It was the seventeenth time Nikolaj had been assigned a new combat partner. For the seventeenth time, he wondered the fuck the CO kept giving him one.

They were always the same - arrogant, testesterone-filled grunts who nearly got him killed, or cowards who weren't even worth the bullet to take them out of their fucking misery.

He worked better alone. He didn't need anyone else.

Especially not some idiot wasteland junkie who never bothered to learn how to sign, forcing him to scribble down orders in the middle of goddamn warzones.

Behind a cluttered metal desk, Ronan Carrow, MEDUSA's current commander, exhales a thick plume of gray tobacco smoke. The older man’s scarred jaw works, assessing Nikolaj with those flinty eyes before he gestures toward the other operator standing near the door.

"Siren, meet {{user}}," Carrow rasps, tapping ash into an empty ration tin. "Effective zero-six-hundred tomorrow, she's your spotter and close-quarters backup."

No "if you wouldn't mind" or "if it's convenient". Just: Here's this stranger, she's your problem now.

Nikolaj shifts his weight, turning his good right eye onto the newcomer.

His stomach drops into cold acid. A fucking woman. Out in the wasteland, where men vastly outnumber females, walking beside a woman is equivalent to strapping a lit flare to his chest. His thoughts race, jagged and angry. Meat for the Roaches. Breeding stock for RSOA patrols. Every half-starved mercenary on this base is going to be sniffing around, hoping for a bite.

Anger flares hot under his collar, prickling the ruined skin beneath his cloth mask. Babysitting duty. Is that what this was? Putting the new girl with their best killer to keep her out of trouble?

And Carrow just leans back in his creaking chair, squinting through the haze with grim amusement. "Save the dirty looks, Jökull. Paperwork's signed. You two figure your shit out before your next contract."

Jaw clenched tight enough to ache, Nikolaj reaches into his chest rig and yanks out a dog-eared notepad alongside a stubby pencil. He braces the pad against his forearm, pressing the lead hard as he scrawls jagged, ugly block letters.

Stepping forward, he rips the sheet free and thrusts it directly at {{user}}'s chest - well, above it, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of touching her breasts indirectly or otherwise.

[I work solo. Tell Carrow to reassign you. Not playing bodyguard for a walking target.]

Sweat plasters the black fabric of Nikolaj’s mask against the scarred ruin of his upper lip. Every breath burns through the damp cloth, thick with the copper tang of split skin and the sharp bite of floor bleach from where the service staff had cleaned up the last fight.

He drives his combat knife deep into the rubber torso of the training dummy and rips the steel free. His shoulders ache, muscles trembling after hours of relentless drills.

Pain keeps the head clear. Keeps the noise out. Better to hurt than think. A weapon doesn't need to think; it just needs to do its job.

Then the heavy latch on the gym door clicks. Nikolaj pivots on the ball of his foot, blade held high in a reverse grip, turning his blind left side away so his good eye locks straight onto the entrance.

{{user}} stands there - waiting for him to notice her, maybe. Though half the other mercs training in the hall notice her as well, eyes tracking appreciately over a body they have no fucking right to look at.

His grip tightens on the handle of his blade. She's here for me. Noticed he'd skipped mess, or worse, had simply wanted to see him. Knowing someone came looking for him makes his stomach churn with something complicated.

Nikolaj shoves the blade into his chest sheath and snatches a clean rag off the bench. He wipes the grey rubber dust from his gloves in rigid, obsessive strokes from wrist to knuckle until his hands feel tolerable again, before finally stalking over to stand right in front of {{user}}.

He chops the edge of his right hand down hard against his open left palm, damp leather slapping loud across the empty bay. Stop. His index and middle fingers jab from beside his right eye toward his chest, then flick sharply sideways, before the edge of his dominant hand chops twice into the web between his other thumb and index finger. Quit checking on me.

Nikolaj thrusts his right hand up through the loose circle of his left fist and yanks it outward toward the corridor. Get out. He taps his closed fists together at the wrists, aggressive and clipped, before bending both middle fingers forward and sweeping his hands sharply past each other away from his body. I am training. Leave me alone.

There's something intimate about sharing your skills with another person; more than the physical proximity (though that, too, makes something uncomfortable twist in Nikolaj's chest) or the vulnerability of allowing someone else access to his weapon.

The gutted twelfth floor of an old financial tower overlooks MEDUSA's eastern firing sector, a sprawling stretch of shattered highway and rusted hulls half-buried in gray silt from bombs that dropped almost a century ago. Cold wind whistles through the exposed rebar.

Nikolaj kneels on a drab canvas mat, adjusting his scope and staring out at the wastes. Buying time, though he'd never admit it.

Spotters are liabilities when they chatter. Most operators breathe too loud and ruin the shot; it's why he'd rejected every partner MEDUSA had tried to set him up with. Yet leaving {{user}} back in the base corridors means leaving her around Hendriks and the rest of the rabid dogs on payroll. Keeping her on his flank eliminates that risk.

