Work Text:
It’s rushed, usually; breathless and quick and a little rough—this because it’s always been something of a last-minute arrangement in between missions, when they’re not in completely different continents and in vastly opposite assignment schedules. There’s also the matter, of course, that their respective agencies are currently heading towards a literal war against one another over their shares of the somewhat limited assassin and spy operations market, which makes every one of their meet-ups the stupidest and most careless way they could endanger their careers.
Today, however, and for the very first time since they started doing this, they don’t have to rush; they have the entire afternoon, evening, and part of the morning to themselves, with no requirement to report back to their respective operation bases until noon. They don’t have to set an alarm to know when to begin re-attiring and re-equipping themselves, don’t have to monitor their communicators for sudden reporting orders, and can actually sleep together here afterwards, and wake up with something else accompanying them in bed besides their handguns.
But precisely because they’ve never had time, they automatically fall into their habitual pace: hard, eager, and fast.
“Okay; first you have like 3 pistols—how many knives do you need?” Momo grumbles against her lips, a little horrified, when she removes both a small bayonet-like weapon that had been strapped to Nayeon’s thigh and a pocket knife taped to her rib. In response, a shirtless Nayeon sits up from her straddling position and, smugly, withdraws a conveniently-sized dagger from a concealed pocket of her bra.
“Maybe you should focus more on taking my clothes off and less on how many weapons I have.”
And that’s both a taunt and a challenge, so naturally, Momo, huffing in exasperation, flips them over and pins her down. It should be embarrassing how significantly her heart rate spikes and her breathing turns ragged and labored at being—willingly, she’ll insist—overpowered, but Nayeon has no time to dwell on that because where she’s mostly desperation and impatience, Momo is all warmth and languidness as her mouth travels down from Nayeon’s lips to her jaw and her neck, teeth scraping patches of skin that respond by burning up like the sun’s touched them. This would be the point at which Nayeon would make some attempt to regain control. This is where she could make some smartass remark about how fucking soft Momo is even when they’re doing this—something so decidedly not soft. This is where she would use her hard-earned espionage-focused training to manipulate Momo into complying with whatever she wants. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t do any of that. Instead, she lets the feeling course free through the length of her limbs to inflame every inch of her body, the feeling of a tongue pressed against her collarbone and of fingertips touching her ribcage and trailing patterns down to her hip.
She tries to find a way to do the same to Momo, but then she remembers that Momo’s been distracting her so effectively that Nayeon hasn’t even removed her bulletproof vest yet. Nayeon is practically naked, Momo is practically all clothed, and that’s unacceptable.
Her hands operate with measured urgency when she rips open the vest from Momo’s torso and impatiently tosses it aside—only for Momo to beam down at her, like the dork she is and always has been, for the entirety of the time they’ve known each other, and gush adorably, “aren’t our new vests cool? My agency just got them last wee—”
Nayeon cuts her off by cupping Momo by the cheeks and dragging their lips together while breathing out, “Momo, shut up,” because otherwise she’s going to smile back or laugh at how little Momo’s changed from back when they were classmates in the Academy, and she can’t do that because if she were to ever actually slow down for a moment and look at Momo, really look—at the smile, at cheeks ruddy with exertion, at eyes that are always bright and hopeful as if their careers didn’t consist almost entirely of murder—if she were to ever slow down, she might blurt out something stupid and unnecessary and humiliating, like, Momo, you loser, I missed you so, so much.
By the time Nayeon’s finally managed to rid Momo of her clothes—and seriously, why did Momo talk crap about her guns when she literally had a grenade tucked into her bra—Momo has sucked what promises to be a horrendous bruise on her chest, and Nayeon’s sole focus now is on where Momo’s hand is. It’s gripping the outside of her thigh with the gentlest squeeze, her fingers pressing down onto skin that’s rapidly heating up, when they should already be inside her.
And then, probably to enrage her, Momo lifts her mouth from her abdomen and pauses her hand movements as well—apparently just to smile and survey her body.
Nayeon groans out a complaint; “did you seriously just sto—” but Momo, entirely too amused and pleased with herself, interrupts her with a laugh; “I’m appreciating.”
“Can you appreciate a little faster or maybe get your hands and mouth involved again instead of just your eyeballs, please?”
“Aww, you said ‘please’! Who are you and what have you done with—”
“Do I have to threaten you with one of my knives, or are you going—”
“Am I going to do what?” Momo jumps in with the sort of terribly charming grin that completely distracts her at first—fuck, Momo is so attractive; how does she just keep getting hotter; how is this possible; what witchcraft is this—but then subsequently makes Nayeon worry; for her wellbeing, for her sanity, for what state she’ll be in if Momo ever decides to stop this. Every time she’s found herself stuck, more and more inescapably, in Momo’s gravitational pull, every time she’s thought, this is too much, I’m feeling too much, Momo’s always broadened the edges of her heart a bit more, just enough to fit that one more drop of feeling that makes up this ocean she’s been damming up inside her. It’s terrible. She’s fucked, on multiple levels, and this is only the fifth time they’ve ever done this.
