un regalo per xmirage
What you wanted
by ? // for xmirage
characters/pairings: Colonnello/Lal Mirch
rating: PG
warnings: ...too cute? Spoilers up to chapter 179.
wordcount: : 3 688
summary: Colonnello asks the important question first.
notes: Some lines of dialogue are quoted from the Binktopia scanlation of chapter 179. I've seen some translations call Colonnello's bird Fargo and others Falco, and I used the latter because it's close to 'falcon'. I hope you enjoy this, !
The voices faded behind her, and Lal Mirch trod heavily on the ground so that the crunch of pebbles would drown them out totally. They sounded all wrong, squeaky and high. She couldn't stand it.
She glanced behind her at the sound of a crunch she didn't make and caught the shine of sun on blond hair. Colonnello was following her. Again. Idiot!
Idiot, idiot, idiot. Except that he did everything, every stupid thing, with calculation and purpose, and she wondered if he had got what he wanted.
Idiot!
It didn't matter - and she'd tell him so when he asked, because it was all he deserved for doing something like that with no hesitation, with everything in his bearing only showing determination...
Lal Mirch rounded a bend in the cliff-lined road that put her out of sight of the others and waited for Colonnello to catch up. Dimly, it occurred to her that she'd never done that before. It would have been unprofessional, and she'd told herself it might make him more irritating - hard as that was to imagine.
He ran up to her, and when she didn't turn, came to face her. She watched his ridiculous baby waddle and felt a fierce stab of embarrassment that he'd seen her walking like that. At least they weren't as badly off as Viper. She couldn't have taken another minute of seeing him sit on his round bottom with his hands flat on the ground in front of him, rocking with the effort of getting to his feet, and what was visible of his face red with embarrassment. That was as good as any of them were now. Reduced to next-to-nothing.
And in spite of that, Colonnello was smiling, and even if the shape of his face had changed the smile was essentially the same. He was impossible. Lal Mirch stopped walking, not wanting to look like she was running away - though she was - and waited to hear what he had to say.
"Will you come with me?"
Lal Mirch stared at Colonnello; her wide eyes - she'd been trying to keep tears from spilling out - went wider. She'd been concentrating on staying calm, on how stupid he was and how stupid she was, and if there was anything to say to that question, it couldn't make its way to her mouth.
"I thought I'd better get right to the important part." Colonnello was smiling wider, happily undaunted. "Are you crying? Hey."
"Rubbish! How could I cry under such circumstances?" The response came so reflexively that it surprised her. Lal Mirch blinked at the fact that words had come out of her mouth, and then at Colonnello.
"Did the curse affect your eyes?" he asked, concerned.
She watched Colonnello's hand move and prickles of sweat broke out on her back, the way it used to when she'd been learning to fire a gun properly with boys standing around in long lines and watching her. His hand landed on her cheek, and the only thing that saved her from jumping was the fact that everything inside her stiffened. Colonnello moved her face so that he could examine her eyes.
"Lal?" he said, when she didn't look at anything but his hand on her cheek, and moved it away. He wasn't keeping up the pretence of "ma'am", but then neither of them was part of the military anymore.
"Come with you?" Lal Mirch burst out. "Where are you going to go? What are you going to do?"
"I'll do whatever I can," Colonnello said, baffled, and then a look of certainty came over his face. "I'll keep on going. Keep on living."
"Like this?" Lal grabbed his clumsy hand, soft with puppy fat. "When we're like this? What kind of life would that be?"
"We could find out!"
He was grinning all over his pudgy little face, so excited it seemed obscene after what had been done to them. It was obvious that he knew she'd given in and hadn't expected her to, and Lal was ashamed that she'd been weak enough to do so. She was still being weak, because looking at Colonnello's face, there was no way she could let his hand go.
* * *
Colonnello had planned his retreat well. Self-consciously, Lal Mirch was focusing on that rather than the walk of the past quarter hour, where she'd clutched at him like a lifeline and he'd squeezed her hand back.
"Good," Lal Mirch commented, looking over the suped-up little four-wheel dirt bike with the packs of provision strapped to it. At first she'd decided that having so much equipment was a paranoid mistake, as the nearest town was only about 200 kilometres away, but a look inside the bags had revealed that they contained mostly money.
"Good?" Colonnello looked up from checking the baggage was securely strapped on, and for the first time he wasn't smiling. "This is almost the only part of my plan that's worked out, and it's the simplest possible part." He looked pensive. "Sorry. The way I rescued you was supposed to turn out a lot cooler."
