Patching Her Up 1: Thought

NOIR-fanfic. Sometimes even the most skillful of assassins get hurt. Or worried.
(Mireille/Kirika)


This is the first installment in my series of short stories called "Patching Her Up".

Read Patching Her Up 1: Thought

Disclaimer: All things Noir belong to Bee Train and probably others, perhaps even to Raimi/Tapert by now, but at any rate I’m just borrowing.

My “Patching Her Up” series is just a series of short stories unrelated to one another, from different fandoms, that have a certain theme in common. Each part is a stand-alone and a one-shot.






Patching Her Up 1: Thought
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by Carola “Ryûchan” Eriksson







”How stupid!” She scolds as she cleans various cuts and bruises. “You’re supposed to be a professional. This is a rookie thing to do, and you know it.”

She knows she is a bit less than gentle as she patches her young partner up, but the girl remains passive, not complaining the treatment. Those dark eyes follow her movements with an intensity that for some unnerving reason makes Mireille feel ashamed.

“Look, I know that in the kind of fights that we end up in it is hard, if not impossible, to escape without injury all the time, but...” She wills herself to calm though her voice still reveals both her exasperation and irritation over the situation. She grabs the bandages. “Its all fine and well to do whatever necessary to live through the moment, but if you do it at the cost of your ability to fight, then you’re as good as dead already.”

She sighs and meet dark eyes with an unusually open expression of concern in her own.

“You yanked your right arm right out of the socket, and your left hand is sprained to the point you couldn’t get it to close around a gun, much less pull a trigger. You came damn close to breaking something, you know?” She stilled her ministrations, merely sitting on the floor in front of the girl on the bed, bandages forgotten in her hand. “What were you going to do if there had been anyone else there? Attack them with your teeth? Or maybe your feet?”

The dark head tilts and brows knit. She sighs again, from a strange surge of affection this time. She can tell that the younger girl is giving serious thought to what was mostly sarcasm on her part.

“You’re actually thinking about it, aren’t you?” She asks, a smile twitching briefly at the corner of her lips. The girl nods.

“Well...” She murmurs, reluctant to admit it but honest enough to know it to be true. “If anyone could manage to kill opponents with just the use of her teeth or toes, it would be you.” Mireille can’t even imagine how, but then again, she wouldn’t have imagined killing someone with their own sunglasses or the wheels of a toy car either.

Another thought intrudes, another memory, and her expression darkens. The words slip past her lips before she had given them leave to escape. “You, and maybe Chloe, of course.”

Another thoughtful look on the young face before her, and another small nod.

Mireille grinds her teeth together and tries to clamp down on her temper. She is angry and she doesn’t want to take any closer look at why.

“Yes, of course. Chloe, the perfect killer.” Her voice is dripping with sarcasm, and she stretches the fabric of the bandages with a touch more ferociousness than is strictly called for. Kirika merely watches, silently as ever. “Just... perfect.”

“Why did you do it, anyway?” Avoiding dark eyes now to finally begin the bandaging that should already be finished. “I know you know better.”

“You.”

The simple answer in that quiet voice is startling enough that she freezes for a moment before looking up, blinking in confusion.

“You were in danger. I had to protect you.” Unspoken was the part where Kirika would do so even at the cost of her own health or safety, and never think twice of it.

Feeling strangely flustered Mireille tries to focus on the arm in front of her. She isn’t sure of how to react, but after a moment angered offence is just easier to take than the all-encompassing confusion and almost adolescent shyness. She growls.

“Because I’m not a perfect killer like Chloe, is that it?” Her voice is brittle with resentment and anger, but most of all with the jealousy she carefully avoids acknowledging to herself. “I may not be versed in how to kill using random toys or tiny blades, but I am far from defenceless. I need no babysitter.”

“We are partners, equal partners.” Bitter words in some ways, as she in the beginning had thought herself the senior, more experienced and more skilled of the two of them. “Unless...” She hesitates, the words tasting like blood in her mouth. “You don’t feel you can trust your back to someone that doesn’t have that skill?”

It is the only way she can ask if Kirika would have preferred Chloe as her partner, and she hates the fact that she has given in to her insecurities and asked almost as much as she fears the answer.

“Chloe...” The quiet voice begins, contemplatively, as brown eyes no longer looks at Mireille but into the distance. That small but important change causes a painful pressure in the blonde’s chest even before Kirika speaks. “I... like Chloe.”

She cannot breathe. All the air has left the room in an instant.

“I would trust Chloe to have my back if we were in a fight.”

Images of just that, the two oh so very lethal girls fighting back-to-back in a crowd of assassins, dance on the inside of Mireille’s eyelids as she closes her eyes for the briefest of moments. Angrily she opens them again, forcing away the memories of that one important and painful moment where she had first realized that there was another that not only challenged her place at Kirika’s side, but perhaps was better suited for it than she could ever be. Kirika and Chloe had been flawless together. Perfect.

“I would kill for Chloe.” Kirika is rather matter of fact, and now her eyes focus back on Mireille’s with a different kind of intensity, a different kind of expression than usual. She smiles, that tiny, sweet and surprisingly innocent-looking smile of hers.

“I would, however, not die for Chloe.”

Dark eyes bore into Mireille’s, their meaning clear. She gasps.

“Oh.” She mutters quietly, feeling surprisingly shy and aware that she has started to blush rather badly. Of course. To people like them, to be willing to kill for someone wasn’t a particularly big deal, but to be willing to die for someone... that was far more significant.

Try though she does Mireille cannot keep herself from smiling slightly, a smile unusually bashful for her in fact, as she wraps up the bandaging with a far more gentle touch than before. As she finishes fastening the edges of it on Kirika’s upper arm, her gaze slides upward to find brown eyes staring unwaveringly back at her.

That is right. She ducks her head slightly to hide the smile until she can get it better under control. Kirika is always watching her.

Always, unwaveringly.

A gentle if not entirely intentional caress of the bandaged arm as she stands up, and Mireille meets Kirika’s gaze with an unusually warm and affectionate one of her own. She reaches out to briefly run her fingers through short dark hair. The younger girl does not protest the gesture, only smiles slightly and continues to meet Mireille’s eyes.

Yes, that is right. Kirika had been watching Mireille from the start and never once looked away.

With a little thrill in her heart it begins to dawn upon Mireille that somewhere along the line of their dark and blood-soaked acquaintance... she has started to look right back.