“You already know what I want,” Nayeon retorts gruffly, accompanying that with an eye-roll, though nowadays she’s not entirely sure why she bothers pretending to be bitchy and disgruntled when Momo can see through her so well, the evidence of which is right in front of her: the knowing grin, the expectant excitement of being well-aware of how good this always is, how good it’ll be right now. “So get on with it, Hirai; we’re not going to live forever.”
Laughing, Momo does indeed “get on with it.” Everything shifts into hot-burning and urgent, and it only takes the barest preliminary touch from Momo for things to go from good to great, and then, once Momo is finally inside her, from great to fucking spectacular. Through the fog of her mind, through the staticky edges of her vision, it’s hard to figure out how they’ve arrived at this place where sex can be both hard and slow, both fun and a little heartbreaking; this place where Nayeon can be all sharp edges and insults and still feel as though her heart is full, overflowing with feelings for someone who was frequently caught napping during their Intro to Poisons and Chemical Agents class and who goes out of her way to avoid killing people who have dogs, someone who interrupted Nayeon mid-kiss once, to remind her that firearms regulations in the European Union were changing in the next month and she needed to make sure her agency scheduled her for permit renewals.
After Momo’s mouth gathers the body-wide throb traveling through Nayeon’s muscles and focuses it on one particular area of her lower abdomen, after Nayeon wonders for the quickest second in human history whether maybe she should grab a nearby pillow to assist her in muffling her noise, after she sort of stops breathing for a second, after that throb becomes more and more intense until it tips her over, after it turns out that she really did need that pillow, after Momo’s kisses find her again and her brain is still malfunctioning and she accidentally whispers what she had been so intently planning on keeping to herself, that’s when she thinks again, this is only the fifth time.
“Yeah? I missed you, too.”
-
The first time was in Cape Town, mere months after their graduation from the Academy. It was frustration that sparked the impulsivity and recklessness for that episode—they were both fresh out of failed missions and Nayeon was well-aware that her preferred outlet for this level of irritation was sex. She hadn’t been sure about Momo’s and hadn’t bothered asking. They were sloppy and a little angry, and gave each other about a hundred insults for every orgasm—the perfect balance of components, in Nayeon’s opinion.
“I see you’re still favoring your right arm over your left. Whatever happened to that ambidextrous skill the teacher’s pet was always bragging about?”
“Where do you keep your Assassin of the Year trophy again, Hirai? Oh, that’s right—you don’t have one. Sorry—can’t relate.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s what you’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it?”
“If it’ll shut you up, then yes.”
Nayeon had left the incident wondering whether she had temporarily lost all her brain cells to have slept with a member of a rival agency—former classmate or not—and also shocked by how thoroughly her dumbass body had enjoyed it.
See, they weren’t even friends in the Academy. Nayeon’s closest friends were Yoo Jeongyeon (whom she happened to date for two years), and Park Jihyo, while Momo was inseparable from Minatozaki Sana and Myoui Mina, the 3 of them being childhood best friends. Their circle of acquaintances had some overlap and in their first 2 years, she and Momo did unfortunately end up attending most of the same classes—Assassination Methods 101, Avoidance of International Laws, Tactical Escapes and Extractions 101 and 105, and Intro to Torture and Pain Compliance—but neither of these factors brought them together. Chances of the two becoming closer became even more slim when they started taking upper division classes and Nayeon was specializing in close-quarter combat and sparring with Myoui Mina on a daily basis while Momo was training in sniping and learning how to shoot targets a kilometer away.
Afterwards, everyone was recruited by different agencies and some assignments were completely expected and almost anticlimactic, like Nayeon being pulled to the Central Bureau, specializing in assassination, and Momo and Myoui joining the East Bureau, both having majored in espionage but minored, respectively, in weapons and tactics, and in government infiltration. Likewise, Jihyo, perennially voted class president, graduating only to become an instructor in the Academy was a yawn-inducing revelation, given the fact that she had practically been trained since birth for this career. There were some real surprises, though; namely, Minatozaki and Chou Tzuyu joining the Interpol, and Son Chaeyoung being pulled to the Scotland Yard, law enforcement agencies that act legitimately to keep justice and peace in the world while the Bureaus send in their personnel to “do the right thing the wrong way” when shit hits the fan internationally and something less-than-legal is called for.
Overall, Nayeon assumed the only classmates she was ever going to see again after graduation were the ones who happened to become her coworkers, like Jeongyeon. That she had the crap luck of ending up in the same agency as her ex-girlfriend made her bitter—absolutely fucking bitter—but eventually she and Jeongyeon were forced into mutual courtesy, and through their many shared operations, developed a genuine friendship.
Either way, having sex with Hirai Momo wasn’t something Nayeon had ever even contemplated, let alone anticipated would happen. But it did happen, and it was an undeniably pleasant experience, though one she nonetheless filed away in her brain inside the box she’d labeled “Things I Have Done That I Will Never Do Again.”