"You never finish things properly," Lal Mirch said, remembering various missions that had been saved from Colonnello's mishaps by his improbable good luck and her intervention ... and, admittedly, often by Colonnello's skill. "But this is still good."
His smile came back, as genuine as before. "Thanks."
"You could have changed the money to more currencies."
"I thought about it. There wasn't enough time, h-HEY! It's my ride!"
Lal Mirch guiltily stopped revving the little engine - what had he done to enable it to roar like that? - and got off the seat. She looked over the craggy landscape as he got on, embarrassed.
She realised she dreaded the thought of getting on behind him and holding on, showing exactly how much she was depending on him - as if it wasn't painfully obvious. But she did it without hesitance. She owed him.
And she'd have to owe him more. Lal Mirch took hold of Colonnello's sides, fingers gripping the rough fabric of his cloak as she said, "You'll have to drop me at a bank. I need to rob it."
"Lal?" he said, shocked, turning around to stare at her.
"They froze my assets. They did it to all us, to give an extra incentive to come here and let them turn us into this."
"You really want to do something like that?" he asked softly.
"I'll only take what's in my balance, of course," Lal Mirch said.
Colonnello took a deep breath, and then nodded. "I have some guns you could use. Anti-tank."
"I managed to stash my own weapons in town," Lal Mirch said. "And anti-tank? That's overdoing it. As always."
He sighed. It seemed that this was another way his plan had gone wrong - it didn't look like he'd expected that he'd need to do something like that. But Colonnello grinned, and she knew he was still sticking with the plan, and sticking with her.
"Reborn also says it's tacky. Hey! You two don't know everything."
She snorted disbelievingly, letting him know she knew more than him.
Colonnello looked northwards to the town, and his grin widened a ridiculous proportion. Lal Mirch got the feeling that something appalling was about to happen. He said, "So, Lal Mirch: Your place or mine?"
"Wha - you!" She smacked him on the head, hard enough that it took him a few seconds before he could laugh, and even then with huffs of pain. Lal Mirch ignored him as much as she could, pulling the helmets out of one of the bags and handing one severely to Colonnello.
He made to put on the helmet, and then paused. "You're still acting like you're the commanding officer, hey!"
Lal Mirch shrugged one shoulder stiffly. "Habit."
"You're not older than me anymore, either." He beamed like this was a major victory.
It was at least a minor one. "You're still not as good as me, though," Lal Mirch said, her haughty tone only partially a joke. "I still have more experience."
"Do you?" Colonnello looked devious. "We're not in COMSUBIN anymore. Bet I've got more experience than you in plenty of stuff we're going to do!"
Lal Mirch waited for another round of tears to hit her. Her world and her history had been taken away and would be denied to her for years. Maybe for good.
She felt strangely light.
"We'll see," she told Colonnello, twice as haughty, and he laughed. Lal Mirch hated when people laughed at her, but strangely, this time she was glad for it.
Once they reached a place to rest Lal Mirch thought she'd like time alone. She'd let out the ball of weariness growing inside her, more quickly whenever she thought of what had just happened; of Viper sitting in the dust and the way Reborn's face was even more unreadable with those unformed baby-features. She'd feel the shame of letting the boy in her care ruin himself for her sake, of letting him go even further to doing this...
For the moment this caught her up, and she wrapped her arms around him as he sped on, throwing a cloud of desert dust into the air. Above them, his new pet beat its wings and screamed its exhilaration.
* * *
Squinting only a little as she stared into the sky, her visor filtering out most of the sun's sharp light, Lal Mirch nodded in satisfaction. From the look on Colonnello's face, the reconnaissance had been successful.
"Hey!" Falco dropped Colonnello in front of her, and then landed beside them and took up a watch on the crowd. Colonnello touched Lal's cheek. "Baby mine."
"That's creepy," she reminded him, voice flat.
Colonnello grinned carelessly. "The ice-cream stall is in the north-east sector. Let's go, hey!"
Lal Mirch pondered her choice in advance, narrowing it down to mint, chocolate, or most preferably toffee, and sighed. The corners of her mouth kept trying to go up. "This kind of thing shouldn't be fun."
Colonnello barked out a rare laugh at that. "You would have enjoyed it before the curse, if you'd given it a try."
She almost said in cutting tones, Is this the kind of date you would have taken me on? The sun felt hotter on Lal Mirch's cheeks. "I never liked candyfloss before," she pointed out.
"Mmm!" Colonnello said appreciatively. "I'm going to have some of that after the ice-cream."
