#we're baaacck | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

starklyscifi · 2 years

Text

Bluebirds by the Sea

It is hot. Too hot. Everyone in their right minds is following the lead of the locals and taking a mid-day nap in their hotel rooms.

The beach is empty.

“So that’s it then?”

Sweat drips down her back, rolls uncomfortably into the waistband of her jeans.

“It’s over?”

She couldn’t not wear jeans. No one looks badass in shorts.

“Really over?”

Thank God for linen shirts. And the well known fact that leather jackets were only a necessity for being taken seriously in the cooler months of the year. She is boiling alive as it is already.

“Shelia?”

She blinks, the fake name taking too long to register.

“Sure.”

He looks down at his bloody hands.

Amateur.

“You’re lying,” he says.

At this point, she’ll say anything to get out of the fucking sunshine. Tell him he’s a purple unicorn with wings, or that he’s good at his job. Or that she likes spending time with him.

“Will you take care of that already?”

He seems to register for the first time that he’s covered in blood, his eyes darting around nervously. She doesn’t move. It’s noon in the middle of July in a resort town in Spain. There’s no one to hide from.

“Everyone’s asleep, just wash up and let’s go before that’s not true anymore.”

He wonders down to the water’s edge, looking like a puppet with a bad master pulling the strings. All jerky movements and feigned nonchalance.

She rolls her eyes behind the high-end sunglasses. Looking badass requires sunglasses, and specifically high-end ones. She spent the entire payout from one job on these, and they’re worth every penny. If no other reason than to hid her irritation from a partner she never asked for.

He comes back, looking like an idiot, but blood free enough for the short walk back to the hotel, where she has to wait for him to shower and scrub the remaining stains out of his shirt.

Anyone worth their salt knows a knife makes a terrible assassin’s weapon.

She ticks off everything about him she doesn’t like as he takes too long in the bathroom. He’s slow. He’s clumsy. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.

He thought that trying to slit someone’s throat was a good idea when she was right there with a syringe in her hand.

Men.

So messy.

“You’re an assassin,” he’d said, the first time she’d complained about his love of knives. They’d been on a train, heading out of Germany and into Denmark. She likes Denmark. It’s one of those places that almost stays a leather-jacket-wearable temperature all year.

“Doesn’t mean I have to be a slob.”

He had looked genuinely offended by that one. But then again, he looked genuinely offended by most things.

He walks out of the bathroom, breaking her reverie, wiping his hands with a plush towel before throwing it on the pile of clothing to be burned. Or discarded in someone’s dumpster, just before trash pick-up. There was no way she was letting him play with matches. He’d burn the city down.

“Is it over?”

She shakes her head, and tells him to leave it to her this time.

Later, when they find the tourist trap they're looking for, he waits outside, lingering in the falling dusk. The heat is just as oppressive in the dark.

She asks for a drink she doesn’t like in a language she doesn’t speak, the order memorized carefully. The bar is filling up with tourists. Perfect cover. No one notices one woman standing at the bar, slipping powder into some God-awful cocktail and swapping glasses out with the old, fat white guy sitting next to her and drinking the same.

On her way out, she takes one sip and grimaces.

Anyone who liked something that sweet deserved to die.

He’s waiting for her in the alleyway, like a bad hangover that just won’t go away.

“Is it over now?”

“You’re not very good at this.”

“I’m new.”

“You’re fundamentally not very good at this.”

He looks her up and down, massaging one hand with the other.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

He takes off, in the confident, assured, male way that assumes she’ll follow. He never looks back. She never looks forward.

“Are you coming?” he calls out.

She is.

She’s always hated summer anyway.

@flashfictionfridayofficial

#flashfictionfriday #flash fiction #starkly mine #dark fiction #assassins #we're baaacck #hopefully more regularly #grad school is wrapping up #writers of tumblr #original fiction #fiction writers #tw death #tw blood #tw violence

73 notes · View notes