Except, of course, that she totally did it again.
The second time occurred over a year later in Bucharest, and though this was the second time, it was the first time for a lot of other things. It was the first time Nayeon allowed herself to really kiss Momo, it was the first time Nayeon realized how careful Momo is underneath the put-on appearance of roughness, and the first time she had an actual conversation with Momo, even if it was about work, even if they both lied, as they were mandated to do, about their assignments and where they were going next. Momo admitted that she doesn’t like the job sometimes; that she wonders whether she’d be better off doing something else. Nayeon admitted that she doesn’t know what other job she could possibly have and be good at.
Some things were the same, though—Momo being a brat, for an example; kissing her but then pulling back to laugh at something she’d apparently just remembered.
“Hey, you’re on the cover of this quarter’s issue of Assassin’s Digest.”
And had this statement been uttered by literally anyone else in the world, Nayeon would have snapped loftily, “yes, that’s fucking right, you peasant; what about it?” but perhaps because Momo is so damn nice, and perhaps because she was giving Nayeon the most affectionate and admiring smile she’d ever seen, Nayeon had blushed instead. Which, for the record, never, ever happens. In the only instances Nayeon’s cheeks have ever been red, they were smeared with someone’s blood.
“So I just had sex with a famous person!” Momo had proceeded brightly, sparking a tightening in Nayeon’s chest that made her momentarily unable to recognize herself.
“You could be having sex with that famous person, again, right now, if you weren’t busy being a nerd,” Nayeon retorted, having to try very hard to insert some edge of half-hearted irritation into her voice. But at least that, finally, shut Momo up.
Two days later, she had a fistfight with an arms dealer’s personal bodyguard, and when she realized sullenly that he punched her in the exact part of her ribs that Momo had left hickeys on, and that this newly-stamped bruise would overwrite the marks Momo gave her, she made sure she used an extra amount of force to knock him unconscious.
The third time was… strange. Because Nayeon had a new scar on her thigh, relatively small and unnoticeable, the product of a superficial knife gash from a fight six months before. Unnoticeable, except that Momo noticed it and was horrified and concerned like the wound was about to burst open and bleed again. Over her then-four-year career, Nayeon had already almost lost toes due to frostbite, had broken three ribs, shattered her shoulder blade, needed reconstructive surgery on her wrist after punching her way out of a coffin, and none of this had ever mattered to her or anyone else, really, except in that moment, as she witnessed it mattering to Momo. And then while Momo, doing an awful job at concealing the heat of her fury, was trying to convince her to disclose who caused that scar—“I just want to talk to them, I promise”—Nayeon herself also noticed something that had been unnoticeable until then: a vague longing in her chest, a thing barely tenuous, mostly nebulous, just there. Her immediate, reflex-like response was to try to morph back into who she had been five minutes before, when she had just started kissing Momo and Momo had begun taking her clothes off, and she could have been anyone she wanted. Once that unnoticeable thing made its presence known inside her and forced her to notice it, she started wishing instead that she could be whoever Momo wanted her to be.
After Momo, heartfelt and sincere in some awful, touching way, told her that she could be covered in scars and could still walk into the Academy and “win prom queen again,” Nayeon felt the thing lurch painfully around and through her heart, so she blurted out in a weak attempt at rudeness, “of course I would still win—look at me,” because she had no idea what words would have emerged out of her instead. Probably something about how she’s a little bit devastated that she can’t see Momo more often; that she can’t just call her or text her, that she can’t carry a picture of Momo around to look at when she’s just finished a mission and wishes she could tell someone about it.
Nayeon hadn’t thought there would be a fourth time. Firstly, because she was promoted and her missions became longer, and more strenuous. One infiltration operation into a human trafficking ring in Malaysia lasted eight months, for an example. Secondly, because some insecure part of her had talked itself into believing Momo couldn’t possibly want her or want to reach out to her, and it wasn’t like Nayeon would purposely, knowingly, make her feelings even more unmanageable by seeking Momo out on her own.
And boy, are her feelings unmanageable… a day into an espionage operation set up atop a decrepit garage, and after scanning the target structure with uninterrupted focus for nearly two hours, a sweet nighttime breeze gently brushed her face and neck and she blinked, concentration broken, as her body murmured to itself, this is how Momo kisses me.
Unmanageable and unacceptable. Also, entirely out of her control and really fucking bleak.
