he dies, headless and fingers missing, grave of an unknown soldier, guns that can not be traced.
——
"Hello, Bonnie," Mycroft says. "Where’s Clyde?"
Sebastian laughs, a little uncertain, and then louder. “Was that a joke?” He cranes against his handcuffs to share a look with the big faceless man by the door, as if they have a bond, being big faceless men. “Did you teach him to do that?”
A different big faceless man kicks him in the back of his legs, and his knees hit the floor with a crack.
——
He pretends to be asleep in the passenger seat, and watches with slitted eyelids the way she shifts gears; violently, foot full on the pedal, killing the clutch. She is listening to music loud and without lyrics but with throaty bass that vibrates through them, together. Streetlight washes over him in waves, faster than seconds ticking by, and he knows that if they crash at this speed they will both die, together, and he knows that she is tempted to do it, and he knows that he would be too.
He knows that he can grab the wheel with all his strength and make that decision for them, right now, and that she would hate him for it, forever. For taking that away from her.
She reaches over, and strokes a hand through his hair.
—-
"Good bye," she says, with the softest sing-song lilt to her accent, and she is from the night, and theirs is a life lived out in places that are not what they seem with the lights turned on. Her eyes are never brown. They are black.
——
He is on his knees, facing her, and she takes a photo. Her phone makes an artificial shutter sound, like snapping bone. The screen highlights her face in the blackness, highlights the scar that stretches unevenly across her throat like a grotesque fanged grin. He wants to run his fingers over her scar, but she would break them off and dump his body behind. He is allowed only to look, and appreciate, how it rips her soft skin, and smiling for her, always.
He has been in the jungle. He has hunted in the jungle, torn down trees and killed men he couldn’t see in the brush with heavy bursts of machine gun fire. But he has never known the jungle, not until he knew her, and her city. Until one night he felt.
She is opening a knife.
"And no man’s plaything," he recites, in the tones of prayer. And because she has learned the ways of men, she is more terrible in the jungle than Mycroft, than him.
She sneers.
——
"Lieutenant Sebastian Moran," Mycroft announces, when they first meet. "Formerly of the Royal Air Force-"
"And I piloted Apache helicopters," he provides, helpfully, then adds, in the mocking voice of an overeager schoolboy, because he enjoys the sour milk way sarcasm curdles in Mycroft’s eyes. "Like Prince Harry, my hero. God save the queen!"
Later, when his lips are so swollen he can barely speak, and he thinks, his whole life he has been tasting blood, he has never had a drink of water before, only woman, only blood, and Mycroft is still calmly asking him questions about Clyde, Bagheera, the Panther, Chaos and his beautiful Night, and Sebastian tries his best to explain, “Apaches have a 30 mike mike gun that’s controlled by the pilot’s helmet, you know - of course you know this. So, you shoot at her, and I turn my head, and I see you. The gun sees you too.
”Tatta-tata-tat. Bloody mess, loads of fun. I’ve cut men in half by looking at them.”
He looks at Mycroft. Mycroft looks back at him; patient, and unimpressed, with bright blue eyes.
"I always wondered what it would be like. To look up at the sky and see an Apache pilot looking down on you, that gun looking down on you. The end of your life. You better wave your empty hands like you’re drowning and hope she passes by." He licks his lips, cracked dry and cut and bleeding. "Because it looks a lot like black, I think. A lot like night."
——
“A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path, for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.”