"The sugar rush will make you trigger happy." Lal Mirch tried for a disapproving frown, but her mouth wasn't cooperating. "We should go to one of the sharpshooting stalls."
They tracked down the ice-cream stand, levelling flat stares at the adults who cooed over 'such precious little babies!' along the way. The stall was well-stocked and had toffee flavour. Colonnello splurged and got a two-scooper, but he topped his strawberry scoop with mint so Lal would have some too. After that and the candyfloss, he won them both enormous teddy bears - technically teddy frogs, in honour of their time at COMSUBIN. Then they took their afternoon nap. The fringes of the field where the horse rides took place were reasonably quiet, and the frogs made excellent cushions.
Lal Mirch woke up before Colonnello, fretful with an overdose of sugar, and growled. She was supposed to be disciplined.
It wasn't too uncomfortable, though. She shifted her frog over to a shadier patch under the tree and settled back, casting an annoyed glance at the peacefully sleeping Colonnello and the bubble of mucus on his nose. But not really annoyed. It was mostly habit. After all, he didn't even snore now that he was a baby.
Colonnello was in love with her. Most probably. He bought his ice-cream in flavours she also liked. He was calling her stupid things lately - 'baby mine'. He'd saved her life, smiling. And she held his hand when she let herself feel like it.
There was no discussion of what any of it meant, and Lal Mirch was grateful. It was easy to make a routine of being beside Colonnello each day again; they'd had enough missions to have found ways to work with each other, the worst and the best sides. Would it have been easy before the curse, to let him be in love with her?
The thought didn't seem to trouble Colonnello, but he had a way of not being bothered by nearly everything. Idiot.
Lal Mirch watched the various bugs bustle through the grass as she lay, and deposited a ladybug on Colonnello's face. The rhythm of expansion and contraction of his mucus bubble didn't change, but his nose twitched as the beetle trundled around his face, and again when it launched itself in a flurry of wings.
Lal grinned at his scrunched-up face. Easy. She could enjoy something like that for a while.
* * *
The prospect of change was still a welcome one. There was a powerful attraction in the idea of being useful again.
"This is excellent!" Lal Mirch said switching off the magnifying function of her visor as she looked up from the fine print of the contract. It was perfect. "The mafia won't have questions about our background beyond what's got known over the past year, and the perks on this look good."
"But it's the mafia! Who says that contract is worth the paper it's printed on?" Colonnello said, looking up from cleaning his rifles. The process had left a few stains on the carpet, but if, as management proposed, this apartment would be their accommodation while they worked at Mafia-land, there would be a lot more gun-oil stains to come.
"It's good for anyone's business to honour their word. And since it is the mafia, it's reasonable enough to shoot them if they try to take advantage us."
Lal Mirch hopped up onto the armrest of the couch by the window, looking down over Mafia-land. They'd barely set foot on the island before being surrounded by men in sombre suits, who'd escorted them backstage where they were offered the job of keeping the peace. Lal Mirch made a face. "We'll owe Reborn. That brat could have told us he was doing us a favour."
"Huh, we should have suspected something when he recommended we come here. Reborn never does something without a motive behind it."
Lal Mirch made an equally cynical noise, and grinned. The fairground was bright with lights and the sharp flashes of gunfire, from what management had described as endless fights between drunks and fools. They certainly did need to tighten the security around here.
"Lal Mirch," Colonnello said, to command her full attention. "Thank you."
She blushed, though she tried hard not to. Why did babies need to be able to blush, anyway? Lal turned to face him, nodding acknowledgement. She firmed her mouth into a tight line, and then thought that there was no reason not to say it; it was stupid not to say it.
"Thank you, too," she said tightly. For everything. For every day.
Colonnello nodded his acknowledgement too, and then said, "Lal? You should go, hey."
Lal looked around the room, slightly confused, not seeing anything or anyone around that could have prompted the advice. "Go where?"
"Anywhere else. The Arcobaleno have a reputation now, so you could get a good job anywhere."
She stared at him. For lack of anything better coming to mind, she said, "I'm not an Arcobaleno."
"People don't know the details. It won't matter. Anyway, Lal, you're still one of the best, so it'll be no trouble proving yourself. Then when your curse is broken you'll have a place in the world."
Lal Mirch looked down at herself. "Maybe the curse took a stronger hold on me than they said it had. It doesn't really look like anything's changed."
Internally she told herself that it couldn't have changed. She'd made her decision: He was her decision. Didn't he know that? Didn't he want that anymore?
"Isn't your scar getting better?" he said. "It looks smaller."
"It looks like that to me all the time," Lal Mirch said. "And whenever I'm in a bad mood it looks larger. It doesn't change, Colonnello. It's the same as always!"