In between the third and fourth time, however, Nayeon and her mission partner had broken into a hospital in an Albanian town to steal a briefcase containing North Korean nuclear codes, and, in a sort of cosmic coincidental miracle, she had spotted Momo, wincing while sitting on a gurney, left arm encased in a temporary cast, upper half of her skull bleeding through several layers of gauze, flanked by Minatozaki Sana and Myoui Mina. Nayeon didn’t afford herself any time to investigate why Sana, still an Interpol agent as far as Nayeon knew, was in the same room as Mina and Momo, an assassin and her sniper, respectively. For the fleeting, heart-wrenching three seconds she spared to inspect the scene, the entirety of her attention was on Momo. And for the long-dragging three weeks that followed, the entirety of her attention was on trying to find Momo again. She didn’t care to dwell on the reasons for her worry and her absolute need to check on Momo’s welfare, because nothing good would come out of doing that. What she did do was a whole lot of hacking and independent investigation—and by that, she means that she violated agency protocols and broke several international laws when she accessed the intra-agency database hoping to reduce Momo’s probable location to a reasonable radius. She declined an invitation to speak at the Annual Assassin and Espionage Services Conference when she finally tracked Momo down in Eritrea, engaged in an operation with Mina.
Thanks to her illegally-retrieved information, Nayeon knew where Momo and Mina’s safehouse was, and she surveilled the location closely enough to figure out when they had concluded whatever operation they were assigned, and when Mina left their compound to make a briefing drop-off at their agency’s command post, a routine procedure that takes about two or three hours.
As she anticipated, Momo was appalled that she had tracked her down, was aghast when Nayeon retorted, matter-of-factly, that she shouldn’t have been in a mission when she was injured only three weeks prior—“you saw me in Albania?!”—but the thing was, she was almost light-headed with relief that Momo was fine, mostly healed and in one piece, so she dismissed Momo’s questions impatiently and just grabbed her by the collar of her ballistic vest and kissed her.
And this was something else Nayeon would never admit: that she had never quite understood the big deal around kissing, even after kissing more people than she could possibly count—both because she wanted to or because the circumstances called for it—until Momo. Kissing had always seemed to her a mere preamble to what actually mattered: sex. But once she started kissing Momo, she found that she wanted to do it over and over again and keep doing it and never stop. It had to do with Momo just being really good at it. It also had to do with an inexplicable sense of safety and trust, like she could let herself enjoy this because Momo would never harm her or ridicule her for it.
“If you ever get that hurt again, I’m going to kill you,” Nayeon had mumbled darkly against Momo’s lips; a nonsensical threat that only made Momo smile into their kiss.
So the fourth time started with kissing, and it could have just been kissing and Nayeon would have been fine with that. But it was Momo who pressed into her, the weight of her touch setting off a most pleasant hum across Nayeon’s whole body. It was Momo whose fingers had traced down Nayeon’s neck and it was Momo whose lips had touched the shell of her ear as she whispered that she wasn’t going to get hurt again and how much she had thought of Nayeon when the pain got really bad because it made her feel better, and Nayeon remembers now what she thought in that precise moment: that nothing in the world could possibly be heavier than the bundle of feelings she’d started carrying around inside her, a bundle that only ever lightened when Momo touched her.
And six months later, the fifth time happens, and Nayeon decides that she could probably do this forever; that she could kiss Momo forever, in every spot of her body, that she could feel and taste the wet warmth of her and listen to every pant and moan and groan, and days could turn into months and months could turn into years, and she could let Momo consume every moment of her life, and her happiness would be full and complete.
When sunlight finds them in the morning, Nayeon has made them history’s worst-tasting omelet and Momo, still flushed and well-kissed from Nayeon’s attention not ten minutes ago, watches her with an enamored grin as Nayeon ponders grimly that maybe that culinary arts extra-curricular back in the Academy would have been a great idea instead of taking that elective on strangulation and asphyxiation methods that she aced without ever studying for it.
“You know you’re basically perfect-looking, right?” Momo queries cheerfully, somehow still sounding like this isn’t a rhetorical question; that she actually wants an answer.
And of course Nayeon knows she’s pretty; has indeed always known, and that awareness has only been reinforced over the years by the fact that whenever an operation required someone to be seduced, man or woman, her agency’s always sent her. But even through these continuous affirmations, the general idea of her looking a certain way has been some ambiguous quality she attaches to herself without any real consideration. Hearing this from Momo, though, an actual perfect-looking person, makes it feel true. She has a feeling Momo would never be attracted to someone she thought was a wretched person, so if Momo likes her, then it gives her some hope that she’s not entirely awful. Momo has seen who Nayeon really is—mean-spirited, heartless, merciless, arrogant, just generally terrible, all around—and she’s still here. Staring at Nayeon and sighing as though she were literally swooning.
“Are you always so fucking sappy in the morning?” Nayeon teases, voice a lot softer than she intended.
Momo is sunlight-drenched and the most beautiful sight Nayeon has ever laid eyes on as she laughs contently at Nayeon’s toothless response. “No… just with you.”
Her next idea fills her with fear, which is an altogether foreign feeling. There’s always been a saying that all Academy recruits are selected because they have displayed some degree of psychopathy, that being the most prominent trait that enables them to be trained and deployed into this career. Nayeon’s specific type of psychological dysfunction is probably her almost complete absence of fear. She’s been scared once in her life, when she almost drowned in a frozen-over river and had to shoot her way out of the ice cap, and her fear then wasn’t related to the very real possibility that she was going to die—rather, that she wouldn’t complete her mission, and an entire village would be leveled by a bomb she was supposed to dismantle. Nayeon’s stared into the barrel of a loaded shotgun and been certain her head was going to be blasted off, and didn’t feel fear then.