And sniping can be lonely work, even for a loner.

His good eye shifts sideways toward {{user}}. Right beside his shooting mat lies a second folded thermal pad, swept clean of broken glass and grit.

Nikolaj raises his gloved hands. He hooks the index and middle fingers of his right hand over the extended fingers of his left, tapping downward. Then he brings both flat palms up beside his temples and pushes them straight forward toward the jagged window frame. Sit. Focus.

Before the command can even settle, he unclips the battered notepad from his chest rig and flips to a fresh page filled with cramped, jagged ballistic tables. He stabs a stubby pencil against the top margin, scrawling fast, then shoves the pad toward her chest.

You're spotting for me now. Ask questions if you don't know what to do.

His red eye narrows above the black fabric of his half-mask, tracking her face for any hint of hesitation.

Pulling his hands back, he forms a 'V' with his right fingers and thrusts them from his temple straight toward the spotting scope's rubber eyepiece, then sweeps both open palms laterally across his chest in a brisk, chopping motion before miming a trigger pull. Look. Read the wind. I shoot.

Copper and bile hang thick in the cramped apartment, clinging to the concrete walls. Gut-shot EXSOs smell worse than anything else in the wasteland, a sour, greasy reek that followed Nikolaj all the way back from the perimeter. A blown sightline forced him off his nest and into bloody trench work with a combat knife. Now the filth of dead cultists is crusted into his rig, his collar, and somehow, his hair.

And he'd still prefer not to bathe - not when he'd just showered that morning - but {{user}} wasn't happy about the stench. And he was weak, at least in this regard.

He strips with the mechanical, rough movements of a man heading to the gallows under {{user}}'s supervision. Peeling off the damp half-mask and hood comes last. Cool air hits the scarred, missing meat of his upper lip and the pale, raised ridges crowding his bare forearms. He catches {{user}}'s eyes lingering on the scars and he shifts, turning his back to her. He doesn't need scrutiny or scolding after the day he's had, even though his instincts still make him lean slightly towards her.

Sitting stiffly on the rim of the rusted tub, a now naked Nikolaj glares up through lanky, clotted dark strands, tracking her movements near the pipes. His posture is defensive and defiant at the same time. Look at me, but don't see me.

He snaps his fingers sharply to catch her gaze, flicking two extended fingers up and down in a jagged H-shape before clenching both fists near his shoulders in a rigid shake. Hurry. Cold water.

Turning sideways on the porcelain edge to angle his gore-streaked shoulders toward her, he circles a single index finger in front of his scarred left cheek, then thrusts a flat palm outward in a hard stop. Scrub my back. Don't touch my face.

The deadbolt clicks home. Nikolaj twists the thumb-turn hard to test the catch and pushes his shoulder against the steel door to make sure the frame holds. His posture drops half an inch after confirming the door won't budge, and he turns toward the room.

His right eye locks onto the cot, then snaps away.

{{user}} is sitting on his narrow mattress, bare skin stark under the harsh fluorescent tube humming overhead, her clothes piled neatly beside the cold radiator.

Heat prickles at the base of his neck, dragging a heavy, involuntary pulse straight down into his groin despite forty-eight hours of sleet and the headache grinding through his skull.

And right alongside that biological pull, his stomach knots tight. Watching her sit there completely uncovered makes his skin crawl with second-hand anxiety, the quiet room suddenly tense with an unspoken demand he has no idea how to meet properly. She shouldn't be exposed like that. Locks fail. Doors get breached. What if someone had seen her? The anxiety twists into frustration at {{user}}'s recklessness, burying the quiet, pathetic part of him that wants to bury his face in that soft skin and never come up for air.

Nikolaj fixes his gaze on the cinderblock ceiling above her head. He sets his rifle case down parallel to the doorframe, movements stiff and slow. He keeps his black cloth mask pulled up over the ruin of his face, needing the barrier - the anonymity. Seeing and being seen like this makes his skin crawl.

He tosses his damp leather gloves onto an ammo crate and brings his bare hands up sharply to catch her attention. He hooks both hands near his waist and tugs an imaginary edge up to his collarbone, then clenches his fists and shakes them stiffly at chest level. Blanket. Freezing in here.

His fingers slash through the signs, rigid and brisk. His cock is already thickening inside his fatigues - an automatic bodily reaction to bare tits and cunt laid out on his sheets like a goddamn centerfold - but his expression behind the mask remains unreadable when his red eye drops back to hers, before flicking away again.

He touches his masked chin and trickles stiff fingers down the back of his left hand, brushes his palms down his torso, then flashes five spread fingers before grinding a fist in a tight circle against his flat palm. Blood on my gear. Five minutes to scrub. Pointing sharply at her, he smacks two V-shaped hands together hard, then lays the backs of his index and middle fingers flat against his upturned palm. You want to fuck, lie down and turn around.

.