"You should keep a more careful eye on it, anyway. It might show signs of getting better at any time." His head was bent over the rifle parts of his rifle.
"You can't ask me to leave!" she shouted, shocking herself at not being embarrassed by the evidence of need in her words.
"I should never have asked you to come with me."
Lal floundered with air in her mouth. But he had asked her - he'd saved her - he'd given her a way to believe that this truncated excuse of a life didn't need to be so painful. She sank down on the arm of the chair, seated by trembling legs, and watched Colonnello clean and then put back together the parts of his rifle, and she knew.
This was it.
* * *
Neither of them slept much that night, substituting it with sitting in opposite corners of the room, and not looking at each other. It was a terrible substitute.
Lal Mirch got up, cleaned and dressed at 6AM, noting bitterly that Colonnello was skipping his morning ritual of meditation in favour of hiding his face in his frog plushie.
"You do know you're an idiot," she said before she shut the door behind her, and heard a soft laugh over the click of the door.
Lal Mirch had the proposed contract Mafia-land management had given them in her hand. She went to the offices where she'd been assured a manager would be ready any time of the night or day to address issues (as it didn't pay to keep trigger-happy mobsters waiting). She explained in quiet tones why she couldn't sign the contract, and explained under what circumstances she would agree.
The night manager thought her idea was excellent, and told her that he'd speak to the day and afternoon managers as soon as possible to put the proposal to them.
Lal Mirch got to know the territory within a five-kilometre distance of the central offices, and then went back in and studied the maps of Mafia-land pinned to the walls. By nine, when all the managers were in agreement, they gave her the nod, and she went ahead and annexed the north half of Mafia-land and declared war on the southern half, announced around the island by hastily-deployed men in trundling snack vans.
At the frontline of the border was the staff accommodation complex. Lal Mirch took great pleasure in bombing it. Even if it was just paint bombs.
As Lal Mirch had expected, Colonnello led the southern army. For the better part of a week, Mafia-land's guests got great joy from taking paintball pot-shots at each other, and to management, this was a vast improvement on the formerly common use real explosives and bullets.
Colonnello performed some technically stellar manoeuvres, and even managed to win a lot of northern territory. The ensuing celebration on the southern side left the majority of them so hung over that it was disgustingly easy for Lal Mirch to win the territory back, but she didn't attribute that as a fault on Colonnello's part when their troops were undisciplined civilians. But when it came to combat, whenever Lal Mirch was close enough to see him and he saw her, it was obvious that his fighting spirit was a sham.
She, on the other hand, painted him blue from head to toe, with purpose and deliberation.
So it was almost a pity when a week after the fighting started, Colonnello walked over No Man's Land by the merry-go-round waving a white flag, and Lal hadn't yet got him on the palm of either hand. She looked at the peace flag and then at his stupid face, and considered shooting him anyway.
Lal Mirch guiltily stubbed her shoe in the ground and waited for him to reach her. It occurred to her that she didn't know what to say, really. It wasn't something to worry about, though; once he opened his stupid mouth she'd probably get a direction to send her anger in.
But it seemed Colonnello didn't know what to say either. The flag drooping in his hand. Falco fluttered off his head and hopped a discreet distance away and began preening its feathers.
At last, Colonnello said, "You started a war for me?" and blushed.
"Yes!" Lal Mirch snapped, crossing her arms. "You're a real Helen of Troy!"
"Lal..." He looked down, and then back at her, and his blush deepened.
"You're too damn stubborn, you know that, Colonnello? Do you remember how many problems came from the way you'd ignore orders when you thought you knew better?"
"Sometimes I did, hey," he said, not really defensive. He looked dumbfounded, and he was staring at her. Lal thought maybe he didn't want to look away.
"I don't want to go!" she said. "All right?"
Colonnello smiled before he could help it. Then it slipped a little as he said, "Hey. You know, I asked you to go for the same reason I asked you to come with me."
"Then you shouldn't have asked!" Maybe he shouldn't have asked the first time, either. It might have been a better life for both of them... She couldn't really believe that.
Colonnello took a step forwards, and then stopped and shook his head. "And what if you grow up again? What happens when your curse breaks and I'm still an Arcobaleno?"
"Let's find out," Lal Mirch said, and held out her hand.