This is fear, though; Nayeon can recognize that. She’s genuinely scared that Momo will turn her down or not take this seriously because she thinks whatever they have is meaningless. She summons all the training she’s ever had to assist her in slowing her heartbeats and steadying her hands; enough to inform quietly, “Momo, I’m going on vacation.”
Still too occupied with swooning, Momo doesn’t notice her terror. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ve never gone on one; not since we graduated.” If she felt this afraid before her missions, she’d probably fail all of them. “Do you want to go with me?”
How do regular people go about their daily lives? Being afraid is fucking awful; she’s nauseous and weak-kneed and in actual pain, and seriously, what the fuck—
Momo beams at her. “Where are we going?”
-
There is no sixth time, really, because they never go on that vacation.
Nayeon has one more short-term deployment before she can request her temporary release, an undercover assignment with Jeongyeon in Copenhagen, and Momo is supposed to finish off one of her own operations somewhere in Europe before she, too, can request a release. It’s no one’s fault (it’s Momo’s fault) that they never get around to confirming their temporary releases from their respective agencies (it’s Momo’s fault), and when the time comes for Nayeon to sign her vacation request, Momo hasn’t even contacted her to confirm their arrangement (this is all Momo’s fault), has practically disappeared into the world and is apparently incommunicable, so Nayeon postpones her release to figure out what the fuck is going on with Momo.
At first, Nayeon worries that Momo was killed. Life expectancy for people in their profession is… woefully, woefully low. Just as quickly, she crushes that thought into non-existence and doesn’t let herself actually consider the possibility, because she knows herself, she knows what she’s capable of, knows how her training shaped her, has a mental catalogue of the exact number of bullets and firearms and machetes and weapons she has, and she knows she’s going to track and hunt down and torture and murder every person she even merely suspects might have had a hand in Momo’s potential death.
Then, as she realizes the role she had mentally assigned to Momo—that of being the one bright spot in the sea of grey that is the rest of her life—she also understands that this is the first time she’s ever wanted to quit the job. She’s been disappointed by the nature of her work before, has killed people she found out later should have probably just been imprisoned instead, has been let down by her agency’s duplicity more than a few times, but this—not having Momo anymore—this is what makes her want to quit.
When she finds out Momo did not die, Nayeon almost kills Momo herself.
Momo, it turns out, accepted a year-long total-isolation mission in Canada with Myoui Mina. The thought is almost incomprehensible.
First of all—Canada?? Canada is where spies retire. Nothing happens in Canada. What fucking mission is this?? Are they surveilling a curling team?? A moose trafficking operation?? An illegal commercial network for maple syrup??
Second of all—Myoui Mina, again?? Momo is partnered with Mina in practically every single mission; how do they not get tired of each other; why would Momo choose to go on a total-isolation mission to the fucking Siberia of espionage with the girl she grew up with, who’s really nice and really pretty—
No.
No.
Nayeon’s mental fortitude is the stuff of legend—she was one of only 4 recruits in the Academy's history who were able to withstand all levels of torture simulations. Yes, thinking about Momo in Canada for an entire year with Myoui Mina is like getting stabbed multiple times—and she would know how that feels, since she has in fact been stabbed multiple times—but she can file away Momo and the entirety of their memories, as she has with everything she felt could hinder the performance of her duties. She won’t see Momo for at least a year; she has plenty of missions to accomplish, people to save, people to kill.
She files Momo away.
-
There is one moment.
She’s in an open field on the outskirts of a tiny town in Ukraine and she plops down against the oversized tire of an old farm tractor, winded and exhausted and covered in blood—her own, that of the war criminal she’s just killed, and of the other 23 henchmen she worked through to get to him—and as she activates her emergency evacuation trigger, she thinks she’s probably bleeding to death and wonders why, exactly, she doesn’t just let herself die.
It’s a nice day; warm even though it’s overcast, and a sharpness in the air hints at potential rain later.
She knows exactly how many people she’s ever killed, because this is one of those things that, for paperwork purposes, one must always keep track of. But she doesn’t know how many people she’s saved. She just prevented a war right now, though. Hopefully she’s saved more people than she’s killed; it’d be a sad thought if that’s not the case.
One of her lungs is perforated; she can tell. It’s why her breathing is wheezy and faint, why she can’t seem to draw in enough air. She’ll probably die here before her transport arrives. Unlike that time under the frozen river, however, she’s completed her mission and has no loose ends, so she could die now and it’d be fine; it'd be—
(“Where are we going?”)
Ugh. She can’t die, can she?
