There is a man on the floor in front of Clementine's seat. Limbs at odd angles, it's clear he'd been shoved into the uncomfortable position simply to keep him out of the aisle. Before even fully acknowledging the situation or even her charge, Clementine drops to check his pulse. It's here she notices his bound hands, cutesy tape sturdily keeping his wrists together, so she presses two fingers against the soft underside of his jaw; steady.
"Sit him up would you, fruit fly?" The Prince orders cheerfully, as if there isn't a partially deconstructed handgun on the tray before her; Clementine will get to that, but she's really trying to deal with one thing at a time here. This day will not let up.
When she does finally stand, she turns wordlessly to The Prince, the silence demanding further explanation. Sure Clementine could move the poor man, she probably wouldn't even have to put down her bag, but too much today has already gone on unexplained.
"It's the best I could do without making a scene or a fuss," The Prince goes on to explain, giving an offhand gesture to the man on the floor with the half-assembled gun she had been fiddling with. Wrong answer.
"Malen'kiy Prints," Clementine's voice is ice cold, a warning, a murmur of carefully controlled anger from where she was frozen in place. The Prince purses her lips for the barest moment; she'd always been of the opinion that Clementine sounds too much like The White Death when she speaks Russian. As much as Clementine hated the comparison, it was useful when she needed to punctuate a moment, and this... this is all too much to go unexplained.
"He was going to kill me," The Prince says, regaining her composure only to pout almost comically, cool gaze focusing back on her victim, "had a gun and everything." At least this time she puts the half assembled gun onto the tray table in front of her instead of using it to gesture so casually. Still, there's no real care or concern from the girl; Clementine feels a little ill at the implications of it all.
"Why is he here?" Through gritted teeth.
"Whatever do you mean?" Everything about The Prince's sudden wide-eyed innocence is an expertly controlled mask, one Clementine knows all too well, and one through which she can see a family resemblance. In the face of a credible threat, The Prince, like her brother, always became smug. Confident in the power she is able to wield, The Prince fully believes she has nothing to really fear.
"Who is he? Why did you lure him here?"
A long moment passes, then another. Silence between the two, The Prince scrutinises Clementine with an almost clinical detachment, as if with intent to dissect. Clementine is fucking sick of the way this family look at her, but she won't blink first.
Slowly, The Prince's lips twist with amusement.
"You don't even ask if I'm okay," there's something in The Prince's tone, or perhaps shining in her eyes, that Clementine can't quite comprehend. It makes the hair on the back of her neck rise.
"You are," a statement, not a question. The Prince's smile grows wider, that light in her eyes grows brighter.
"Just sit him up, we have time for explanations before he wakes up," the moment breaks like nothing peculiar had rust happened, and The Prince went back to carefully picking through the parts of the gun scattered before her.
So Clementine complies; she tells herself it's only because her own neck is beginning to ache looking at the poor man cramped in like that. After putting down her bag, it only takes her a moment to prop the man up, attempting a discrete medical check on him as she worked to shift him into what had been her seat. The bruising around his left temple and eye confused her, considering The Prince has never been a particularly physical fighter, however the moment the man's head lols towards Clementine as she's sitting him up, she get clarification by way of two minute, angry burn marks an inch and a half apart. What would be almost impossible to notice to the untrained eye is far too familiar to the operative, whose whole body tenses in visceral reaction the moment she recognises them.
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it's in my nature {Tangerine | Bullet Train}
FanfictionTangerine doesn't say that he's still feeling a smidge of guilt on the off chance he thinks about that civilian he inadvertently got killed back in New York, because he doesn't feel guilt. Maybe he feels a bit responsible; she was targetted because...