They climbed to the top of the Ferris wheel and watched the civil war peter out, the last few diehards painting the sunset electric blue and neon green. And it was stupid, and Falco screeched warnings while flapping anxiously around them, but they climbed without letting go of each other's hands, giggling like children.
by ? // for xmirage
characters/pairings: Colonnello/Lal Mirch
rating: PG
warnings: ...too cute? Spoilers up to chapter 179.
wordcount: : 3 688
summary: Colonnello asks the important question first.
notes: Some lines of dialogue are quoted from the Binktopia scanlation of chapter 179. I've seen some translations call Colonnello's bird Fargo and others Falco, and I used the latter because it's close to 'falcon'. I hope you enjoy this, !
The voices faded behind her, and Lal Mirch trod heavily on the ground so that the crunch of pebbles would drown them out totally. They sounded all wrong, squeaky and high. She couldn't stand it.
She glanced behind her at the sound of a crunch she didn't make and caught the shine of sun on blond hair. Colonnello was following her. Again. Idiot!
Idiot, idiot, idiot. Except that he did everything, every stupid thing, with calculation and purpose, and she wondered if he had got what he wanted.
Idiot!
It didn't matter - and she'd tell him so when he asked, because it was all he deserved for doing something like that with no hesitation, with everything in his bearing only showing determination...
Lal Mirch rounded a bend in the cliff-lined road that put her out of sight of the others and waited for Colonnello to catch up. Dimly, it occurred to her that she'd never done that before. It would have been unprofessional, and she'd told herself it might make him more irritating - hard as that was to imagine.
He ran up to her, and when she didn't turn, came to face her. She watched his ridiculous baby waddle and felt a fierce stab of embarrassment that he'd seen her walking like that. At least they weren't as badly off as Viper. She couldn't have taken another minute of seeing him sit on his round bottom with his hands flat on the ground in front of him, rocking with the effort of getting to his feet, and what was visible of his face red with embarrassment. That was as good as any of them were now. Reduced to next-to-nothing.
And in spite of that, Colonnello was smiling, and even if the shape of his face had changed the smile was essentially the same. He was impossible. Lal Mirch stopped walking, not wanting to look like she was running away - though she was - and waited to hear what he had to say.
"Will you come with me?"
Lal Mirch stared at Colonnello; her wide eyes - she'd been trying to keep tears from spilling out - went wider. She'd been concentrating on staying calm, on how stupid he was and how stupid she was, and if there was anything to say to that question, it couldn't make its way to her mouth.
"I thought I'd better get right to the important part." Colonnello was smiling wider, happily undaunted. "Are you crying? Hey."
"Rubbish! How could I cry under such circumstances?" The response came so reflexively that it surprised her. Lal Mirch blinked at the fact that words had come out of her mouth, and then at Colonnello.
"Did the curse affect your eyes?" he asked, concerned.
She watched Colonnello's hand move and prickles of sweat broke out on her back, the way it used to when she'd been learning to fire a gun properly with boys standing around in long lines and watching her. His hand landed on her cheek, and the only thing that saved her from jumping was the fact that everything inside her stiffened. Colonnello moved her face so that he could examine her eyes.
"Lal?" he said, when she didn't look at anything but his hand on her cheek, and moved it away. He wasn't keeping up the pretence of "ma'am", but then neither of them was part of the military anymore.
"Come with you?" Lal Mirch burst out. "Where are you going to go? What are you going to do?"
"I'll do whatever I can," Colonnello said, baffled, and then a look of certainty came over his face. "I'll keep on going. Keep on living."
"Like this?" Lal grabbed his clumsy hand, soft with puppy fat. "When we're like this? What kind of life would that be?"
"We could find out!"
He was grinning all over his pudgy little face, so excited it seemed obscene after what had been done to them. It was obvious that he knew she'd given in and hadn't expected her to, and Lal was ashamed that she'd been weak enough to do so. She was still being weak, because looking at Colonnello's face, there was no way she could let his hand go.
* * *
Colonnello had planned his retreat well. Self-consciously, Lal Mirch was focusing on that rather than the walk of the past quarter hour, where she'd clutched at him like a lifeline and he'd squeezed her hand back.
"Good," Lal Mirch commented, looking over the suped-up little four-wheel dirt bike with the packs of provision strapped to it. At first she'd decided that having so much equipment was a paranoid mistake, as the nearest town was only about 200 kilometres away, but a look inside the bags had revealed that they contained mostly money.
"Good?" Colonnello looked up from checking the baggage was securely strapped on, and for the first time he wasn't smiling. "This is almost the only part of my plan that's worked out, and it's the simplest possible part." He looked pensive. "Sorry. The way I rescued you was supposed to turn out a lot cooler."