She has to see Momo again. She has to punch Momo, for ditching her to go off gallivanting to Canada with the girl who’s probably perfect for her. She has to apologize for that godawful omelet she made them, and acknowledge that her cooking is nightmare fodder. She has to tell Momo that winning Assassin of the Year is not as big of a deal as everyone thinks it is—it’s not like she ever even got a raise or anything—and Momo’s long-standing record in the intra-agency marksmanship competition is a lot more impressive. She has to thank Momo for liking her when she has nothing, objectively speaking, that anyone should like. She has to tell Momo that for a few years now she’s worried more for Momo than for her own wellbeing, that she’s hoped for Momo’s happiness more than she’s hoped for her own. That she’s glad she got to know Momo the way she did, that she got to take their small moments of laughter and carry them with her through the shittiest, dreariest times of her life.
With a breathless grunt—five more minutes is probably all she has; two more of full consciousness—she reaches for the corpse beside her and digs through his pockets until she finds a pen.
What’s Momo’s Academy recruit number again?
The thing is, she has to designate someone to receive whatever estate she leaves behind. And usually, this would be taken care of; everyone who works for any Bureau fills out their next-of-kin information in their packet and then renews their authorization on a yearly basis. Nayeon’s never gotten around to it. Never wanted to get around to it. She left that shit blank and never looked back. It’s the problem with not having anyone; looking at that paper and being reminded of it.
In the absence of that next-of-kin information, one is supposed to write their designated inheritor on their palm when this sort of situation happens; when one is staring, eye-level and unblinking, at death. Nayeon can’t, in her right mind, write Momo’s name—what if her body is found by the war criminal’s allies before her agency gets to her?—so the next best thing is to write Momo’s identifier.
Fuck. She can’t remember it. It’s probably the blood loss—her vision’s going a little fuzzy, too, and she can barely grip this pen.
Oh, right—it’s two numbers higher than her own. What are her numbers again?
She rolls up her sleeve to expose her inner forearm, wipes away a thick line of blood trailing down from her shoulder, then uses what’s probably her last morsel of strength to press down hard, with her thumb, on the skin right above the crease of her elbow. When she lifts her thumb, she spots her number but only the briefest, faintest impression of it, because she should have pressed down more forcefully.
[587235]
Okay, so Momo’s is 587237—quickly, she scribbles the numbers on her palm, then lets her hands fall on her lap as she stretches her legs in front of her and closes her eyes. She hopes she doesn’t end up falling over and unable to sit back up. If it starts raining and she’s laying down, facing the sky, the droplets will probably give her flashbacks to that time she was waterboarded.
Her heart pumps weakly, increasingly irregular. There’s an old assassin folkloric tale of how there’s a song you’re supposed to hear when you’re dying, but all Nayeon can pick up right now are the sluggish and syncopated pounding of her heartbeats and the annoying whistle-like hiss of her breathing, which is a terrible fucking song to die to.
There’s a lot of money in her bank account; they’re all paid handsomely and she’s never had the time or opportunity to spend any of it. Her first non-work-related expense was going to be that vacation. She hopes Momo spends every cent—and then she wonders if Momo will just end up buying an enormous piece of land to be able to adopt all the homeless dogs in the world like the ones from those videos that always make her cry.
Besides the money, Momo will receive Nayeon’s weapons and cars. Oh, and her Assassin of the Year trophies.
Ha—she’s going to hate that.
Nayeon smiles.
-
(“No... just with you.”)
-
Nayeon doesn’t die.
When she wakes to a bright-lit hospital room in the Central Bureau’s intensive care hospital wing, her first thought is, shit, she’s probably going to be on the cover of Assassin’s Digest again for killing that war criminal in what was essentially a suicide mission, and living to tell the tale.
It takes her exactly 3 months to recuperate from the gunshot wounds, the lacerations, and the broken fingers, and then—she insists; she basically has to harass the Bureau director—she’s reassigned to full duty. And if she had never known the taste of Momo’s kiss or the sound of her laugh, being back in the field would have felt like being home again.
Well. No matter. She gets to work anyway.
-
Nayeon is running through a maze-like arrangement of rooms in what used to be a fully-functional castle and is now supposed to be a museum, except that it was bought by the head of an international organ trafficking organization.
A bullet narrowly misses her and another blasts through a table behind which she had considered taking cover, for at least long enough to reload and attempt to formulate some plan for escape.
Several problems are all in play right now:
1. This castle is enormous, and she's very, very far away from her designated exit point;
2. Nayeon’s communicator was shot off her hand;
3. Oh, yeah—her cover’s blown and she’s being chased by two dozen armed men;
4. Her evacuation transport is fifteen minutes away and she’s not sure she can survive even the next five minutes without being shot.
Her best chance against odds that are decidedly not in her favor is to barricade herself in one of the castle towers to facilitate her evacuation, and once she does locate the entrance to one such tower, she covertly races inside and secures the gigantic wooden door behind her while calculating that, in her most optimistic estimates, she might have about 10 minutes to wait for her transport until the henchmen find her.
