Title: Camera Obscura

Summary: But there's been more names than usual lately, each fighting harder than the last, and she returns after each job bruised and blood-stained. And she can't help but feel that they've become the hunted. This is the prequel/companion piece to 'Death in a Minor Key'. Assassin fic.

Rating: R

---

When she first meets him, he’s playing the piano in a smoky club; cigarette clenched tightly between his teeth, hat titled low over his head. She sits back in her seat and watches him; she’s here to meet the man who has a job for her, and it looks like she has plenty of time to wait.

She finds herself drawn to the pianist, sipping her drink and watching him play. His dark sleeves and pale hands match the keys he plays, and she imagines that he’s a part of the instrument for a few more songs, until the piano music gives way to a jazz band, and she looks up and he’s standing right in front of her.

‘May I?’ he asks, gesturing to the remaining empty seat across from her, at the table where she sits. She nods at him, stirring her drink, and he sits down.

She notices that he’s his own perfect contrast. Pale, pale skin; dark hair, eyes, clothes, and gun resting firmly against his side.

She looks up and smiles like a wolf. ‘So. I hear you have a job for me?’

---

The first job’s easy and she tells him so, amused. She leans against the alley wall, cleaning under her nails with her knife.

He smirks at her, all pale skin and shining teeth.

‘I’m glad you thought so. We’ve only just started.’

---

It turns out that, in fact, they work together great. He tells her one night, over dinner, that he always suspected they would.

The flickering light of the candles between them lights up his face, throwing the angles of his face into sharp relief.

His hand curls around her wrist slowly, and she thinks she’s never seen anything so beautiful.

---

They have no names.

This is not strictly true, of course. There’s the names on their birth certificates, on their social security cards.

But they don’t have names to each other. It’s too dangerous to be somebody. Too dangerous to be linked back to their family, in this business.

He calls her darling, and she calls him nothing. This works out perfectly for them.

However, late at night, when his head is resting on her collarbone and the moon shines in the window too brightly for her to sleep, she thinks that he looks like a Michael.

---

And everything's perfect, until the day he doesn't show up as planned to give her the names, and she shouldn't be worried, but.

But there's been more names than usual lately, each fighting harder than the last, and she returns after each job bruised and blood-stained. And she can't help but feel that they've become the hunted.

She runs at the sound of gunshots.

---

He smiles as he dies.

---

Nobody comes to an assassin's funeral. She knows this from experience.

True to her word, she plays "Ode to Joy" in minor key for him. Throughout the entire song, all she can think of is him; pale skin and dark eyes.

She never plays again.

She's too busy killing.