"You never finish things properly," Lal Mirch said, remembering various missions that had been saved from Colonnello's mishaps by his improbable good luck and her intervention ... and, admittedly, often by Colonnello's skill. "But this is still good."
His smile came back, as genuine as before. "Thanks."
"You could have changed the money to more currencies."
"I thought about it. There wasn't enough time, h-HEY! It's my ride!"
Lal Mirch guiltily stopped revving the little engine - what had he done to enable it to roar like that? - and got off the seat. She looked over the craggy landscape as he got on, embarrassed.
She realised she dreaded the thought of getting on behind him and holding on, showing exactly how much she was depending on him - as if it wasn't painfully obvious. But she did it without hesitance. She owed him.
And she'd have to owe him more. Lal Mirch took hold of Colonnello's sides, fingers gripping the rough fabric of his cloak as she said, "You'll have to drop me at a bank. I need to rob it."
"Lal?" he said, shocked, turning around to stare at her.
"They froze my assets. They did it to all us, to give an extra incentive to come here and let them turn us into this."
"You really want to do something like that?" he asked softly.
"I'll only take what's in my balance, of course," Lal Mirch said.
Colonnello took a deep breath, and then nodded. "I have some guns you could use. Anti-tank."
"I managed to stash my own weapons in town," Lal Mirch said. "And anti-tank? That's overdoing it. As always."
He sighed. It seemed that this was another way his plan had gone wrong - it didn't look like he'd expected that he'd need to do something like that. But Colonnello grinned, and she knew he was still sticking with the plan, and sticking with her.
"Reborn also says it's tacky. Hey! You two don't know everything."
She snorted disbelievingly, letting him know she knew more than him.
Colonnello looked northwards to the town, and his grin widened a ridiculous proportion. Lal Mirch got the feeling that something appalling was about to happen. He said, "So, Lal Mirch: Your place or mine?"
"Wha - you!" She smacked him on the head, hard enough that it took him a few seconds before he could laugh, and even then with huffs of pain. Lal Mirch ignored him as much as she could, pulling the helmets out of one of the bags and handing one severely to Colonnello.
He made to put on the helmet, and then paused. "You're still acting like you're the commanding officer, hey!"
Lal Mirch shrugged one shoulder stiffly. "Habit."
"You're not older than me anymore, either." He beamed like this was a major victory.
It was at least a minor one. "You're still not as good as me, though," Lal Mirch said, her haughty tone only partially a joke. "I still have more experience."
"Do you?" Colonnello looked devious. "We're not in COMSUBIN anymore. Bet I've got more experience than you in plenty of stuff we're going to do!"
Lal Mirch waited for another round of tears to hit her. Her world and her history had been taken away and would be denied to her for years. Maybe for good.
She felt strangely light.
"We'll see," she told Colonnello, twice as haughty, and he laughed. Lal Mirch hated when people laughed at her, but strangely, this time she was glad for it.
Once they reached a place to rest Lal Mirch thought she'd like time alone. She'd let out the ball of weariness growing inside her, more quickly whenever she thought of what had just happened; of Viper sitting in the dust and the way Reborn's face was even more unreadable with those unformed baby-features. She'd feel the shame of letting the boy in her care ruin himself for her sake, of letting him go even further to doing this...
For the moment this caught her up, and she wrapped her arms around him as he sped on, throwing a cloud of desert dust into the air. Above them, his new pet beat its wings and screamed its exhilaration.
* * *
Squinting only a little as she stared into the sky, her visor filtering out most of the sun's sharp light, Lal Mirch nodded in satisfaction. From the look on Colonnello's face, the reconnaissance had been successful.
"Hey!" Falco dropped Colonnello in front of her, and then landed beside them and took up a watch on the crowd. Colonnello touched Lal's cheek. "Baby mine."
"That's creepy," she reminded him, voice flat.
Colonnello grinned carelessly. "The ice-cream stall is in the north-east sector. Let's go, hey!"
Lal Mirch pondered her choice in advance, narrowing it down to mint, chocolate, or most preferably toffee, and sighed. The corners of her mouth kept trying to go up. "This kind of thing shouldn't be fun."
Colonnello barked out a rare laugh at that. "You would have enjoyed it before the curse, if you'd given it a try."
She almost said in cutting tones, Is this the kind of date you would have taken me on? The sun felt hotter on Lal Mirch's cheeks. "I never liked candyfloss before," she pointed out.
"Mmm!" Colonnello said appreciatively. "I'm going to have some of that after the ice-cream."
"The sugar rush will make you trigger happy." Lal Mirch tried for a disapproving frown, but her mouth wasn't cooperating. "We should go to one of the sharpshooting stalls."