She dashes up the spiraled stairs and then halts at the top step, catching sight of what appears to be a sniper, propped by the tower window. Nayeon draws her weapon immediately to shoot and takes one step forward to obtain a better target view of the sniper’s head.
That’s the only step she takes, because then that sniper swivels around, having rapidly pulled out a handgun of her own, and Nayeon’s feet are bolted to the floor as though roots have sprouted from the soles of her boots.
Momo.
Fuck.
The tactical gear, the military-grade equipment, and enough weapons to decimate a drug dealer’s birthday party—all of it indicates that Momo, too, is involved in some kind of operation here. This is not supposed to happen. Two Bureaus are not supposed to run concurrent operations. When they do, one spy has always murdered the other.
The center of the earth’s gravity shifts under her feet when Momo widens her eyes in recognition, and Nayeon almost faints.
“Nayeon?!” Momo exclaims, in such shock that she’s paled to a corpse-like color. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Fueled by all the accumulated anger and resentment and hurt and her own current less-than-stellar mood, Nayeon scoffs disdainfully. “Me?? I’m on duty. What the fuck are you doing here?”
Momo flinches. It’s probably the unfriendly sharpness of her tone—she hasn’t spoken like this to Momo in years, and Momo has probably grown unused to it.
Neither of them has lowered their weapon, and now Nayeon can’t remember ever drawing a gun on Momo, even back in the Academy.
“Lower your gun, Nayeon,” Momo tells her evenly, while conveniently not lowering her own.
“Don’t fucking hold your breath,” Nayeon snaps, making a show of tightening her grip on said gun.
“I’m setting up for a surveillance mission and have primacy rights,” Momo argues with some visible irritation, and prompting Nayeon to roll her eyes at Momo’s loser way of telling Nayeon that she was here first.
As if Nayeon gives a shit.
Honestly, she can’t believe she’s about to channel her inner know-it-all to lecture Momo on intra-agency protocol when they’re about to be stormed in and killed, but… “Primacy rights don’t apply in countries that aren’t in the Geneva Convention,” she retorts contemptuously. “And before you try to argue with me, I was the one who aced the international treaties test while you were sneaking in food and trying to eat without getting caught by the instructors, so don’t fucking try me, Hirai, unless you woke up today wanting to get shot in the face.”
Maybe Momo did wake up wanting to get shot in the face, because the next thing she does, baffling Nayeon, is raise an eyebrow challengingly to taunt, “what makes you think you’d shoot me before I shot you? That’s the class I aced, in case your shit memory is failing you.”
Right. Momo is a better shot than she is. That’s a really good point.
Momo gives her no time to spit out some other insulting reply; she sets her gun down atop a nearby table and angrily grits out, “how about I give you some home court advantage?”
And then she’s advancing, barehanded, towards Nayeon, who barely manages to holster back her own handgun in alarm before she’s deflecting a punch from Momo.
Well, then! A fistfight it is.
She forcefully swats away another punch and manages to almost strike Momo’s torso with a swing of her own, but Momo sidesteps that just as quickly and then Nayeon is having to counterpunch a fist that almost lands on her jaw. Momo lifts her right foot, and Nayeon, guessing she’s going for a front kick, immediately kicks Momo’s foot down and jabs Momo on the throat. Momo takes a fraction of a second to cough, during which Nayeon throws another punch, only for Momo to grab her hand mid-air and slam it back onto Nayeon’s chest, holding it there with a pissed-off glare that surprises Nayeon with its intensity.
Fuck. She’s faster but Momo is stronger, and a lot better than she expected. It stands in stark relief now, the fact that because they majored in different areas and are assigned to different agencies, she’s never fought Momo, has never worked with her, has never seen her in action. The only Momo she’s known for the past few years has been the one who makes dumb jokes and likes to kiss this exact wrist she’s now so firmly gripping; more specifically, a scar there, right under the joint, that she incurred from the reconstructive surgery, and that Momo thinks is shaped like a banana.
The way she grabbed her fist though—Momo’s fighting style is very, very familiar. Nayeon sparred against Myoui Mina every day for five fucking years and knows exactly who taught Momo how to close-quarter combat.
And the mere thought of Myoui Mina teaching Momo anything—that’s enough to send through her a renewed flare of aggravation.
Huffing, Nayeon grasps Momo’s wrist and twists it with enough force to push it away from her body, then kicks Momo on the thigh and lands another blow on her ribs.
“How was your Canadian resort vacation with Mina?” Nayeon derides without having spared even a single second to wonder if it’s a good idea to make her innermost feelings so transparent.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Momo pants out, sounding genuinely confused even while she throws an uppercut so precise and swift that Nayeon almost doesn’t dodge it, and her counter-jab is deflected efficiently enough that she’s no more successful in striking Momo.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” she grits out, managing to punch Momo’s shoulder but also receiving a low hook to her abdomen. “The mission you ditched me for, you moron.”
