Drabble: Letting Cannonballs Fly (Rose/Eleven)

anointedbybutterflies:

WARNING: THIS IS DARK. SO. YEAH!

There’s blood under her fingernails, and bruises that match up to slim fingers on his neck, his collar, scratches red and irritated running down his chest, but no one says anything. He finds that fear is the best motivator, and she’s scary in all the loveliest ways, blonde hair making her look soft and sweet, but eyes that are cold and calculating. Eyes that make you long for a death, you know is coming, and you only wish she’d taken the shot from a rifle five hundred feet away.

They’re the kind of people that you never want to actually meet, but you hope that if you have to see one of them, that it’s her. He likes to be able to see the life drain out of you, something poetic in watching from up close as a person stops being a person (whatever that means) and starts being just a body. He usually doesn’t ever pull the trigger, or hold the knife, but he’s the one killing you.

Their best kills are the ones where they’re together. Him, ever the people person, standing with their soon-to-be victim. Her, out of sight but never out of the Doctor’s mind, hiding somewhere, always the force behind the action. She uses the comm. in his ear to whisper to him. It’s supposed be a warning system. He’s supposed to use it to signal her, and give the victim a last second to resign themselves to the fact that they’re meeting their end. No one knows that all of their cues are nonverbal, coded into their actions and conversations.

“This one gets to live.”, in the way that he leans a bit forward to get closer, without landing in the puddle of blood that is large enough to be bad, but is small enough not to be cause of death. “Take the shot now.” Hidden in the tapping of his foot once, irritated at a person’s stupidity, a corpse slumping to the floor as he continues his monologue. He says later that it does as little good to talk to a dead person, as it does to talk to a living one. She puts a knife to his throat for that, and he smiles as she creates a slice across his chest that borders on too deep, but for them it’s just the shallow end of the pool.

The bruises fade from his neck.  His chest heals nicely, the cut not affecting the scratches and so they fade away. But the blood stays under her fingernails, and they stay the same as they’ve always been.