They tracked down the ice-cream stand, levelling flat stares at the adults who cooed over 'such precious little babies!' along the way. The stall was well-stocked and had toffee flavour. Colonnello splurged and got a two-scooper, but he topped his strawberry scoop with mint so Lal would have some too. After that and the candyfloss, he won them both enormous teddy bears - technically teddy frogs, in honour of their time at COMSUBIN. Then they took their afternoon nap. The fringes of the field where the horse rides took place were reasonably quiet, and the frogs made excellent cushions.
Lal Mirch woke up before Colonnello, fretful with an overdose of sugar, and growled. She was supposed to be disciplined.
It wasn't too uncomfortable, though. She shifted her frog over to a shadier patch under the tree and settled back, casting an annoyed glance at the peacefully sleeping Colonnello and the bubble of mucus on his nose. But not really annoyed. It was mostly habit. After all, he didn't even snore now that he was a baby.
Colonnello was in love with her. Most probably. He bought his ice-cream in flavours she also liked. He was calling her stupid things lately - 'baby mine'. He'd saved her life, smiling. And she held his hand when she let herself feel like it.
There was no discussion of what any of it meant, and Lal Mirch was grateful. It was easy to make a routine of being beside Colonnello each day again; they'd had enough missions to have found ways to work with each other, the worst and the best sides. Would it have been easy before the curse, to let him be in love with her?
The thought didn't seem to trouble Colonnello, but he had a way of not being bothered by nearly everything. Idiot.
Lal Mirch watched the various bugs bustle through the grass as she lay, and deposited a ladybug on Colonnello's face. The rhythm of expansion and contraction of his mucus bubble didn't change, but his nose twitched as the beetle trundled around his face, and again when it launched itself in a flurry of wings.
Lal grinned at his scrunched-up face. Easy. She could enjoy something like that for a while.
* * *
The prospect of change was still a welcome one. There was a powerful attraction in the idea of being useful again.
"This is excellent!" Lal Mirch said switching off the magnifying function of her visor as she looked up from the fine print of the contract. It was perfect. "The mafia won't have questions about our background beyond what's got known over the past year, and the perks on this look good."
"But it's the mafia! Who says that contract is worth the paper it's printed on?" Colonnello said, looking up from cleaning his rifles. The process had left a few stains on the carpet, but if, as management proposed, this apartment would be their accommodation while they worked at Mafia-land, there would be a lot more gun-oil stains to come.
"It's good for anyone's business to honour their word. And since it is the mafia, it's reasonable enough to shoot them if they try to take advantage us."
Lal Mirch hopped up onto the armrest of the couch by the window, looking down over Mafia-land. They'd barely set foot on the island before being surrounded by men in sombre suits, who'd escorted them backstage where they were offered the job of keeping the peace. Lal Mirch made a face. "We'll owe Reborn. That brat could have told us he was doing us a favour."
"Huh, we should have suspected something when he recommended we come here. Reborn never does something without a motive behind it."
Lal Mirch made an equally cynical noise, and grinned. The fairground was bright with lights and the sharp flashes of gunfire, from what management had described as endless fights between drunks and fools. They certainly did need to tighten the security around here.
"Lal Mirch," Colonnello said, to command her full attention. "Thank you."
She blushed, though she tried hard not to. Why did babies need to be able to blush, anyway? Lal turned to face him, nodding acknowledgement. She firmed her mouth into a tight line, and then thought that there was no reason not to say it; it was stupid not to say it.
"Thank you, too," she said tightly. For everything. For every day.
Colonnello nodded his acknowledgement too, and then said, "Lal? You should go, hey."
Lal looked around the room, slightly confused, not seeing anything or anyone around that could have prompted the advice. "Go where?"
"Anywhere else. The Arcobaleno have a reputation now, so you could get a good job anywhere."
She stared at him. For lack of anything better coming to mind, she said, "I'm not an Arcobaleno."
"People don't know the details. It won't matter. Anyway, Lal, you're still one of the best, so it'll be no trouble proving yourself. Then when your curse is broken you'll have a place in the world."
Lal Mirch looked down at herself. "Maybe the curse took a stronger hold on me than they said it had. It doesn't really look like anything's changed."
Internally she told herself that it couldn't have changed. She'd made her decision: He was her decision. Didn't he know that? Didn't he want that anymore?
"Isn't your scar getting better?" he said. "It looks smaller."
"It looks like that to me all the time," Lal Mirch said. "And whenever I'm in a bad mood it looks larger. It doesn't change, Colonnello. It's the same as always!"