It’s as if this is some kind of cue for them, because simultaneously they each take a step back and Nayeon realizes she’s winded both from Momo’s last punch, and from the fastest-paced fistfight she’s been engaged in in a very long time. Mina is a great teacher, apparently.
Momo scoffs with a blend of disbelief and anger, wiping away a sheen of sweat from her forehead. “Well, I’m sorry I didn’t want to go on vacation with someone who sleeps with me and then goes off to make out with her ex in Copenhagen!”
What the fuck…
Eyebrows tightly furrowed together, a bewildered Nayeon replies, “you saw me and Jeongyeon in Copenhagen?”
“I had my own mission there, and let me tell you how surprised I was to see through my scope you and your ex about to hook up in a parking lot—” Oh, Momo is angry. Very, very angry. “—I almost shot her with my rifle, by the way, just so you know—and oh, I really have to ask, did you just sleep with me in between missions with her, or—”
Momo’s fiery temper tantrum is almost amusing, but now, as it dawns on her that this petty, idiotic misunderstanding is the reason behind a whole year’s worth of sadness, she’s almost livid.
“We were undercover as newlyweds, Momo—what the fuck!” she exclaims, apparently startling Momo a bit. “That’s why you went on your little couple’s retreat with Mina?!”
If anything, this seems to confuse Momo even more, and she already didn’t look as though she quite understood where Nayeon was going with her outburst.
“Huh? Mina is married,” Momo blurts out, obviously baffled.
And the little morsel of calm that Nayeon was so tenuously holding on to simply evaporates; before she’s even quite aware of her own movements, she’s already pulling out her gun again and aiming it squarely at Momo’s forehead, while asking with pissed-off incredulity, “YOU FUCKING MARRIED HER?!”
Instantly, Momo lets out a tiny panicked yelp and launches her body behind a table for cover. “NOT MARRIED TO ME! MARRIED TO SANA! PUT YOUR GUN DOWN!”
Oh.
The effect of that denial is pretty immediate: Nayeon does lower her handgun, but now she has a host of other questions and considerations bursting in her mind that she doesn’t hesitate in verbalizing as Momo is tentatively poking her head from behind the table to assess her safety. “Wait—Sana as in, Minatozaki Sana? The Interpol agent? Holy shit—everyone in our class owes me money. Remember when we were all betting who was going to sleep with a Fed first and I was the only one who put my money on Mina? And now she’s literally married to one!” She recalls something else and quips animatedly, “oh, and you were the dumbass who bet on me—I remember that! Hey, how long have Sana and Mina been together?”
Now much less alarmed, Momo has slowly risen from the ground and is watching Nayeon with a pained wince.
“Since before the Academy. And ugh; that was a secret that no one is supposed to know—you’re right, I’m never going to win Assassin of the Year. Mina’s won it once and you’ve won it twice—”
“Three times, actually,” Nayeon corrects, under her breath but loudly enough that Momo gives her a stony glare. Grinning toothily, she decides to proceed with the previous topic. “So you’ve been third-wheeling your two best friends this whole time?”
Momo throws her a scowl that could scare birds away. “Don’t remind me.”
“I really thought you were dating Mina,” Nayeon admits blankly.
“Well, we’re assigned together a lot because we’re a good team and know each other so well, but I also did promise Sana I’d always protect Mina, which is why I went on that Canada mission; we were providing security to their Olympic curling team,” Momo shrugs and Nayeon pinches the bridge of her nose at that last part. “And you’re not hooking up with Jeongyeon after you meet up with me?” That question… in the shallowest part of its surface, it sounds humored. Momo is even forcing a tight smile to go along with it. But Nayeon recognizes the rawness and vulnerability underneath, and as her heart suddenly becomes a lot lighter inside her chest, she’s simultaneously sad that Momo doesn’t know already what she’s about to say.
“I wouldn’t go back to someone I liked in the past, when there’s someone I really, really like right now.”
Because Momo is a terrible spy who wears all her emotions on her face, Nayeon watches when her heart, too, lightens, and her entire expression takes on the brightness of the sun.
“Really?”
It’s a little worrisome how much Nayeon can’t wait to kiss Momo again.
“Yes. Assassin's honor.”
They hear a not-so-distant sound of a shotgun being fired upon the wooden door at the foot of the stairs and immediately and in perfect timing, both she and Momo reload their weapons.
“You could have told me that you were being tracked,” Momo hisses, and Nayeon shrugs; unable to contain the impulse, she presses a quick kiss to Momo’s cheek, then checks her emergency evacuation trigger again.
“My transport is 2 minutes away.”
Momo is still smiling, supremely pleased from that cheek kiss apparently. “We have enough rounds for 2 minutes.”
A jumbled echo of hurried footsteps makes their way to them. Nayeon estimates the first wave will be about a dozen men.
“Do you think I could win Assassin of the Year if we make it out of this alive?”
“Momo… I’ll just give you one of my trophies, how about that?”
“Okay, I guess.”
-