"You should keep a more careful eye on it, anyway. It might show signs of getting better at any time." His head was bent over the rifle parts of his rifle.
"You can't ask me to leave!" she shouted, shocking herself at not being embarrassed by the evidence of need in her words.
"I should never have asked you to come with me."
Lal floundered with air in her mouth. But he had asked her - he'd saved her - he'd given her a way to believe that this truncated excuse of a life didn't need to be so painful. She sank down on the arm of the chair, seated by trembling legs, and watched Colonnello clean and then put back together the parts of his rifle, and she knew.
This was it.
* * *
Neither of them slept much that night, substituting it with sitting in opposite corners of the room, and not looking at each other. It was a terrible substitute.
Lal Mirch got up, cleaned and dressed at 6AM, noting bitterly that Colonnello was skipping his morning ritual of meditation in favour of hiding his face in his frog plushie.
"You do know you're an idiot," she said before she shut the door behind her, and heard a soft laugh over the click of the door.
Lal Mirch had the proposed contract Mafia-land management had given them in her hand. She went to the offices where she'd been assured a manager would be ready any time of the night or day to address issues (as it didn't pay to keep trigger-happy mobsters waiting). She explained in quiet tones why she couldn't sign the contract, and explained under what circumstances she would agree.
The night manager thought her idea was excellent, and told her that he'd speak to the day and afternoon managers as soon as possible to put the proposal to them.
Lal Mirch got to know the territory within a five-kilometre distance of the central offices, and then went back in and studied the maps of Mafia-land pinned to the walls. By nine, when all the managers were in agreement, they gave her the nod, and she went ahead and annexed the north half of Mafia-land and declared war on the southern half, announced around the island by hastily-deployed men in trundling snack vans.
At the frontline of the border was the staff accommodation complex. Lal Mirch took great pleasure in bombing it. Even if it was just paint bombs.
As Lal Mirch had expected, Colonnello led the southern army. For the better part of a week, Mafia-land's guests got great joy from taking paintball pot-shots at each other, and to management, this was a vast improvement on the formerly common use real explosives and bullets.
Colonnello performed some technically stellar manoeuvres, and even managed to win a lot of northern territory. The ensuing celebration on the southern side left the majority of them so hung over that it was disgustingly easy for Lal Mirch to win the territory back, but she didn't attribute that as a fault on Colonnello's part when their troops were undisciplined civilians. But when it came to combat, whenever Lal Mirch was close enough to see him and he saw her, it was obvious that his fighting spirit was a sham.
She, on the other hand, painted him blue from head to toe, with purpose and deliberation.
So it was almost a pity when a week after the fighting started, Colonnello walked over No Man's Land by the merry-go-round waving a white flag, and Lal hadn't yet got him on the palm of either hand. She looked at the peace flag and then at his stupid face, and considered shooting him anyway.
Lal Mirch guiltily stubbed her shoe in the ground and waited for him to reach her. It occurred to her that she didn't know what to say, really. It wasn't something to worry about, though; once he opened his stupid mouth she'd probably get a direction to send her anger in.
But it seemed Colonnello didn't know what to say either. The flag drooping in his hand. Falco fluttered off his head and hopped a discreet distance away and began preening its feathers.
At last, Colonnello said, "You started a war for me?" and blushed.
"Yes!" Lal Mirch snapped, crossing her arms. "You're a real Helen of Troy!"
"Lal..." He looked down, and then back at her, and his blush deepened.
"You're too damn stubborn, you know that, Colonnello? Do you remember how many problems came from the way you'd ignore orders when you thought you knew better?"
"Sometimes I did, hey," he said, not really defensive. He looked dumbfounded, and he was staring at her. Lal thought maybe he didn't want to look away.
"I don't want to go!" she said. "All right?"
Colonnello smiled before he could help it. Then it slipped a little as he said, "Hey. You know, I asked you to go for the same reason I asked you to come with me."
"Then you shouldn't have asked!" Maybe he shouldn't have asked the first time, either. It might have been a better life for both of them... She couldn't really believe that.
Colonnello took a step forwards, and then stopped and shook his head. "And what if you grow up again? What happens when your curse breaks and I'm still an Arcobaleno?"
"Let's find out," Lal Mirch said, and held out her hand.
They climbed to the top of the Ferris wheel and watched the civil war peter out, the last few diehards painting the sunset electric blue and neon green. And it was stupid, and Falco screeched warnings while flapping anxiously around them, but they climbed without letting go of each other's hands, giggling like children.